An investigation into linguistic features of chiasmus in english and vietnamese proverbs

Abstract

Proverbs, a national cultural product, carry themselves the characteristics of being memorable and persuasive. To achieve these characteristics, one of the effective stylistic devices used in proverbs is chiasmus. This study deals with the lexical, syntactic and pragmatic features of chiasmus in English and Vietnamese proverbs by applying the qualitative and quantitative research. Besides, descriptive and contrastive methods are chosen as the methodology to find out the similarities and differences of these above mentioned features of chiasmus in both languages from 400 proverbs collected. In terms of lexical features, there are the word reversal and repetition of nouns, verbs, adjectives in both languages. Besides, the word reversal of different pairs of word and different part-of-speech, of the same word but different part-of speech, of number have been found out. Moreover, lexical chiasmus which is formed by the substitution of pronouns in English proverbs, the formation of word and word reversal with the corresponding pairs belonging to the same semantic field in Vietnamese ones are the other lexical features. In terms of syntactic features, chiasmus is divided into two different levels: syntactic chiasmus at the phrasal level and the sentential level with many chiastic structures analyzed. In terms of pragmatic features, English and Vietnamese proverbs share some things in common such as serving as a memory aid, highlighting a meaningful contrast, denoting prominence, showing strong emphasis and making aesthetic. What is more, chiasmus carries in itself the pragmatic features of drawing attention and creating cohesion in ordering ideas. Finally, from the findings, some pedagogical implications have been suggested to benefit the English language learning and teaching.