総合研究11 日・英慣用表現の対照研究
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概要
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This research has been undertaken to study contrastively the idiomatic expressions of Japanese and English in order to determine the extent to which the idioms of the respective cultures show idiosyncratic ways of looking at the world. With the specific purpose of offering to the more advanced language learner a greater familiarity with the relationship between a language and the emotional life it expresses, we have focused on those idioms that relate the emotions to the parts of the body. Methodologically, the study has been organized as two interrelated and parallel projects, one for Japanese, the other for English, with each proceeding with a comparable list of body parts and a generally parallel list of emotions. The English group , whose findings are presented here , began with an examination of the idiomatic expressions as they are offered by the standard lexicons, with the 1993 edition of the Random House Unabridged Dictionary serving as its basic source, supplemented by those works presented in the bibliography. The emotions for English were derived in the main from Roget's Thesaurus , with the systematic study of Benedict de Spinoza and the categories of Charles S. Peirce suggesting a general schema. This schema establishes three levels of emotion: those associated with the natural, animal emotions such as fear, those that function on the interpersonal lever such as hatred , and those related more broadly to social interaction such as envy. While the overall findings will be presented in Part II of this study, where the Japanese findings will be presented and contrasted with those found for English, several significant features of the English material have already emerged and point to aspects of the language that will be contrasted with Japanese. Of the 300 idiomatic expressions found for English, well over one third are associated with four parts of the body, i.e., the heart(35), eye(34),face(25), and head(25), 119 in all. Of the 42 emotions established by the schema , the five most frequently occurring in idiomatic expressions are anger(50), anxiety(28), fear(28), contempt(27), and indifference(22). These figures reflect a clear tendency for English to apply idioms of this sort to the negative emotions.
- 東京女子大学の論文