A study of linguistic features Of comparison proverbs In english and vietnamese

Abstract

Due to the inextricable relationship between language and culture, it is essential that learning and teaching a language be accompanied with learning and teaching its culture. Proverb is an indispensable part of language which is assumed to reflect the cultural values and beliefs of a nation. Proverbs in general and comparison proverbs in particular are of culture-specific nature and vary from culture to culture. On this basis, the thesis investigates the similarities and differences of comparison proverbs in English and Vietnamese especially in terms of syntactic, lexical and semantic features and their underlying cultural reasons. The thesis is carried out and based on descriptive and contrastive methods. 400 samples in English and Vietnamese were taken from different sources such as dictionaries, books, the Internet… for the sake of the syntactic, lexical and semantic analysis. The thesis also suggests some implications for the teaching and learning of proverbs in general, and those for the translating of comparison proverbs from English into Vietnamese and vice versa in particular.