THE USE OF CONCEPTUAL METAPHORIN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE IDIOMS WITH HUMAN ORGANS

Abstract

This study investigates the use of conceptual metaphor in English and Vietnamese idioms with human organs. Metaphor is for most people a device of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish - a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language; moreover, metaphor is typically viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought or action. The metaphorical idiom is a phrase that ordinarily designates one thing is inferred to another. I also inspect how cultures affect the coinage of idioms in Vietnamese and English, examining how and why the metaphorical sources in idioms with the parallel implications would be different or alike. Why idioms with human organs would be selected as materials for this investigation rather than others is mainly due to the prevalence of the human organs around us. Many idioms unsurprisingly have been coined with the name of it, and the figurative interpretations of the idioms and the human organs themselves share many conceptual similarities, which is the prior requirement to evoke the metaphorical expressions. In the present study, English idioms with the Vietnamese correspondents are included. For comparing the cultural differences and similarities of these two languages, first, I try to look for some English idioms with human organs from the internet; next, their Vietnamese idioms with similar connotations are searched. After inspections, only the English idioms that have the Vietnamese semantically-related counterparts remain to be discussed. Those English idioms lacking Vietnamese correspondents and the ones that are too unfamiliar to most people are out of the consideration. On this basis, a number of persuasions are put forward for the teaching of English idioms in classes.