Author(s)

Yan Gu

Corresponding Author

Yan Gu

ABSTRACT

Constructive grammar is essentially a category of cognitive linguistics. It considers vocabulary, grammar, semantics and pragmatics as a whole. It considers that the whole form and function of the construction does not add up to the simple components. Idioms are the essence of language. English is known for its rich idioms. It is very common to use idiom mutations in practice because of actual needs. Here, the principles of construction grammar theory are used to analyze the ways and classification of English idiom variation. The modern Chinese-English idiom variation is compared and analyzed from the aspects of phonetic features, semantic features, pragmatic features and syntactic features. The research results serve the expected practical value of English teaching, idiom dictionary compilation and corpus improvement.

KEYWORDS

Construction grammar; Chinese and English; idioms variation; comparative analysis