An investigation into syntactic and semantic features of idioms denoting time in English in comparison with Vietnamese equivalents in literary works

Abstract

This study is originated in a wish to study semantic and syntactic features of English and Vietnamese idioms containing words denoting time. In this study, there are 383 idioms in English and Vietnamese investigated with a large number of samples from various dictionaris, short stories and from internet. From the description as well as a full contrastive analysis on distinguishing features, we draw some similarities and differences of semantic and syntactic features. This study also suggests some implications for language teaching and learning of idioms as well as for further study