Contrastive analysis of "dog" expressions in English and Persian

Abstract

This study is based on corpora of animal expressions in English and Persian. In this study, "dog" expressions are examined based on Hsieh's (2006) approach of semantic molecules to explore the salient meanings and the cultural backgrounds. Animal expressions may reveal people's thoughts, emotions, culture, and customs. The analysis of about 10,000 Persian and English proverbs shows that there are 207 Persian and 97 English "dog" expressions. In spite of cultural and social differences between English and Persian, the salient semantic properties derived from the name of this animal are nearly the same. The main semantic molecules of the word "dog" are "worthless, bad-tempered, cruel, violent" in both English and Persian. © 2011 American Society for Engineering Education.