An investigation into linguistic features Of english and vietnamese proverbs Denoting human behaviour

Abstract

This paper is a contractive analysis of English and Vietnamese proverbs denoting human behaviour. The study analyzes the data qualitatively and quantitatively to find out the similarities and differences in syntactic, semantic and stylistic features of English and Vietnamese proverbs denoting human behaviour. The analysis is based on 480 proverbs in English and Vietnamese collected from various books, dictionaries, short stories and from the Internet. The findings show that proverbs denoting human behaviour in the two languages have remarkable similarities and differences in terms of not only structures and meanings but also stylistic features. The thesis also puts forward some implications for the learning, teaching and translating of proverbs in general and proverbs denoting human behaviour in particular