DOI: 10.16986/hunefd.1778071 ISSN: 2536-4758

A Cross-Linguistic Cognitive Analysis of ‘Nurturing a Potential Betrayer’ Idioms and Implications for Idiom Teaching

Muhammet Fatih Adıgüzel, Özge Kutlu Demir, Tuçe Öztürk Karataş
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This cross-linguistic cognitive study analyses nine “nurturing a potential betrayer” idioms across eight languages—English, Vietnamese, Chinese, French, Spanish, Arabic, Japanese, and Turkish—while addressing their pedagogical implications for language teaching and learning. Despite their shared cautionary function, idioms such as English to feed a snake in one’s bosom and Vietnamese nuôi ong tay áo (“to raise bees in one’s sleeve”) reveal unique conceptual metaphors and cultural frames. Utilizing source domains like SNAKE, BEE, CROW, TIGER, and DOG and the CONTAINER image schema, the nine idioms frame a disappointing betrayal by an intimate as the betrayer’s inherent evil, a violation of reciprocity, or the nurturer’s strategic failure. This challenges the notion of cross-linguistic idiomatic synonymy and highlights the risks of conceptual “false equivalents” in equivalence-based pedagogy. To address these issues, our research supports a cognitive-cultural approach for idiom analysis that highlights metaphor, imagery, and cultural contextualization, and proposes various teaching techniques such as visualization, scenario-based discussions, and contrastive mapping to enhance comprehension, retention, and pragmatic competence. Thus, idiom learning becomes an engaging exploration of cross-cultural meaning, based on each idiom’s unique micro-model within the universal macro-model of The Danger of Nurturing a Betrayer.

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