AN INVESTIGATION INTO ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE PROVERBS DENOTING FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS

Abstract

This study investigates linguistic features of English and Vietnamese proverbs denoting family relationships. It focuses on analyzing and comparing the syntactic features, semantic features and stylistic devices in English and Vietnamese Proverbs Denoting Family Relationships. Basing on the description and analysis on distinguishing features, the similarities and differences of proverbs in the two languages are presented. The data include 300 samples in English and Vietnamese, from various linguistic books, dictionaries and from the internet and they are analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively. The findings show that proverbs denoting family relationship have remarkable syntactic and semantic features in the two languages such as phrases, sentences, and structures are identical to some extent. In the semantic aspect. The occurrence fields are the same English and Vietnamese. The findings also show that both English Proverbs Denoting Family Relationships and Vietnamese Proverbs Denoting Family Relationships are used as stylistic devices such as rhyme, metaphor, simile, etc. These findings lead to some implications for the language learning and teaching. It is hoped that the study will be useful to those who teach and study English as well as ones who are interested in proverbs denoting family relationships