A Comparative Analysis Of Chinese And Mongolian Idioms Expressing Emotions

Emotions are an essential part of human life,which have an effect on how people feel and perceive,on cognition and physiological body functions.People express their emotions through language.Every language receives the influence of the natural environment,social environment and culture.“成语”Chengyu(Chinese idioms)and Mongolian idioms are set phrases,they are unique,have a fixed structure,and reflect the development of a language over the course of thousands of years.Idioms are endued with profound meaning and deep culture connotations.Furthermore,idioms cannot be understood without the cultural background and language environment in which they are used.By means of a comparative analysis of Chinese and Mongolian idioms,and research of cultural characteristics,way of thinking,expression styles of emotions which are reflected in these idioms,Mongolian people who are learning Chinese language and Chinese people who are learning Mongolian language can rise mutual understanding and enrich their perspectives on each others culture.In the current thesis 75 Mongolian idioms and 64 Chinese idioms have been selected out of “Mongolian Idiom Dictionary” and “Xinhua Idiom Dictionary”to conduct an analysis and coparative study on formal structure,semantic content and cultural connotative meaning of these idioms.Research methods are dictionary comparative analysis,language comparative analysis and culture comparative analysis.Current research mainly finds,one difference between Chinese and Mongolian idioms is that Chinese idioms are most often composed of four characters,Mongolian idioms are generally composed of two or more words,or words and word roots.Comparative analysis of grammatical structure revealed,verb idioms in Chinese accounted for the largest proportion,whereas in Mongolian idioms phrase verb grammatic structure idioms accounted for the largest proportion.The current thesis analyzes idioms which are related to body parts,animals,natural phenomena,colours and culture specific objects.The most idiom components in both languages are related to body parts.Furthermore,there are many idioms in two languages that contain the same component words to express similar emo-tions.A relatively rare situation is that the same component word in Chinese and Mongolian idioms is used to express different emotions.Some Chinese and Mongolian idioms contain their own culturally rich components.To sum up,the cultural connotations of Chinese and Mongolian idioms,wich expressing emotions,contain many similarities.