An investigation into linguistic features of conceptual metaphors in english and vietnamese

Abstract

This is a contrastive analysis of conceptual metaphors for “life, death, and time” in English and Vietnamese. This thesis aims at investigating the semantic features of “life, death, and time” in the frame of linguistic cognitivism as well as the conceptual metaphors for “life, death, and time” in English and Vietnamese on the background knowledge of cognitive semantics raised by G. Lakoff and M. Johnson [18]. Besides, it also finds out and explains the similar and different expressions of conceptual metaphors for “life, death, and time” in English and Vietnamese. This careful investigation might lay the foundation to suggest some implication for teaching and learning English as well as translation work in Vietnamese. This helps Vietnamese learners of English achieve better communicative competence in a cross-cultural communication.