An Investigation Into Idiomatic Expressions Containing Numbers In English And Vietnamese.pdf

Output file VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HA NOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES POST – GRADUATE FACULTY ****** NGUYỄN THỊ THỦY TIÊN AN INVESTIGATION INTO IDIOMATIC EXPRESSIONS CONTAI[.]

NGUYỄN THỊ THỦY TIÊN

AN INVESTIGATION INTO IDIOMATIC EXPRESSIONS CONTAINING

NUMBERS IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE

(NGHIÊN CỨU NHỮNG THÀNH NGỮ CÓ CÁC TỪ CHỈ SỐ

TRONG TIẾNG ANH VÀ TIẾNG VIỆT)

M.A Minor Thesis

Field : English Linguistics

NUMBERS IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE

(NGHIÊN CỨU NHỮNG THÀNH NGỮ CÓ CÁC TỪ CHỈ SỐ

TRONG TIẾNG ANH VÀ TIẾNG VIỆT)

M.A Minor Thesis

Field : English Linguistics

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CANDIDATE’S STATEMENT……….i

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……… ……….ii

ABSTRACT……… ……….… iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS…… … ……… …… ……… …iv

LIST OF TABLES……….……… ……….…….vi

PART A: INTRODUCTION 1 Rationale of the study………….…….………… ……….……… 1

2 Aims of the study ……….……… … ……….……….2

3 Scope of the study……….……… ….…………2

4 Methods of the study.……….…… ………… ……… … …………2

5 Design of the study…… ……….……….… ………3

PART B: DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 1: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND 1.1 Meaning……… 4

1.2 Senses ……… ……… 6

1.3 Definition of idioms ……… ……… …… 7

1.4 Characteristics of idioms ……… ……… …8

1.5 Classification of idioms ……… …………9

1.6 Idioms and proverbs.……….………11

1.7 Idioms and collocations ……… ……… 12

1.8 Idiom and 'dead' metaphor……… ……… ………13

1.9 Number in English and Vietnamese……… ……… 13

1.10 Review of previous studies on idioms.…….…….…… ……… 16

CHAPTER 2: THE STUDY 2.1 Research question….……… ……… 18

2.2 Data collection…….……….…… 18

2.3 Analytical framework………18

2.4 Data analysis.……….……….……… …….20

2.4.1 Ideational, interpersonal and relational numerical idioms in English and Vietnamese … ……… 20

2.4.2 The frequency of appearance of numbers in English and Vietnamese idioms……… 23

2.4.3 The connotative meanings of numbers in English and Vietnamese idioms.……… 28

PART C: CONCLUSION 1 Major findings……… ……… 33

2 Implications ……… ……….33

3 Suggestions for further studies……… ……… ……… 34

REFERENCES ………… ……….………35

APPENDICES

LIST OF TABLES

Table Names of table Page

Table 1 Types of numerical idioms in English and Vietnamese by

Fernando’s model

20

Table 2 The frequency of appearance of numbers in English idioms 24

Table 3 The frequency of appearance of numbers in Vietnamese idioms 26

Table 4 The connotative meanings of numbers in English and

Vietnamese idioms by Spangler and Werner’s model

29

PART A

INTRODUCTION

1 Rationale of the study

English has been a very important international means of communication in almost fields of life such as economy, politics, culture and education English bridges people over the world together Consequently, the mastering of English has been the desire of modern people who wish to join the international community in order to broaden their knowledge, promote in their career and have wider net of relationship

Having the desire of becoming a member of international community in many fields to develop aspects of life, Vietnam is clearly aware of the importance of English as

an international communicative means Learning and teaching English have been drawing

a lot of attention of the whole Vietnam society English has been an official and compulsory subject in education curriculum Vietnamese people wish to have a good command of English so that they can have the key to the open world

The mastering of English is not an easy matter because it requires a large number

of linguistic issues such as grammar and pronunciation to have effective communicative activities Among these issues, vocabulary plays a vital role due to its meaning creating In fact, teaching and learning vocabulary are always emphasized In vocabulary teaching and learning, idiom is an issue with which English learners and teachers are concerned because idioms are frequently used to make conversations more natural, interesting and concise in daily communicative activities Thus, the effective use of idioms is a necessary requirement for any language learners who have desire to master it

Numbers which are very common in our daily life and have certain cultural characteristics also appear in idioms Idiomatic expressions containing numbers bring about interesting diverse meanings to our utterances and writings Moreover, personally, I myself am extremely interested in idiomatic expressions containing numbers In daily life

of Vietnamese and English, I see that numbers have certain significance People admire some numbers and vice versa All of those are factors that give me the inspirations to choose this topic

2 Aims of the study

The study is to explore the role of numbers in creating the meanings of idioms in English and Vietnamese Based on that, a brief comparison between idioms in English and Vietnamese is carried out to find out the similarities and differences in the contribution of numbers to their meanings In summary, this study is aimed at:

 To explore the roles of numbers in the meanings of idioms in English and Vietnamese

 To find out the similarities and differences in the contribution of numbers to the meanings of idioms in English and Vietnamese

In order to achieve these aims, the following question should be answered:

 What are senses do numbers contribute to the meanings of idioms in English and Vietnamese?

3 Scope of the study

Because of the limitation of time, material resources, my knowledge and academic ability, this study is only focused on the senses of numbers contribute to the meanings of idioms Specific speaking, the study is focused on revealing what types of English and Vietnamese idioms numbers appear in and their connotative meanings in these idioms That is the foundation for a brief comparison between the contribution of numbers to the meanings of idioms in English and Vietnamese

4 Methods of the study

In order to achieve those above-mentioned aims, the study employs both quantitative and qualitative methods By virtue of quantitative method, data have been collected from, literary works, books of idioms and semantics and newspapers, websites and dictionaries in both English and Vietnamese The qualitative method is adopted to interpret the collected data

5 Design of the study

The study is consisted of three parts:

The first part is Part A “INTRODUCTION” This part provides a brief account of

issues which are rationale, aims, scope, methods, and design of the study

The second part is Part B “DEVELOPMENT” This part is consisted of two

chapters Chapter 1, theoretical background, provides the theoretical information about meanings, sense, idioms, brief information about numbers in English and Vietnamese and the review of previous studies on idioms Chapter 2 is concerned with research question, data collection, analysis framework, data analysis

The last part, Part C, “CONCLUSION”, summaries the major findings of the

study, provides implications and suggestions for further studies

PART B

DEVELOPMENT

CHAPTER 1: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

This chapter has provided the theoretical framework for the following analysis of numerical idioms in the main chapter In this chapter, theoretical background is consisted

of matters related to meaning; senses; idioms (the definition, the classification, the characteristics; the distinguishing between idioms and proverbs, idioms and collocations, idioms and dead metaphors); brief introductions about numbers in English and Vietnamese and the brief review of previous researches about idioms

1.1 Meaning

Lyons (1997:1) said, “Semantics is generally defined as the study of meaning, and this is the definition which we shall initially adopt” Thus core issue in the field of

semantics is the meaning In Understanding English Semantics by Dr Nguyen Hoa (2004),

the definition of meaning is explained as follow: “According to C.K Ogden and I.A

Richards (1923) in “The meaning of meaning”, a number of meanings can be associated

with this term”:

 An intrinsic property

 The other words annexed to a word in a dictionary

 The connotation of a word

 The place of anything in a system

 That to which the user of symbol ought to be referring

 That to which the interpreter of a symbol

- refers

- believes himself to be referring

- believes the user to be referring

In terms of meaning classification, Hoa, Nguyen (2004: 51-54) divided meaning into seven types with different functions in communication In this study the writer concerns only connotative meaning because the study is aimed at revealing the significance

of numbers in numerical idioms Specific speaking, because numbers can be lucky or unlucky numbers in daily life, the study has the desire to explore the role of numbers in creating positive, negative, and neutral meanings for idioms to assess whether they are lucky numbers in idioms or not Spangler and Werner (1989:50) states that one can have

three main attitudes: positive (favourable), neutral (impartial), or negative (unfavourable)

They provide the following example of a table containing the same characteristics of a woman described in three different ways depending on the attitude the writer has (i.e words with positive, neutral and negative connotation):

a sense of humor wears makeup outgoing intelligent

dame fat silly, dizzy paints her face domineering know-it-all

Leech (1974:23) defines that “connotative meaning is the communicative value of

an expression according to what is referred to, exceeds the above contents that are purely conceptual” Keith Alan, (2001:147) states “the connotations that arise from encyclopedic knowledge about its denotation and also from experiences, beliefs, and prejudices about the contexts in which the expression is typically used.” For example, the word BOY has

the connotation „STRONG‟ – positive meaning and LION the connotation „CRUEL‟ – negative meaning

Siregar (2005) claims that there are two kinds of meaning in semantics: Linguistic meaning and Speaker meaning Linguistic meaning is determined by the meaning of its constituents and their grammatical relations For example:

- Be careful of a sharp bend in the road

- Please don‟t bend this paper

Speaker meaning is what a speaker means in producing an utterance It consists of

literal meaning and non-literal meaning Literal meaning does not make hearers have

difficulty understanding what the speaker means However, we mean something different

from what our words mean by speaking non-literally In that case, it is called non-literal

meaning Using idioms is a way of using non-literal meaning because the meaning of an

idiomatic expression cannot be predicted either lexically or grammatically This study is

concerned with idioms so non-literal meaning is focused on

1.2 Sense

According to Hoa, Nguyen (2004), sense is a philosophical term for meaning Sense is

the realization of meaning in speech Sense relationship is also an important of the study of

language because a word does not only have meaning but also contribute to the meaning of

a larger unit, a phrase, a clause, a sentence For example, the senses of the word “library”

in the two sentences are different:

- He has a quite large library ( a collection of books)

- The library is at the end of this street ( a building where books

are kept and organized) According to Palmer (1976), sense “relates to the complex system of relationships

between linguistic elements themselves (mostly the words)” Hoa, Nguyen (2004) suggests

that there are two kinds of sense relation They are substitutional and combinational which

correspond to the two Saussurean terms of paradigmatic and syntagmatic Substitutional

relations exist between members of the same grammatical category and syntagmatic

relations hold between items of different grammatical categories For example:

The was bought yesterday

- Substitutional relation is the relation among “book, car, pen” They can

replace each other and belong to word class “noun” Grammatical relation is the relation

among “ the, book, was, bought, yesterday” which are different grammatical categories

book

car

pen

1.3 Definitions of idioms

In English, there are a large number of idioms often used in daily communicative activities Thus, idioms have been a concern of any English learners because they can not understand idioms by inferring from the literal meanings of words, which leads to difficulty in communicating in both spoken language and the written form People often talk about idioms during the process of learning English, so what is idiom in English?

According to Cruse (1986: 37), an idiom is an “expression whose meaning cannot

be inferred from the meanings of its parts when they are not parts of idioms” Cruse (1986: 37–38) claims that an idiom must have two compulsory features: „Lexically complex‟ showing that each idiom has to be consisted of more than one lexical constituent and

„semantically simplex‟ that is „a single minimal semantic constituent‟ As a result, a idiomatic expression can be divided into several semantic constituents For example, the

non-meaning of the expression „at the eleventh hour‟ can not be deducted from the non-meanings of

any its constituent or from its structure The expression means that something happens when it is almost too late, or at the last possible moment Fernando (1996) shares the same view of the definition of idioms At the same time, he has a broad view when considering idioms as multi-word expressions whose meanings are not derived from the meanings of their constituents or their syntactic structures or consist the meaning of one of its constituents while the other constituent denotes a concept which it does not denote in other

linguistic contexts Idioms even accept restricted variation such as literal idioms „on the contrary, a happy new year‟

Oxford Advanced Learner‟s Dictionary provides the definitions of “idiom” as “a group of words whose meaning is different from the meanings of the individual words”

In Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary, idiom is defined as “a group of words in a fixed order that have a particular meaning that is different from the meanings of each word understood on its own” Idiom, a colorful way of using English, is used in informal and formal, spoken and written languages to bring about stronger meaning than non-idiomatic phrases in an impressive way by conveying both ideas and implying the

attitude of the language user such as disapproval, admiration or humor For instance, “look daggers at someone” is more interesting than “look angrily at someone” although they

express the same meaning