As the essence of the Chinese language, four-character idioms are the crystallization of traditional use by the Chinese people. The integrity of their meaning and the solidification of their structure seem to be conventionalized. However, with the dynamic evolution of the Chinese language, its four-character idioms should not be considered to be the unchangeable “antique” in language expressions, but as the unique “living fossil” of traditional Chinese culture, since these idioms have already developed with prominent elasticity and enormous potentiality for change. Grounded on the view put forward by Wang Wenbin that Chinese language possesses the trait of spatiality, this paper focuses on the special and complicated language unit of Chinese four-character idioms. What has been observed is that four-character idioms are characterized by chunkiness and discreteness. Their chunkiness can be revealed by their inner components being orderly spread, parallel combined and chunkily integrated when they are componentially analyzed, and being independently lumpy, relatively juxtaposed and flexibly disconnected while used as a whole in a sentence. Their discreteness can be demonstrated by the feature of elasticity: being separable, insertable, order-exchangeable and substitutable. The chunkiness and the discreteness actually accommodate each other and interact with each other as both cause and effect, thereby making the trait of the spatiality of Chinese quite conspicuous.

Keywords： Chinese ; four-character idioms ; spatiality ; chunkiness ; discreteness