NGUYỄN HẢI THU

VIETNAM ACADEMY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES
GRADUATE ACADEMY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES

Nguyễn Hải Thu

ENGLISH LANGUAGE

A STUDY OF IDIOMS DENOTING SPEED IN
ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE FROM SOCIOCULTURAL PERSPECTIVE

MA THESIS IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE

COURSE: 2016 – 2018

HANOI, 2018


VIETNAM ACADEMY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES
GRADUATE ACADEMY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES

Nguyễn Hải Thu

A STUDY OF IDIOMS DENOTING SPEED IN
ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE FROM SOCIOCULTURAL PERSPECTIVE

Field: English Language
Code: 8220201
Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Hoàng Tuyết Minh


supported me through the steps of the study, and whose stimulating ideas,
expertise and suggestions have inspired me greatly via my growth as an
academic researcher.
A special word of thanks goes to my best friends and my colleagues,
without whose support and encouragement it would never have been possible
for me to have this thesis accomplished.
Last but not least, I am greatly indebted to my family, my husband for
their sacrifice contributing to the fulfillment of this academic work.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
number
Declaration by Author

i

Acknowledgements

ii

Abstract

vii

List of Abbreviations

viii


4

1.6.1. Research Methods

4

1.6.2. Research Procedure

4

1.6.3. Data Collection

5

1.6.4. Data Analysis

5

1.7. Structure of the Study

6

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW

8

2.1. Previous Studies

8

16

2.3. Idioms Denoting Speed

21

2.3.1. Speed and Speed-related Concepts

22

2.3.2. Idioms Denoting Speed

23

2.4. Socio-culture

23

2.4.1. Definitions

23

2.4.2. Factors and Influences

24

2.4.3. In relation to language

27



Structures
3.1.5. Idioms Denoting Speed with Adverb Phrase Structures
3.2. Idioms Denoting Speed with other Structures

34
34

3.2.1. Idioms Denoting Speed with Parallel Structures

34

3.2.2. Idioms Denoting Speed with Comparative Structures

36

3.3. Comparison between Idioms Denoting Speed in English and

39

Vietnamese in terms of Syntactic Features
3.4. Summary

42

iv


CHAPTER 4: SEMANTIC FEATURES OF IDIOMS


50

4.3. Comparison between Idioms Denoting Speed in English and

52

Vietnamese in terms of Semantic Features
4.4. Summary

55

CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION

56

5.1. Recapitulation

56

5.2. Concluding Remarks

57

5.3. Implications

58

5.4. Limitations and Suggestions for Further Studies

59

vi


LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

Adj

:

Adjective

Adv

:

Adverbial

AdvP

:

Adverb Phrase

AP

:

Adjective Phrase

Art


:

Numeral

O

:

Object

Prep

:

Preposition

PP

:

Prepositional Phrase

V

:

Verb

VP


Table 4.2:

Frequency of Figurative Meaning in English and 52
Vietnamese Idioms Denoting Speed

viii


CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
This initial chapter presents the rationale of the study, along with the
aims, objectives, and the scope of the whole assignment. Above all, it is in
this chapter that the research questions are demonstrated to work as clear
guidelines for the paper.
1.1. Rationale
English is considered the key for international understanding and world
regulation, under the phenomena called globalization. As the English
language and globalization walk side by side, towards the goal of
communication, business and politics, ways around the world has been made
simpler than ever. In other words, English has become today a basic need for
any professional in any major area.
The internationalization of manpower has made nations adopt English
as the official language of the world, and Vietnam is no different. Vietnamese
learners of English are seeking and applying various learning techniques in
order to master the language, opening the doors for both personal and
professional development. However, while there are standardized exams to
score and measure level of English proficiency such as IELTS, TOEFL,
TOEIC and so on, little is there any official study on Vietnamese learners’
actual ability to communicate in English, also known as communicative

speed in English and Vietnamese in terms of syntactic and semantic features.
Secondly, pointing out the similarities and differences of these English idioms
containing nouns, adjectives, verbs that are related to speed and their
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Vietnamese equivalents in terms of syntactic and semantic features. Finally,
suggesting some ideas for teaching and learning idioms denoting speed.
1.3. Research Questions
In order to gain the aims of the study, the study is to answer following
research questions:
- What are the typical syntactic and semantic features of idioms denoting
speed in English and Vietnamese?
- What are the similarities and differences between idioms denoting speed
in English and Vietnamese in terms of syntactic, semantic features and
socio-cultural perspectives?
- What are the implications for teaching and learning English idioms
denoting speed in English and Vietnamese?
1.4. Scope of the Study
In the framework of the study, the thesis only focuses on idioms
denoting speed in English and Vietnamese in terms of syntactic and semantic
features. This study includes idioms which contain all nouns, adjectives,
adverbs and verbs expressing speed and which are related to speed. The data
are taken from from 70 linguistics books, 30 dictionaries, 22 short stories and
15 Internet sources.
While completing this thesis, all speed idioms are collected and being
under consideration before being used. Hopefully, the outcomes will have a
certain contribution to the communication development for Vietnamese
language learners.


selected and scanned to find idioms that contain the word speed or speedrelated meaning and concepts. Secondly, selected samples in each language
are categorized based on sentactic and semantic features perspectively. This
step is done seperately for samples of each language in order to find out
categorical patterns. Lastly, the study compared findings of both language to
examine the similarities, differences and their relationships with socio-culture.
1.6.3. Data Collection
The study is required to guarantee the following criteria:
- Data selected are idioms
- Selected idioms denotes speed
- The sources from which the chosen samples are picked up are major
dictionaries, idioms dictionaries, published books on idiomatic expressions
and major listing of idioms on the Web.
This research paper is restricted to English and Vietnamese idioms
denoting speed. As a result, there are 180 English idioms denoting speed and
180 Vietnamese idioms denoting speed from many different sources.
1.6.4. Data Analysis
After being collected, idioms in the two languages are selected and
grouped to be independently observed. All idioms are analyzed, classified in
order to meet the need of analysis. Data analysis is done in terms of syntax
and semantics.
Syntactically, the analysis and classification are mainly based on the
different structural categories of idioms such as: noun phrases, verbs phrases,
adjective phrases, adverb phrases, and prepositional phrases. The results of
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this steps are summarized in statistical tables. By examining the distribution
rates of each type in English and Vietnamese, the researcher would look for
the special characteristics for each of them, generalize the results so as to have
a complete overview about the structure of idioms in English and Vietnamese.

structure), parallel structure and comparative structure. The chapter concludes
with the syntactic comparison between idioms denoting speed in English and
Vietnamse from socio-cultural perspective.
Chapter 4 is the second analytical chapter, studying idioms denoting
speed in terms of semantic features. In this chapter, sample data of each
language are divided into idioms containing the word speed or speed-related
concepts, and idioms that have figurative meaning related to speed or speed
concept. The chapter concludes with the semantic comparison between idioms
denoting speed in English and Vietnamse from socio-cultural perspective.
Chapter 5 concludes the thesis and explores the possibilities for
upgrading existing corpus tools to better support speed-related idiomatic
expression studies in the future.
References come at the end of the study.

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CHAPTER 2
LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1. Previous Studies
As can be seen, English idioms considerably play an important role in
linguistic source of all nations in the world. That is one of the reasons leading
to many studies on English idioms in terms of psychological and cultural
factors. However, very few of those studies narrows down the scope of the
study to a particular type of idioms such as water-related, weather-related…
or idioms under the lights of various fields of language, including syntactic,
semantic and translation, etc. Therefore, this causes some difficulties for the
author in the process of researching materials.
As a social phenomenon, language is composed of words and multiword units or multi-word (lexical) items (Lewis, 1993), with the latter
encompassing idioms and collocations as the two main categories (Grant &

notes on the origins of idioms, notes to help with difficult vocabulary, study
pages, exercises and cartoons to aid learning and add interest. “Oxford
Dictionary of Idioms” by Siefring, J. (2004) provides learners with updated
idioms including clear explanations in typical contexts.
It can be said that “Thành Ngữ Tiếng Việt” of Nguyễn Lực and Lương Văn
Đang (1978) is one of the earliest books about idioms in Vietnam. After that, it is
the appearance of “Từ Điển Thành Ngữ và Tục Ngữ Việt Nam” by Nguyễn Lân
(1994), Hoàng Văn Hành (2008) “Thành Ngữ Học Tiếng Việt”, etc.
The above findings serve as framework of this study, which is the
premise for the future research on teaching and learning idioms effectively
and efficiently to Vietnamese learners of English.

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2.2. Theoretical Background
In this part, I would like to mention some concepts and the uses of the
theory of syntactics and semantics that help us find out the similarities and
differences off syntactic and semantic features of English speed-related
idioms and the Vietnamese equivalents.
Syntactics is the grammar, structure or order of the elements in a
language statement. It applies to computer languages as well as to natural
languages. Usually, we think of syntactics as “word arrangement”. However,
syntactics is also reached in some languages such as Latin by inflectional case
endings. In computer languages, syntactics can be extremely firm as in the
case of most assemble languages or less rigid in language that make use of
“keyword” parameters that can be stated in any order.
Syntactics is also a set of rules in a language. It dictates how word from
different parts of speech being put together in order to convey a complete
thought. In this research, syntactics is used to convey the denotation of speed

particular combination, have different meaning from the one they would have
if you took the meaning of all individual words in the group”.
Longman Idioms Dictionary (1998) defines them as “a sequence of
words which has a different meaning as a group from the meaning it would
have if you understand each word separately”. Accordingly, idioms should
not be broken up into their elements because they are sometimes referred to as
a fixed expression (Cowie and Mackin, 1975; viii cited in Balfaqeeh, 2009).
According to McMordiew (1983), “we can say that an idiom is a
number of words which (when they are) taken together, mean something
different from the individual words of the idiom when they stand alone”.
(McMordiew, 1983, p. 4).

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On the other hand, Moon (1998) in her book, A Corpus-Based
Approach, defines idiom as “an ambiguous term, used in conflicting ways”. In
lay or general use, idiom has two main meanings. First, idiom is a particular
means of expressing something in language, music, art, and so on, which
characterizes a person or group; secondly, an idiom is a particular lexical
collocation or phrasal lexeme, peculiar to a language (Moon, 1998, p. 3).
Most of the scholars quote that idioms in most of the cases show no
flexibility to change in form and grammar. In this case, Baker (1992) states
that, some idioms even allow “no variation in form under normal
circumstances” and that a translator can not do any of the following with an
idiom: a) Change the order of the words in it; b) Delete a word from it; c) Add
a word to it; d) Replace a word with another; and finally e) Change its
grammatical structure.
The definition of idioms in Vietnamese is given out in “Kể Chuyện
Thành Ngữ, Tục Ngữ” by Hoàng Văn Hành (2002, p. 25): “idioms are some

says something is generally true in life.” (Oxford Student’s dictionary of
English, 2001)
It is also worth noticing that a proverb is not merely the language but
one of the most substantial contributions to the folk culture of each country.
People can perceive that nation’s lands, people and humanity tradition
through the treasure of proverbs of a nation.
In summary, although there are many different angles in expression the
definition of the word idiom, most linguists and researchers have the same
view that an idiom is a fixed expression whose meaning cannot be taken as a
combination of the meaning of its constituents.

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2.2.2. Syntactic Features of Idioms
As an idiom is a set-expression, the components in idioms can neither
be added nor substituted. They cannot be changed or varied in the way literal
expressions are normally varied, whether in speech or in writing. Moreover,
when an idiom is used in a complete sentence, it is hardly possible to change
it into passive. Let us consider such an idiom: to eat humble pie which means
to say and show that one is sorry for a mistake that he/she made in the
sentence She had to eat humble pie when Harry, who she said would never
have any success, won first prize. It would be unnatural to say Humble pie
was eaten by her. It is also noticeable that one cannot make other changes
without losing the idiomatic meaning. Almost all idiomatic phrases fail in one
way or another to permit the usual grammatical operations which literal
phrases usually do. This relates to the grammatical fixity of idioms.
It is clear that, an idiom is a fixed group of words. The constituent
components of an idiom cannot generally be changed, replaced, interrupted,
modified or omitted by other words. If there are any attempts to change one of

terms of structure, an idiom can have a regular structure, an irregular or even
a grammatically incorrect structure.
For the first type, they have common forms but there is no connection
between the meaning of each component and that of the whole unit. Typical
examples of idioms with regular structure are not difficult to find: the greeneyed monster (a feeling of anger or unhappiness because somebody, you like
or love is showing interest in somebody else), a pipe dream (a hope, believe,
plan and so on that will probably not come true), poetic justice (a punishment
or reward that is deserved). The meaning of idioms in this group cannot be
perceived without having been learnt already.

15