Comparative Contents of Idioms with Comparisons in English and Vietnamese from a Cognitive View: A Contrastive Analysis

Abstract

Idioms with comparisons are common in both English and Vietnamese. These idioms are formed by three component parts, namely comparative contents, comparative connectors, and comparative conventional images (Giang, 2023). This article uncovers the comparative contents of idioms with comparisons in English and Vietnamese in the light of cognitive linguistics through idiom analysability (Langlotz, 2006). This contrastive analysis presents the similarities and differences between English and Vietnamese idioms with comparisons in terms of their comparative contents, including closed comparative contents and open comparative contents. A manual search of Giang's (2018) idiom collection helped to establish a corpus of 672 English and 731 Vietnamese idioms with comparisons, which served as the data for the research. The results of this study show that the most significant difference between English and Vietnamese idioms with comparisons lies in the distribution of categories of comparative contents. The closed comparative contents of idioms with comparisons in Vietnamese are more prevalent than those in English, and vice versa for open comparative contents. The average proportion of closed comparative contents through idioms with comparisons in English is slightly higher than that of those in Vietnamese. The open comparative contents can be possibly and impossibly explicit; however, the possibly explicit open comparative contents of idioms with comparisons are unique in Vietnamese.