A study of linguistic features Of idioms expressing anger In english and vietnamese

Abstract

Idioms in general and idioms expressing anger in particular are of culture-specific nature and vary from culture to culture. On this basis, the thesis investigates the similarities and differences of idioms expressing anger in English and Vietnamese especially in terms of syntactic and semantic features, based on descriptive and contrastive methods. 400 samples including 200 idioms in English and 200 ones in Vietnamese were taken from different sources such as novels, short stories, dictionaries, the Internet… for the sake of the syntactic and semantic analysis. Based on the constrastive analysis, this thesis is carried out to find out the similarities and dissimilarities of syntactic and semantic features of English and Vietnamese idioms expressing anger to help learners of English and Vietnamese learn English and Vietnamese better. The thesis also suggests some implications for the teaching and learning of idioms in general, and those for the translating of idioms expressing anger from English into Vietnamese and vice versa in particular. The findings obtained from the analysis show that metaphor, metonymy, symmetry, simile and hyperbole are the most common stylistic devices of idioms expressing anger. What is more? Metaphors and metonymies could be used in English and Vietnamese idioms expressing anger with many images of body parts. There are about 45 and 50 idioms in English and Vietnamese respectively containing words relating to these images. With regard to differences, conversive, parallel structures and rhymes in idioms are very popular and powerful in Vietnamese whilst it can not be found in English. Hopefully, the result of the study could help the communicators and learners of English and Vietnamese as a foreign language use the idioms expressing anger properly and especially avoid negative interference in translating these idioms.