Overseas Research

For a long time, English idioms is always a hot spot in the study of foreign language scholars. Their theoretical

accomplishment mainly involves the researches of idioms form and semantic, and the researches of idioms function and idioms cognitive.

Makkai¡¯s Idiom structure in English identifies two major types of idioms: those of encoding and decoding. He classified idioms of decoding as lexemic and sememic, giving greater attention to the structure of the lexemic variety.

L£®P.Smith¡¯s book Words and Idioms (1925), is an exposition of what language idiosyncrasies or peculiarities tell us about the usage of idioms in English. Smith pays more attention to structural peculiarities and idiomatic tranagessions than to the semantics of idioms. To him, idioms are essentially those forms peculiar to a language, whether they are literal or not.

C. Fernando¡¯s Idioms and Idiomaticity classifies the English idioms into three kinds of idioms are: ideational idiomatic expressions, interpersonal idiomatic expressions, and relational idiomatic expressions. The most salient feature of Fernando¡¯s book is that she moves the study of idiom firmly out

of the domain of the phrase and the sentence into a consideration of the function of idioms in contexts of communication (R.Carter 1996). Fernando accounts for the ubiquity of idioms by analyzing what they do in different discourse types.

Domestic Research

In our country, there was a little late for starting to study the English idioms in domestic research. According to the difference of the key point of study, it can be divided into two periods: experience period and multiple theory phase.

Learning English Idioms, which was published in the Journal of PLA institute of foreign languages by FungChuiWah in 1978, was the earliest article of the domestic research of English idioms writings. Since then, many schoolars devoted themselves to the study of idioms. But this time¡¯s studies just limited in the basic characteristics of idioms and their translation skills discussion.

In 1998, SheXianjun published an article whose tittle was The Understanding of the Idioms: Structure or Extraction in Psychological science, which marked the domestic study of idioms was transitting from the traditional experience period to

multiple theory phase.

For about 10 years, Domestic idioms research gradually extended to cognitive linguistics and functional linguistics and applied linguistics based on the traditional research methods. The traditional idioms research mainly focus on the types of English idioms, semantic, syntactic features and understanding of English idioms, allusion and its source and the translation skills of English idioms.

In the application of idioms research, many scholars focus on the comparative study of English and Chinese idioms. WngWenbin and YaoJun explained the cause of the similarities and differences of metaphors in idioms in Chinese and English language and explored their intrinsic cognitive mechanism similarities and differences.

The defects and countermeasures idioms research into multiple theorization period, the relevant domestic research papers of English idioms emerge in a large amount. But from the research achievements and the situation of now, the current domestic research in this field is not yet mature, especially in the research process, content, method, which are still existing many problems and defects.