Three-character idioms in contemporary Japanese

Abstract

This article employs structural-semantic and functional analysis to examine the composition and semantic features of three-character idioms in modern Japanese. It uncovers their “inner form” (A.A. Potebnya) and investigates the grammatical characteristics that integrate constituent elements within compound words. In these idioms, the fusion of proto-Chinese and native Japanese roots has developed over centuries within the history of the Japanese language, rooted in Chinese characters. Genetically, Japanese three-character idioms are divided into proto-Chinese and native Japanese categories. For both, Chinese characters are fundamental: each complex lexeme analyzed here is written with three Chinese characters. Proto-Chinese idioms are further divided into genetically homogeneous and heterogeneous categories. The study places special emphasis on the metaphorical aspects of three-character proto-Chinese idioms and certain aspects of their syntactic use.