A Contrastive Study On Animal Idioms In Chinese And Thai

The animal holds an important place in the life of the Chinese and Thai people. Idioms composed of animal morphemes are symbolic and profound in meaning. Because both countries vary in their social backgrounds, modes of thinking, and manners and customs, the people's feeling and association with animals are also different. As a result, the Chinese and Thai animal idioms differ in their conceptual meaning and figurative sense. The semantic difference reflects the cultural uniqueness, and also causes the Thai learners of Chinese to make errors when studying Chinese animal idioms because of the interference of their mother tongue.Using contrastive linguistics, lexicology, cultural linguistics, interlanguage and error analysis as the theoretical framework, and adopting questionnaire survey as well as quantitative and qualitative analyses as the main research methods, this paper takes the Chinese and Thai animal idioms as the object of study and carries on a contrastive analysis of them. First, it discusses the definitions and origins of the Chinese and Thai idioms, followed by a description of the formal properties and syntactic functions, categories of the animals involved in Chinese and Thai animal idioms. Second, it discusses the literal meaning and figurative sense of the Chinese and Thai animal idioms and the relationship between the vehicle and the figurative meaning. Third, it makes a comparison between the Chinese and Thai animal idioms in their cultural connotation and socio-cultural backgrounds from the perspective of geographical environment, life style, ideas and beliefs, along with an analysis of the two peoples' feelings and attitudes toward animals and an exploration into the root causes of semantic and cultural differences. Finally, based on a questionnaire survey, it makes an analysis of the errors by a group of Thai learners when understanding and using Chinese animal idioms, gives a description of the features of the errors, makes an attempt to find out the causes of errors, and puts forward some suggestions for teaching Chinese idioms to the Thai learners. The author hopes that this contrastive analysis of the Chinese and Thai animal idioms may help the Thai learners to better understand the features, regularities and cultural connotation of the Chinese animal idioms so as to improve their study and ability in understanding and using Chinese idioms.