An investigation into idiomatic expressions containing numbers in english and vietnamese

Aims of the study The study is to explore the role of numbers in creating the meanings of idioms in English and Vietnamese.. In summary, this study is aimed at:  To explore the roles of

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

Field code : 60 22 15

Supervisor: Dr Hà Cẩm Tâm

Ha Noi – 2011

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

Fernando’s model

20

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

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

Palmer (1990) defines idioms as group of words whose meaning can not be inferred from the meanings of separate words Semantically, an idiom is a language unit like a word However, grammatically, an idiom does not function like a word Idioms are grammatically restricted A word can be added suffix or prefix or its form can be changed

For instance, the idiom “take a hand” in past simple is “took a hand” However, it can not

be changed into “take hands”, “hand” does not accept plural form “s”

In Vietnamese dictionary by Vietnam Linguistics Institute (1997), idioms are defined as commonly used fixed expressions whose meanings can not be simply inferred from the meanings of constituents In Vietnamese, this is the definition “thành ngữ là tập hợp cố định đã quen dùng mà nghĩa của nó không thể giải thích một cách đơn giản bằng nghĩa của các từ tạo nên nó” In Vietnamese, most of the idioms are incomplete meaningful groups of words so they can not stand alone Idiom often appears in a sentence as a part so

as to contribute to the complete meaning of the sentence such as “Cái mặt búng ra sữa mà

bày đặt bàn bạc chuyện yêu đương” In Vietnamese, idioms are frequently used in proverbs, literature, and fork songs

1.4 Characteristics of idioms

According to Nunberg, Sag & Wasow‟s (1994, p 492-93), six characteristics of idioms are as follow:

• Conventionality: The meanings of idioms can not be deducted from “knowledge of the

independent conventions that determine the use of their constituents when they appear in isolation from one another”

• Formal inflexibility: The numbers of syntactic frames in which idioms appear are

limited Thus, idioms are syntactically restricted

• Figuration: The meanings of idioms are non-literal, or figurative thanks to the

involvement of idioms in metaphors (take the bull by the horns, time as a substance, time

as a path, love as war, and up is more), metonymies (lend a hand, count heads),

hyperboles (not worth the paper it‟s printed on)

• Proverbiality: Idioms are used to illustrate familiar situations of social life The

situations are similar to folksy, familiar images (climbing walls, chewing the fat, spilling

beans)

• Informality: Idioms have a tendency to appear in colloquial speech

• Affect: Evaluative or affective stances can be inferred from the use of idioms

1.5 Classification of idioms

Based on the scalar categorization, Fernando (1996: 35) divides idioms into three types: Pure idioms, semi-idioms and literal idioms

from the meanings of their constituents or their syntactic structures For example, idiom

“shoot the breeze” has the meaning which is not related to the meaning of the words

“shoot” and “breeze”

with a non-literal subsense, usually special to that co-occurrence relation and no other.”

In other words, the meaning of a semi-idiom consists of the meaning of one of its constituents while the other constituent denotes a concept which it does not denote in

other linguistic context For example, the meaning of greenhouse includes the literal meaning of “house” but not the meaning of “green” A greenhouse is not a house of

green color, but a house for growing plants However, when “green” co-occurs with other words like “window, door, trees, pencil…”, it is an adjective denoting color and modifying these nouns

They accept restricted variation For instance, some literal idioms are such as “on the

contrary, a happy new year…”

Based on the Halliday (1985), Fernando (1996: 72) suggests the functional categorization of idioms which divides idioms into ideational idioms, interpersonal idioms and relational idioms

 Ideational idioms: They “either signify message content, experiential phenomena

including the sensory, the affective, and the evaluative or they characterize the nature of

message, for example, as being specific or non-specific” For example, mess about with expresses an action or have blood on one‟s hands demonstrate an event

Message content:

 Actions : Tear down, wear different hats

 Events : Have blood on one‟s hands, turning point

 Situations : Be in a pickle, be up a gum tree

 People and thing : A red herring, a man about town

 Attributes : Matter – of – fact, lily-white

 Evaluations : Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, a watched pot never boils

 Emotions : Tear one‟s hair, lose one‟s heart

Characterizing the message:

 Specific information : What I am saying is, my guess is

 Non-specific information : And so on, kind of

 Interpersonal idioms: The kind of idioms has interactional function or

“characterize the nature of the message” such as say no more and as a matter of

fact

Interactional strategies are concerned with:

 Greetings and farewells : See you later, bye for now

 Directives : Never mind, say no more

 Agreement : Say no more, that‟s true

 „ Feelers‟, eliciting opinions : How do you feel?, what do you think?

 Rejections : I wasn‟t born yesterday, you‟re joking

Characterizing the message involves:

 Newsworthiness: Guess what!, what do you know?

 Sincerity : As a matter of fact, believe you me

 Calls for brevity : Get to the point, cut the cackle

 Uncertainty : Mind you, I daresay

 Relational idioms: They make the discourse have coherence Thus, they can be

“grouped with conjunctions” such as and, but, because as having a textual function

They can also be divided into :

Integrative information:

 Adversative : On the contrary, far from

 Comparison : On the other hand, on the other

 Causal : So that when, no wonder

 Concessive : At the same time

 Addition : What is more, in addition to

Sequencing or chaining information

 Sequencing meta-discoursal information : In the first place, last but not least

 Sequencing temporal information : One day, up to now

1.6 Idioms and proverbs

It is essential to distinguish idioms and proverbs because language users tend to find it difficult to make differences

phrase or sentence that gives advice or says something that is generally true, for example

„Waste not, want not‟” In Cambridge Advanced Learner‟s Dictionary, a proverb is “a short

sentence, etc., usually known by many people, stating something commonly experienced

or giving advice” Another definition by Vu Ngoc Phan (2000: 39) is that a proverb as “a complete saying expressing one idea of comment, experience, morality, justice or criticism”

Proverbs and idioms have many in common so there have been books introducing the collection of both proverbs and idioms Firstly, both idioms and proverbs are the product of human‟s thought cultures and the life experience and are orally exchanged from generation to generation as the matter of fact or the truth without any doubt Secondly, they have fixedness showing that any changes such as constituent substitution or word order may lead to the change in meaning Another similarity is the use of metaphor to have non-literal or figurative meaning Thus, their meaning must be understood in metaphorical way without being based on the literal meanings of compositional words

Despite those aforementioned similarities, both proverb and idiom has their typical characteristics The first difference is grammatical structure Whereas an idiom is an equivalent unit to a word or a phrase as parts of sentence, a proverb is a complete sentence

or a phrase expressing a full idea The second one is the function A proverb is “a known phrase or sentence that gives advice” and expresses “one idea of comment, experience, morality, justice or criticism” As a result, it has perceptive function, aesthetic

well-function and educational well-function For instance, the proverb “Money makes the mare go”

expresses a comment about the negative aspect of money Its perspective function helps people realize the harmful power of money controlling things immorally Educational function advises people not to be blinded by the power of money and to avoid its bad affects Besides, its aesthetic function is making people be aware of abstract message through a lovely, exaggerative, figurative way On the contrary, idioms have no the three functions because of not demonstrating judgments, giving advice or stating general truth

about life For example, the idiom “be on cloud nine” expresses the happiness of a person

when a wonderful thing happens but it provides no educational lessons or life experiences

In summary, the differences in structures and functions make proverbs and idioms distinguishable

1.7 Idioms and collocations

Idiom and collocation have both similarity and difference Howard Jackson (1990: 256) regards collocation as “a lexical relationship of mutual expectancy, the presence of a particular lexical item gives the rise to the greater chance likelihood that other lexical items belonging to the same area of meaning will also occur.” Mc Carthy (1996: 16) regards collocation as corruption-occurrence between words Besides, Chistra Fernando (1996:27) views collocation as the company words keep In terms of difference, the meaning of an idiom can not literally derive from the meanings of its constituent; however, the meaning

of a collocation is the combination of the literal meanings of its separate words Moreover, collocations are not as restricted as idioms in terms of word substitution Whereas, word substitution can make an idiom lose its idiomatic meaning and no longer be an idiom, a collocation accepts that despite the change in its meaning but remains as another collocation There are some examples such collocations „catch a bus/ a train, strong/ weak/ black/ white/ hot coffee, a cold/an icy/a chill/a biting etc wind‟

Despite the differences, Fernando Chistra (1996: 36) suggests that both idioms and collocations “show a habitual co-occurrence of words” These combinations of words are widely acknowledged naturally and can be recognized without difficulty such as idioms

„spill the beans, foot the bill‟ and collocations „heavy/torrential rain, heavy

/traffic/rain/snow‟

1.8 Idiom and 'dead' metaphor

Cruse (1986) suggests that idioms and dead metaphor should be distinguished While a metaphor, a kind of hidden comparison is an expression referring to one particular thing or object which is different from the thing or the object literally described in this expression, a dead metaphor is a metaphor in which words lose direct meanings and have only figurative meanings In Hoa, Nguyen (2004), the word „ponder‟ originally meant

„weigh‟, but now it has the meaning „ consider thoughtfully‟ Thus, idioms and dead metaphors are interpreted in the same way As far as syntax is concerned, both dead metaphors and idioms are fixed A dead metaphor will no longer be a dead metaphor if its syntactic structure is changed

1.9 Numbers in English and Vietnamese

This part is aimed at providing brief introduction about numbers, their functions in daily life and cultural roles Based on that, the relationship between numbers and the meanings of idioms containing numbers in English and Vietnamese can be established and made clearer

1.9.1 Numbers in English

Because the study is concerned with only idioms containing cardinal numbers and ordinal numbers, only cardinal and ordinal numbers are taken consideration into According to Graham Flegg (2002) in the book “Numbers: Their history and meaning”, cardinal numbers are the basic numbers used for counting such as one, two or nine Ordinal numbers are used for indicating order The majority of ordinal numbers are formed by

affixing the -th suffix onto the cardinal number such as tenth and eighth except for the

irregular cases such as first (1st), second (2nd), third (3rd), and fifth (5th)

Numbers are a part of language They are frequently used in daily activities such as counting, arranging orders, making measurements or giving assessment As the

relationship between language and culture is inseparable, numerical words play a role in human cultural communication

In English culture, there are certain numbers considered as lucky numbers in human psychology In “Handbook of international research in mathematics education”, by Lyn D English, Maria Giuseppina Bartolini Bussi (2008), the world is made of three parts involving the land, the sea and the sky; nature is consisted of three parts which are animals, plants and minerals; the spirit, the flesh and the soul compose a human Thus, number

“three” appears in quite a lot of sayings like „the third time is the charm‟, „number three is

always fortunate‟ and „all good things go by threes‟ “Three‟ is seen as a perfect number in

the eyes of Pythagoras, an ancient Greek philosopher because he suggests that everything can be divided into numbers and the best number choice is the number „three‟ symbolizing three stages of a process including the beginning, the middle and the completion According to Sin-wai Chan and David E Polland ( 2001) in “ An encyclopedia of translation : Chinese- English, English – Chinese”, there is another lucky number which is

“seven” because seven refers to the planets such as Sun, Moon, Venus, Jupiter, Mercy,

Mars, and Saturn that are accompanied with the God Furthermore, according to Christian religion, it took the God seven days to create the world Consequently, in the western religion, there are seven virtues consisting trust, hope, tenacity, prudent, control, fair, and benevolence and seven sins including gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, pride, lust, and envy

On the contrary, the number „two‟ is considered as an unlucky number or as source of evil

so the meanings of English numerical idioms containing „two‟ are often something not

good such as two by four and two bits Besides, thirteen is also the first avoided number in

western culture due to its unlucky meaning That dated back to the old story from Holy Bible that Jesus was betrayed by his thirteenth follower while having the last dinner with the other twelve followers Here are brief introduction about cultural significance in Bible

in the book “Numbers in the Bible: God‟s Design in Biblical Numerology” by Robert Johnston (1999):

In Bible, the number “1” is the symbol of unity As a cardinal number it denotes unity; as an ordinal it denotes primacy It can be inferred that in English culture, that

number can be seen a number with positive meaning or neutral meaning

Number „two‟ can be considered as an unlucky number or as source of evil so the meanings of English numerical idioms containing „two‟ are often something not good such

as two by four and two bits

In English, number “3” is considered as a lucky number and people often use it to divide things into three parts

In the West, four represents the physical world, as the 4 elements (Fire, Water, Air, Earth), the 4 seasons and as the 4 cardinal points (North, South, East, and West) It can be seen as a significant number

Five is four plus one (4+1) We have had hitherto the three persons of the Godhead,

and their manifestation in creation Now we have a further revelation of a People called out from mankind, redeemed and saved, to walk with God from earth to heaven Hence,

Redemption follows creation Inasmuch as in consequence of the fall of man creation came under the curse and was "made subject to vanity," therefore man and creation must be redeemed Thus we have:

These are the five great mysteries, and five is therefore the number of GRACE

Six is man's number, because God created man on the sixth day It often symbolizes imperfection, because it falls short of the perfect number seven So it can be concluded that in English culture, “6” is not considered as a lucky number

Seven represents the number of perfection because God rested on the seventh day and it is the symbol of virtue, and self-sacrifice It is believed in some western cultures, that the seventh son of a seventh son has the power of healing and that the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter has the gift of interpreting dreams

In Christianity, eight represents rebirth or resurrection It can be considered neither lucky number nor unlucky number

In Christianity, there are nine choirs of angels, nine gifts of the Holy Spirit, and nine; as in 3 times 3, as it refers to the Holy Trinity Thus, “9” can be seen as a lucky number

1.9.2 Numbers in Vietnamese

In daily life, we can see that numbers are usually used in Vietnamese daily activities such as talking about age, sizes of shirts and shoes In addition, they bring about certain cultural colors According to Mingtan (2002) in “How to attract Asian women”, there are unlucky numbers such as three and four It can be seen that number „three‟ is not lucky number in Vietnamese culture When people get married or start going out to do

something important, they avoid the date having „three‟ In addition to, the number „ four‟

represent many things such as natural phenomenon ( four directions : East, West, South, North; weather : Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter ), social phenomenon ( job : solider, farmer, cadre, business man ; art : music – chess – poetry ), human being ( moral, citizen‟s responsibilities ) However, it can be seen as unlucky number because it is related

to „death‟ People often say „birth, age, illness, death‟ For example, people do not want this number „four‟ appearing in their number plates On the contrary, in the book “ Viet Nam Culture” by Bobbie Kalman ( 2002) and the book “ The little Sai Gon cook book : Vietnamese Cuisine and Culture in Southern” by Ann Le, Julie Fay (2006) , Vietnamese consider numbers „six, eight, nine‟ are lucky numbers : The number „six‟ represents luckiness, happiness and material benefits; the number „ eight‟ symbolizes achievements and becoming rich ; the number „ nine‟ represents power

1.10 Review of previous studies on idioms

Studies on idioms have been paid a lot of attention by many researchers Thus, it can be said that the collection of idioms researches is not small

In Viet Nam, there have been studies on English and Vietnamese idioms The

research “Idiomatic expressions containing the word „dog‟ in English and Vietnamese” by

Tu, Dao Thanh ( 2007) was aimed at studying idiomatic expressions containing the word

„dog‟ in English and compare with those in Vietnamese to establish their similarities and difference and show the specific features of English and Vietnamese cultures about dog

The study found out that in English culture, dog was the symbol of night, darkness and

afterworlds – the world of death whereas in Vietnamese culture, dog was one of the pure Vietnamese relics to protect houses as well as the spiritual life of the Vietnamese At the

same time, the study also explored that in both English and Vietnamese, idiomatic meanings of the phrases and sentences containing “dog” had more negative meanings than positive ones However, there were some differences In English, many idiomatic expressions containing “dog” expressed more good personal characteristics or high status

of people and the convenient conditions and good luck but these idiomatic meanings were hardly seen in Vietnamese

Another study is “An investigation into the English words and idioms denoting

happiness.” Lam, Nguyen Thi Van (2002) The purpose of the study was to find out the

answers to the research question “What are the grammatical features and semantic structures of „happy‟ and other words and idioms denoting happiness?” The study found out that „happy‟ was an adjective to denote „happiness‟ It was a neutral, generic term It was descriptively synonymous with „glad, pleased, delighted, elated‟; nearly synonymous with „cheerful, gay, merry, exultant, gleeful, jubilant‟, and antonymous with „unhappy, sad‟ In terms of words and idioms denoting happiness, there were 8 adjectives denoting happiness, 6 nouns denoting happiness, and 2 verbs denoting happiness and 6 idioms denoting happiness Their grammatical features depended on the sub-classes they belonged

to

Gap identified here is in Vietnamese, there seems to be the shortage of numerical idiom researches Thus this study on idiomatic expression containing numbers in English and Vietnamese was carried out to find out the contribution of numbers to the meanings of idioms in English and Vietnamese