AN INVESTIGATION INTO ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE IDIOMS CONTAINING WORDS DENOTING METAL

Abstract

Idioms can be considered as an atrractive and popular phenomenon of every language. Nevertheless, most of foreign language learners find it uncomfortable to use them in daily life because their meanings cannot be easily deducted from the meanings of their components. In reality, a lot of researches have been done on idioms, but there have still been a great number of aspects relating to idioms that need to be explored. Therefore, this thesis is to study syntactic, semantic and stylistic features of English and Vietnamese containing words denoting metal. The analysis is made use of 240 idioms in English and Vietnamese together with numerous samples in dictionaries, short stories, prose and from the internet. The study aims at finding out similarities and differences of these idioms in terms of syntactic, semantic and stylistic features. In terms of syntactic features, English and Vietnamese ICWDM have phrasal structures. However, Vietnamese ICWDM contain sentential and parallel structures which could not be found out in the English ones. In terms of semantic features, semantic opacity is common in two languages. Furthermore, English and Vietnamese ICWDM can be divided into some semantic fields such as human personality, human actions or activities, human psychological state, and so on. Apart from common semantic fields, each language shares its own ones. In terms of stylistic features, the idiomatic meanings of English and Vietnamese ICWDM can be expressed through stylistic devices such as metaphor, simile, metonymy and hyperbole. Finally, on the basis of findings, the study also sets out some implications for teaching and learning idioms as well as some suggestions for further study relating to idioms.