An investigation into the syntactic and semantic features of idioms containing Words denoting kitchen utensils in English and vietnamese

Abstract

Basically, the study is focused on investigating the similarities and differences of EIKUs and VIKUs in terms of syntactic and semantic features on the basis of descriptive and contrastive methods. More than 300 idioms in English and Vietnamese were taken from different sources such as novels, short stories, dictionaries, the Internet, etc. to meet the demand of the syntactic and semantic analysis. Syntactically, EIKUs have four categories such as noun phrases, verb phrases, adjective phrases and prepositional phrases but there are not any prepositional phrases in VIKUs. Semantically, both EIKUs and VIKUs are divided into 11 semantic fields such as behaviour, personality, success and failure, love and marriage, health, family situation and family life, mood/psychological state, dangerous situation, difficulty and ease, relationship, time and space and others. The thesis also suggests some implications for the teaching and learning of idioms in general, and those for the translating of IKUs from English into Vietnamese and vice versa in particular.