A Comparative Study Of Chinese And Thai Idiomatic Expressions With Numbers

Every language in the world is deep-rooted in the specific cultural background and is a mirror of profound cultural connotation. The numbers in the language reflects the scale and quantity of the objective material world. Now that the social history, the culture psychology, the ideological system, and the manners or customs of various ethnic groups are very different, and that there is a big discrepancy between their feeling and imagination of specific numbers, the sociocultural significance of numbers in their respective languages are not similar as a result, and in consequence form respective number culture.The number culture transcends the quantitative sense expressed by the number itself, and makes the exoteric number into an object of worship or taboo. Each language possesses very many idiomatic expressions with numbers, of which the implicated cultural significance is a typical representation of number culture.In this comparative study of Chinese and Thai idiomatic expressions with numbers, the author tries to analyze the different characteristics of their lexical structure, semantic meaning as well as language application, and investigate the distinction of their structural features and connotative meanings, so that it can contribute some useful advices or suggestions for the Chinese-Thai bilingual teaching and translation. Related theories of lexicology, cultural linguistics, constructive linguistics and cross-cultural communication are applied in this study.The thesis is divided into five chapters.Chapter One introduces the framework, purpose, methods and theories of this research, and gives a brief overview of previous research.Chapter Two expounds in detail the major characteristics of Chinese and Thai idiomatic expressions with numbers in terms of their syntactic structure and grammatical function.Chapter Three carefully compares the cultural significance and the application of rhetoric methods in Chinese and Thai idiomatic expressions with numbers.Chapter Four experimentally probes the questions in Chinese-Thai bilingual teaching and translation, from the perspective of a second language, and puts forward some useful suggestions.Chapter Five, as conclusion, summarizes the research findings and results.