1Call-for-individual-com-AILA-2023.docx
The chéngyǔ is the most widespread category of settling in Chinese and constitutes an important part of the shúyǔ or phraseological units (PUs). However, translated terms in French are unclear; for example, they are referred to as "quadrysillabic expressions or idioms" (Sabban 1979), "sinisms," "quadrisyllabic catachresis" (Doan 1982), "idioms" (Doan and Weng 1999), "quadrisyllabic formulas" (Drocourt 2007: 259), "idiomatic expressions" (Chen 2021), "locutions" or "proverbs" (Trapp 2011), or "proverbial locutions" (Lectez 2020). These translations do not necessarily have the same meaning, especially "idiomatic expression" and "proverbial locution."
Idiomatic expressions (IEs) and chéngyǔ differ in terms of certain characteristics that fall under "idiomaticity" (Gross 1996; Gonzalez Rey 2002; Mejri 2003), or 民族性 mínzúxìng (Sun 1989, Ma 1978), that is, "a construction specific to a language that has no exact lexical and syntactic equivalent in another language and cannot be translated literally" (Neveu 2004: 2). This difference concerns linguistic (predominant quadrisyllabism in Chinese and parallel or non-parallel internal structure, i.e., formal constraints non-existent in French) and cultural (historical heritage and bookish source in Chinese but with the popular origin in French) aspects.
Nevertheless, we still share this understanding of IEs, and base on a double analysis of the chéngyŭ :
1) Stylistic: "locutions" or "expressions"
In French, the chéngyŭ corresponds to a term implying "most often, the use of a figure, metaphor, metonymy, etc." (A. Rey 2003: X), as opposed to locutions ("way of say-ing") (Ibid.).
2) "Idiomatic" or "proverbial"?
a) From a syntactic viewpoint, idiomatic expressions are lexical units and proverbs are sentences with characteristic syntactic structures.
b) "The semantic structuring of proverbs" (Mejri 2008: 3) allows us to differentiate proverbs from idiomatic expressions, which have implied meaning. According to Tamba (2011), idiomatic expressions are endowed with a lexical meaning that is sometimes non-compositional (Svensson [2008] would say "opaque," as opposed to "trans-parent") but analyzable and motivated; in other words, each unit of an expression potentially has several layers of meaning (quoted by Henry 2016).
c) From a fixedness point of view, a proverb is less "fixed" than an idiomatic expression. According to Klein and Lamiroy (2016: 18), diachronic variation is more important than synchronic variation since proverbs have existed since the Middle Ages and evolved.
Therefore, the chéngyŭ appear to be very similar to the phraseological units called "IEs."
[…] polylexical sequences with a categorical content [...] which are characterized semantically by their non-compositionality, partially, can be the result of a tropic procedure (essentially metaphor or metonymy). They are defined syntactically by a minimal degree of fixedness and lexically by, at least, a partial closure of the paradigmatic classes. (Bolly 2011: 43)
Keywords: idiomatic expressions, chéngyŭ, terminology, proverbial locution
Bibliographie :
BOLLY Catherine, 2011, Phraséologie et collocations. Approche sur corpus en français L1 et L2, Bruxelles, New-York : Peter Lang.
CHEN Lian, 2021, Analyse comparative des expressions idiomatiques en chinois et en français relatives au corps humain et aux animaux, thèse de doctorat, Cergy Paris Université.
GONZÁLEZ REY María Isabel, 2002 [2003], La phraséologie du français, Toulouse : Presses Universitaires du Mirail.
HENRI Kevin (2016) : « Les chengyu du chinois : caractérisation de phrasèmes hors norme », Yearbook of Phraseology, vol. 7, no. 1, 2016, p. 99-126.
