Contrastive analysis of body – related idioms in English and Azerbaijani

Abstract

Based on a contrastive analysis of body – related idioms in English and Azerbaijani, the present research concerns the analysis of similarities and differences of them with regard to their semantic aspect. Idioms are fixed expressions. They carries a definite figurative meaning and its overall idea can hardly be interpreted from the meanings of its constituent parts. Body – related idioms are the main part of the vocabulary of English and Azerbaijani languages. So, data referring to human body organs: face, eyes, tongue, head and hand are gathered from various online sources and Kunin’s Comprehensive English - Russian Phraseological dictionary, as well as, Veliyeva’s Azerbaijani- English - Russian dictionary of idioms. The research begins with theoretical background about previous studies related to the present topic, definition of idiom, the relationship between culture and idioms, and classifications of idiomatic expressions in English and Azerbaijani. The next stage of the study concerns the data analysis of body – related idiomatic expressions in English and Azerbaijani. This data analysis stage is also divided into two sublevels. At the first level, more than 110 idiomatic expressions referring to five human body organs- head, eye, face, tongue, hand and their Azerbaijani equivalents have been analyzed with respect to their content plane and attitudinal specifics. The following part of the work contains the analysis of identical, similar and completely different features of 60 body- related idiomatic expressions with regard to their semantical aspects. Additionally, determining the type to which each idiom belongs according to the degree of transparency between constituent elements is also a part of this analysis. The outcomes of the research allow to identify similar and different aspects of cross - cultural relations