Culture-Oriented Idioms in English and Albanian Language-Analyses of the Semantic and Syntactic Structure of Life and Death Idioms: A Comparative Study

Abstract

Idiomatic expressions are a crucial part of language reflecting the mindset of a nation’s culture and shaping the characteristics of language usage. This paper elaborates on the rich content of the variety of idiomatic expressions in English and Albanian of idioms related to life and death. Each language possesses its characteristics making the languages similar and different from one another, thus leading to different expressions of the same things. Writing and speaking a language cannot be understood without using idioms, especially when describing one’s emotional or mental conditions. This article aims at analyzing the semantic and syntactic structure of idioms denoting life and death connotations in both languages. Language is an independent system and as a result, different ethnic groups show their psychological characteristics through different concepts. Such differences and similarities are reflected in figurative expressions of each nation which incorporates the focus of this study. An analysis of the constituent parts of idioms, features of non-compositionality, syntactic functions in sentences, and other characteristics of set expressions are the focus of this research paper through componential and comparative analyses. The research is based on the database of 480 English idioms 291praseoloical units with the element “life”, 189 phraseological units with the element “death”, and more than 320 idioms in Albanian. Data were driven from two phraseological dictionaries Albanian Phraseological Dictionary and English–Albanian Phraseological Dictionary. A detailed and in-depth insight was made into the corpus of the dictionary entries to find out idioms that express life and death in both languages. The methods used are based on comparative and componential analyses. The study displayed characteristics in idiomatic expressions reflected in two cultures showing different semantic and syntactic features in both languages.