IDIOMS CONTAINING THE WORD “HORSE” IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1:  INTRODUCTION

1.1. Rationale for the study

1.2. Aims and objectives of the study

1.3. Research questions

1.4. Scope of the study

1.5 Significance of the study

1.6. Design of the study

Chapter 2: LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1. Review of previous studies

2.2. Review of theoretical background

Chapter 3: METHODOLOGY

3.1. Research Design

3.2. Database

3.3. Methodology

3.4. Procedure

Chapter 4: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION

4.1. Results and discussion

4.2. Implication

Chapter 5: CONCLUSION

5.1. Recapitulation

5.2.Concluding remarks

5.3. Limitations of the research

5.4. Suggestions for further research

REFERENCES

APPENDIX

LISTS OF TABLES & FIGURES

CONTENTS

Table 1 –  Statistical analysis of syntactic features of English and Vietnamese idioms containing the word “horse” PAGE

26

Table 2 –  Stastical analysis of semantic features of English and Vietnamese idioms containing the word “horse” 26

Chart 1 – Rate of syntactic features of English and Vietamese idioms containing the word “horse”. 33

Chart 2 -Rate of semantic features of English and Vietnamese idioms containing the word “horse”

ABBREVIATIONS & CONVENTIONS

•ESL

•TOEFL

• IELTS

• TOEIC • English as a Second Language

• Test of English as a Foreign Language

• International English Language Testing System

• Test of English for International Communication

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First of all, I would like to express my special thanks to Dr. Nguyen Thu Hanh, my supervisor, for her exciting lectures on Linguistics, her valuable advice and continual supports without which I could not have finished my thesis.

My heartfelt thanks go to all the staff, teachers and members at Faculty of Post-Graduate Studies – University of Business and Technology for their work and services.

Especially, I would like to show my profound gratitude to all the librarians at Faculty of Post-Graduate Studies during my searching for reference books. Their enthusiastic cooperation is really precious towards the results of my study.

I owe my warmest thanks to my family for their support and encouragement during the completion of this research.

Finally, I am also grateful to all the authors whose books, newspapers and magazines I have referred to.

ABSTRACT

The main objective of this thesis is discovering the synctactic patterns of and the semantic features of English and Vietnamese idioms containing the word “horse” based on the theoretical frameworks of comparative analysis.

The corpus of the study consists of 100 horse idioms (50 in English and 50 in Vietnamese) containing the word “horse”. Both quantitative and qualitative methods have been used to find out the answers to the research questions.

There are some findings in the research. In the first place, the six patterns of syntactic structure, namely Noun Phrase Structure, Verb Phrase Structure, Adjective Phrase Structure, Prepositional Phrase Structure, Sentence Structure, Parallel Structure are all used  to form horse idioms in English and Vietnamese language. Among them, the most commonly used feature for English idioms containing the word “horse” is Verb Phrase Structure. The use of Noun Phrase Structure ranks the second. However, taking Vietnamese idioms at the same category, we can see that Parallel Structure and Sentence Structure are the two most popular syntactic features that are employed to make a “horse” idiom. There is a common point between the investigated idioms of the two languages is that both of them tend to use Adjective and Prepositional Phrase Structure at a very small frequency. The data analysis also points out that in terms of semantic features, the horse idioms expressing neutral points appear with the highest frequency in both English and Vietnamese idioms containing the word “horse”.

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