An investigation into conceptual metaphor of “moon” and “trăng” in English and Vietnamese in the 19th and 20th poetry

Abstract

This is an attempt to find out the similarities and differences of conceptual metaphors of “moon” and “trăng” used in the 19th and 20th century poems in English and Vietnamese. To achieve the purposes, this paper chooses the descriptive, quantitative and qualitative approaches throughout the study. There are 449metaphorical expressions of “moon” and “trăng” collected from English and Vietnamese poems in books, journals and on the Internet. The result shows that there are ten interesting source domains occurring in conceptual metaphors of “moon” (“trăng”) in English, Vietnamese, or both. They are A PERSON, A CONTAINER, AN OBJECT, A PLANT, AN ANIMAL, FOOD AND DRINK, A DESTINATION, WATER, A COVER and TIME. Besides, there were also findings about similarities and differences between conceptual metaphors of “moon” and “trăng” used in poetry in the two languages. The differences are detected through the language use, the frequency of occurrence and through some source domains found in one language but not in the other one. The research also suggests some implications for teaching, learning and translating conceptual metaphors, which is useful for Vietnamese learners of English to be successful in cross-cultural communication.