Vietnam and China are the two neighboring countries that have shared an entangled history for over two thousand years. In the ancient past, there were more frequent contacts among the people of these two nations. Anciently, a large number of Chinese people emigrated into Vietnam from Northern China. Therefore, there is an extensive and deep accumulation of the Chinese culture and language in the Vietnamese culture and language. Through the contact, many different levels of the Chinese language and culture were borrowed into Vietnamese in order to enrich the language vocabulary including the Vietnamese idioms.
In the Vietnamese idiom system, there are many idioms which are rooted in the Chinese language. There are many factors that are involved in borrowing the Chinese language. The factors are the requirement of describing social and cultural phenomena, the pressure of the Vietnamese cultures in selecting and using the Chinese idioms which result in establishing the form, the Sino-Vietnamese characters, and their semantics of the Vietnamese idioms. That is to say under the Vietnamese cultural model, the Chinese idioms were changed in order to fit in the system.
Idioms are not only language units, but also convey the social and cultural characteristics of the given language. This study collected its data from four dictionaries, including two dictionaries of Vietnamese idioms and two dictionaries of Chinese idioms. The dictionaries are the Nguyen, N.Y. (1993) Dictionary of Vietnamese idioms, the Nguyen, N.Y. (1994) Dictionary of Vietnamese idioms with Chinese origins (published in Vietnam), the Revised Chinese Dictionary released by the Taiwan Ministry of Education (MOE), and the Liu, W.G. & Hou, W.F. (1994) An encyclopedic dictionary of Chinese idioms. The data included 675 groups of the Vietnamese idioms and their corresponding Chinese idioms. In the 675 groups of the Vietnamese idioms, there are 136 groups that are idioms using the human body part terms.
This corpus-based study employs a comparative analysis approach to explore and discuss changes in forms, structures, and semantics of the Chinese idioms after they came in the Vietnamese language and culture. Moreover, the study also uses the theory of cognitive linguistics to explain the reason for the semantic changes in the Chinese idioms by examining the metaphorical uses of the body part terms in the Vietnamese idioms that originated in Chinese. Then the result of this examination reveals the characteristic of the Chinese and Vietnamese cultures as well as their cognitive mechanism.
This study has five chapters including the preface and conclusion. Chapter 2 is the analysis of Vietnamese idioms that originated in Chinese. Chapter 3 is an exploration of the metaphorical uses of the body part terms in those idioms. And chapter 4 presents the metaphorical scope of the Chinese and Vietnamese cognition as well as the cultural characteristics of the metaphorical use of the body part terms in the Vietnamese idioms.
In chapter 2, first, the researcher presents and discusses the results of the previous studies related to the Chinese and Vietnamese idioms. Then, by data analysis, the researcher describes the developments in the form, structure, and semantics of the idioms, and then also discusses whether the changes in the form would affect the semantic changes of the idioms. This study points out that although the previous studies are plentiful and substantial, there are still shortcomings consisting of how morphological changes can lead to a semantic shift in the idioms, and in the Vietnamese cognition and cultural characteristics as well.
In chapter 3, the body part terms which are employed in the Vietnamese idioms that originated in Chinese are analyzed. First, this study reviews previous studies on the Chinese and Vietnamese idioms which contain the body part terms. Secondly, 136 groups of Vietnamese idioms that originated in Chinese that contains the body part terms are examined. Then I will categorize the idioms, analyze how the body part terms are used in these idioms, and identify the changes of the human body parts in the Vietnamese idioms compared to the Chinese ones. The result of this analysis will identify whether there was a semantic change in the idioms at the time of the idiom borrowings. This chapter concludes that the semantics of the idioms are affected by the changes in the uses of the body part terms after the idioms were borrowed and have become to be used in the Vietnamese language.
With the aim of finding the reasons which cause the semantic changes in the idioms, especially in the uses of the body part terms, chapter 4 uses the conceptual metaphor theory to analyze the structures of the idioms. Then it provides an explanation for the semantic changes of the idioms. Metaphorical expressions are different across languages and cultures. For the Vietnamese idioms which originated in the Chinese language, the semantic change of the idioms compared to the original Chinese ones, are due to the difference between the Vietnamese and Chinese conceptual systems. This chapter also indicates the influences of the Traditional Chinese Medicine, religions, the history of both countries, society and cultural life that influenced selecting and using the body part terms in the idioms in the two languages, and finally the differences between the two cultures are also pointed out.
This study not only shows the changes in the form, structure, and semantics in the Vietnamese idioms which originated in the Chinese language. This study more importantly shows, and determines what impacts the semantic changes of the idioms, and presents the differences between the Vietnamese and Chinese languages and cultures by looking at the body part terms that are used in the idioms in the two languages. The result of this study not only contributes to the theories of conceptual metaphor, cognitive linguistics but also to the second language acquisition theories and applications.