An investigation into Syntactic and semantic features of english and vietnamese proverbs denoting weather

Abstract

It is obvious that proverbs occupy a large part in almost every language. Proverbs denoting weather is one of the most popular types of proverbs that people pay much attention to and use frequently. However, proverbs in general and proverbs denoting weather in particular, are units of language full of problems which make second language learners find it difficult to understand. Therefore, the thesis makes an investigation into syntactic and semantic features of English and Vietnamese proverbs denoting weather in an attempt to discover the similarities and differences between them in terms of syntax and semantics by means of contrastive analysis with qualitative and quantitative approaches. In this thesis, English and Vietnamese proverbs denoting weather are collected from dictionaries, books and websites on the internet. The study shows types of sentences used in PDW and ways of forecasting weather conditions as well as the influence of weather conditions on human life in EPDW and VPDW. The study also puts forward some implications for teaching and learning English to Vietnamese learners.