Open any Chinese idiom dictionary, and most of what we see are four-character idioms. Take the popular "Modern Chinese Idioms Dictionary" (updated edition, published by Shanghai Education Press) as an example. For example, according to statistics, the dictionary has 8,700 idioms, of which 8,420 are four-character idioms, accounting for about 90%. People will naturally ask this question: Why did the four-character pattern become a Chinese idiom? The main format? This can be answered from the following aspects.
1. As the main format of Chinese idioms, the four-character pattern conforms to the efficiency principle of language communication
As concise as possible Language should convey as much information as possible, which should be the efficiency principle of language communication. In short, it is "concise and concise".
Whether Chinese idioms are directly quoted from ancient poems or from ancient myths, fables, and history It is summarized from stories, or processed from ancient poems and sentences, and its content is quite rich and profound. Considering the effectiveness of language communication, idioms need an optimal language that can not only contain complex and complete meanings, but also be concise and concise. Form.
As we all know, an idiom is a special fixed phrase, which is a complete unity in meaning. It often cannot be separated and interpreted literally in isolation. In use, its function is equivalent to a word. , so it is actually a stereotyped combination of morphemes. Most of the morphemes in Chinese are monosyllabic, and they are expressed in Chinese characters in writing. Therefore, the number of words is a factor that must be considered in order to be concise and concise. We might as well Imagine what it would be like if most Chinese idioms had less than four characters or more than four characters. Take "the fox pretends to be powerful", "besieged on all sides", and "out of reach" as examples. The rich connotations they contain, if only It is obviously not clear to express it clearly with two words. With three words, it is written as "fox false power", "song from all sides", and "whip can't reach". It is simple but the meaning is very unclear. (A few idioms actually need three words. It can express the complete meaning, and people extend it into a four-character pattern for aesthetic reasons, such as "hand-to-hand combat - short-hand combat", "not surprising - not surprising", which should be treated as a separate matter) If it is written as "the power of a fox pretending to be a tiger" , "Besieged on all sides", "Although the whip is not as long as the horse's belly", the information capacity does not increase much, but it appears redundant and cumbersome. It can be seen that the four-character pattern is the best format for concise and comprehensive language.
So, Why four-character idioms can be concise and comprehensive should be examined from the relevant characteristics of the Chinese language itself.
First of all, most of the "characters" that constitute four-character idioms are monosyllabic morphemes. They combine form, sound , meaning in one, has an independent and complete meaning, can be used freely or relatively freely, participates in forming various words, and has a large information capacity. For example, "seeking truth from facts" is composed of four morphemes, and the meanings of each relatively independent morpheme are organically connected Together, it expresses a rich and complete meaning. Especially idioms such as "the donkey in Guizhou is exhausted", "waiting for the rabbit", "carving a boat to seek a sword", etc., use four morphemes to record a vivid fable story, and then use it as a metaphor to make the idiom have more meaning than the literal meaning. It contains richer and deeper meanings. This is undoubtedly due to the advantage of the large meaning capacity of Chinese monosyllabic morphemes.
Secondly, Chinese is a non-morphological language, and the composition of language units mainly relies on word order and function words. To combine. The direct combination using word order as a means is closely related to the concise and comprehensive characteristics of the four-character idiom language. As long as the various morphemes that enter the idiom can match each other semantically and at the same time conform to logical principles and language habits, they do not need to be combined. With the help of other language components and directly relying on word order, they can be combined flexibly to form complex and diverse grammatical relationships such as parallelism, subject-predicate, partial positive, predicate-object, predicate-complement, etc., and use this to express rich meanings. For example, "Frankly speaking" is composed of subject-predicate relationships The "straight-hearted" and "quick-spoken" are reconstructed to form a parallel relationship; "the capable person is a teacher" is a subject-predicate relationship formed by the "able person" in the partial positive relationship and the predicate-object relationship "being a teacher", etc. It is a direct combination of morphemes with the help of word order. Because of this, it is possible for the small world of four-character idioms to accommodate such flexible and diverse grammatical structures, load such rich information content, and become a concise and concise unity. .
2. Four-character idioms have rich aesthetic characteristics and are popular among people
First of all, four-character idioms
There are a large number of new four-character idioms. Most of them were written by literati (including ready-made four-character idioms, and those with more than four characters that can be turned into four-character idioms by later generations), such as "Don't ask for a deep explanation", " "The truth will come to light", "It's easy to master", "Treat everyone equally", etc. There are also many oral creations from the masses, such as "weak", "clean", "fearful", etc. This fully ensures the continuous development and long-term prosperity of four-character idioms To sum up, it is no accident that the four-character idiom has become the main format of Chinese idioms. On the premise that it not only conforms to the principle of language communication efficiency but also suits people's aesthetic requirements, adding Based on the long history of development, the formation of the four-character idiom is a matter of course.