Structural and Semantic Properties of Idiomatic Pairs in English and Vietnamese: A Contrastive Analysis

There are idiomatic pairs in both English and Vietnamese. While idiomatic pairs in Vietnamese have been extensively researched from different views, it seems that there have been few thorough studies of idiomatic pairs across English and Vietnamese. This paper looks into the structural and semantic properties of idiomatic pairs in English and Vietnamese using the framework of idiom analysability (Langlotz, 2006). This is a contrastive analysis that presents the similarities and differences between English and Vietnamese idiomatic pairs in terms of structural and semantic properties, including grammatical and componential patterns, semantic compositions, and transparent-opaque components. A manual search of Giang's (2018) idiom collection yielded a corpus of 231 English and 2374 Vietnamese idiomatic pairs, which served as the data for the study. The findings of this study indicate that the biggest difference between English and Vietnamese idiomatic pairs lies in their distribution in each language. There are much more idiomatic idioms in Vietnamese than in English. Grammatically, idiomatic pairs in both languages are formed by two syntactically equivalent component parts. In Vietnamese, the components that create idiomatic pairs are even, and in English, they are odd. Semantically, the majority of English and Vietnamese idiomatic pairs are able to be analysable, and their meanings are at least motivated in some way.