Chapter one severs as an introduction of dissertation, including the definition of idioms, the aim, the significance, and the framework of the whole paper as well

Chapter two takes a review of the studies on English idioms made by scholars both at home and abroad。 Though the history of the idioms from the pragmatic perspective is relatively short, and idioms have not been studied yet in accordance with Speech act theory, experts and scholars did give a lot of theories and practices on it, which lays solid foundation for this thesis。 Some relevant theories like Speech act theory and the classification of illocutionary acts by Austin and Searle are introduced。 

Chapter three devoted to the analysis on the illocutionary acts of idioms in the contexts。 It mainly takes qualitative analysis of literary works and spontaneous conversations。 The idioms are mainly classified into the categories of assertives, directives, and expressives。 In each category, different illocutionary acts are used, like advising, requesting, wishing and so on。 

Chapter four is the conclusion part, in which the author summerizes the major findings of this investigation, draws conclusions from them, points out some limitations and offers suggestions for future research。 

2。 Literature Review

2。1 Traditional Studies of Idioms

The study of English idioms has a long history。 The linguists in the early stage mainly concerned with the classification and illustration of the sources and the function of expressions of idioms。 The representative is the English linguist Smith with his major work Words and Idioms。 His focus is the classification and illustration of the communicative function of idioms。 In the early stages, his exploration of the sources and structures of idioms and classification to the sources of idioms in detail become his main contribution。 He also stressed the basic characteristics of idioms, but he paid little attention to the meaning and understanding of idioms。 And he did not explain why idioms have those characteristics。 文献综述

From the 1930s to the 1950s, with the spread of the influence of Saussure's structuralism and the flourishing of Bloomfield's American structuralism, the analysis of idioms with modern linguistics began to appear。 The theories of morphology, semantics and syntax based on the structuralism have been used to explain the lexical structure, the semantic feature and the syntactic function of idioms。 The representative is C。 F。 Hockett who stressed the important role of context in recognizing and explaining idioms。 He pointed out that, without a context, it’s difficult to make sure whether an expression is an idiom or collocation; he also developed several characteristics of idioms such as single unit, institutionalization and irreplaceability。 (Luo Shiping, 2005)

From the 1950s, linguists began to study the deep structure of idioms with the transformational-generative grammar, especially the transformational ability of idioms。 As Fraser stated that to illustrate idioms with the transformational-generative grammar, it mainly concerns with two problems。 One is how to manifest the meaning of idioms in the deep structure of the sentence。 The other is how to show that it is hard for the idioms to be transformed in the syntactic structure。 The greatest contribution made by the transformational-generative linguists of idioms is that they began to discern the transformational potential of idioms and through researches they found that most of the idioms have deficiencies in transformation in varying degrees。 And some of them do not have the ability to have syntactic transformations。来*自-优=尔,论:文+网www.youerw.com

From the 1980s, the study of English idioms has entered into a new stage。 Many scholars had broken the bond of original research methods and achieved remarkable success。 Psycholinguistics R。 W。 Gibbs (1997) contributed to the understanding of idiom。 In his paper Metaphor in Idiom Comprehension, he said “Many concepts, especially abstract ones, are partly structured via the metaphorical mapping of information from a familiar source domain onto a less familiar target domain”。 Another breakthrough was achieved in 1985 by Halliday, he puts forward the functional grammar theory, focuses on the three major functions of idioms。 Inspired by Halliday’s theory, some scholars began to make deep researches of the functions of idioms on the basis of functional grammar。 The most prominent in this period is C。 Fernando。 She classified idioms into three categories: ideational idioms, interpersonal idioms and relational idioms。 The study of the functions of idioms broke the limit of structuralism and transformational-generative grammar。 It endows practical significance to the study of idioms by opening the functional study in the communicative environment。