Contrastive analysis of Hungarian and English phraseological units containing the word ’mother’

Abstract

In the paper I present a contrastive analysis of Hungarian and English phraseological units containing the word ’mother’, and I outline the benefits of these units for second language teaching. My main target is to reveal the compliance of the collected expressions on the semantical level through phraseological connections. Since the expressions under investigation „relay (…) generally applicable observations, facts of life, social values, (and) cultural experiences” (Császári 2013, 47), the exploration of the semantic motivation behind them may be extremely useful for language learners in reconstructing two (or more) cultural systems. In language learning, linguistically expressed cultural elements such as the ones analyzed in this paper may play a major role in the way students perceive the target language and the target language community whose world view such phraseological units offer a glimpse into.