A study of english and vietnamese idioms Describing people’s outward appearance

Abstract

This paper is a contrastive analysis of English and Vietnamese idioms describing people’s outward appearance. The study analyzed the data qualitatively and quantitatively to find out the similarities and differences in syntactic and semantic features of English and Vietnamese idioms describing people’s outward appearance. The analysis was based on 430 idioms in English and Vietnamese as well as numerous samples from various novels, dictionaries, short stories and from the internet. The findings show that idioms describing people’s outward appearance in the two languages have remarkable similarities and differences in terms of not only the structures but also the meanings. The thesis also aims at suggesting some implications for the learning and teaching of idioms in general and idioms describing people’s outward appearance in particular.