Thành ngữ cặp trong tiếng Anh

Abstract

Idiomatic pairs in English are regarded as a special kind of idioms. They have typical characteristics in terms of both forms and contents. In addition to giving the criteria for idiomatic pair identification, the paper aims to explore the structural and semantic features of idiomatic pairs, including grammatical patterns, componential structures, semantic compositions and transparent-opaque components. To collect the data, a hand search of four English idiom dictionaries was conducted to establish a corpus of 222 entries, from which the structural and semantic features of idiomatic pairs were described and analysed. Results from this study show that the interpretation of the forms and contents of English idiomatic pairs is linked together. Thus, it proves that idiomatic pairs in English can be analyzable and have meanings that are at least partly motivated.