Objectives, Scope and Data Sources of the Study: The dissertation deals with adjectives of size in Russian: высокий низкий, глубокий – мелкий, толстый - тонкий, длинный - короткий,широки
Trang 11 Necessity of the Study
1.1 Adjectives of size are one of the basic lexical fields in theRussian and Vietnamese lexicon They are the special quality adjectivesdenoting the entities’ properties conceived and divided by humanbeings They have both general and specific features in terms ofcognition and the culture and language of each nation
1.2 The real world is like a picture perceived by human and created through language and the language mapping That picture of theworld and the view associated with it in the peoples speaking differentlanguages have similarities and differences Through the survey andcontrast analysis, the dissertation is to find out these similarities anddifferences in the structuring of the relations and the spatial properties ingeneral and those of size in particular
re-1.3.Presently, the requirements for the intensive teaching andlearning of foreign languages demand a comprehensive and thoroughanalysis of the lexical fields, in which the lexical subfield of spatial sizeexists The results of the dissertation are to make some contributions tomaking Russian and Vietnamese teaching more effective for the students
of Russian as well as the Vietnamese ones
2 Literature review
- With the introduction of Cognitive Linguistics in the world, manyworks based on the cognitive views have proposed the basic principles ofCognitive Linguistics, of which the most important is “Language is not aself-governing ability of cognition; semantics and grammar areconceptualization; language knowledge arises from the use of language
- In Vietnam, since the early 1990s, Cognitive Linguistics hasbecome a new linguistic tendency Many research projects on space from
a cognitive perspective have gone beyond the scope of traditionallinguistics and have raised many important points such as:
+ Cognitive Linguistics aims to conduct an overall comprehensivestudy on the cognitive functions of language
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Trang 2+ Cognitive Linguistics is a door to people’s spiritual and intellectualworld, and a means to achieve the secrets of the thinking process, thefocus of the study shifted from thinking to consciousness, concerned withthe conceptualisation and categorization of the objective world
+ The formation of the conceptual structure is closely related topeople’s experience and cognitive strategies
+ The meaning of language is not limited within the language systemitself, but derives from the experience gained in the interaction betweenpeople and the world, between their knowledge and belief systems
3 Objectives, Scope and Data Sources of the Study:
The dissertation deals with adjectives of size in Russian: высокий низкий, глубокий – мелкий, толстый - тонкий, длинный - короткий,широкий - узкий, большой - маленький in contrast with equivalentones in Vietnamese: cao (high) - thấp (low),sâu (deep) – nông (shallow) ,dày (thick) - mỏng (thin), dài (long) - ngắn (short) , rộng (wide) - hẹp(narrow), to (big) - nhỏ (small)
-The dissertation focuses on the semantic features of the adjectives ofsize, the size location mechanism, the size cognition mechanism and theuses of the above adjectives
The data used in the study are collected from the Russian –Vietnamese Dictionary, Vietnamese – Russian Dictionary or otherRussian and Vietnamese dictionaries, coursebooks, textbooks, studies,doctoral dissertations, master theses, the literary works, etc
4 The Aims and Tasks of the Study
4.1 The Aims of the Study
The study aims to:
a Contribute to clarifying the semantic features of adjectives of size
in Russian and Vietnamese, especially to identifying the meanings andmeaning traits which have not been provided in dictionaries, or have notbeen clarified, or have been generalized but need describing in moredetails
b Contribute to clarifying the cognition mechanism of space ingeneral and that of size in particular by the Russian and Vietnamese
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Trang 3c Apply the research results to the teaching and learning of Russian
in Vietnam, and propose suggestions to correct errors in using sizeadjectives by learners of Russian
4.2 Tasks of the study
The study is conducted with the following tasks:
a Describing and analyzing the semantic features of adjectives ofsize in Russian and Vietnamese on the basis of linguistic data from thedictionaries to clarify the systematic relations between words and theirmeanings
b Contrasting the meanings and expression manners of the spacialproperties of the adjectives of size in Russian and Vietnamese throughtheir collocations with spatial entities with a view to pointing outsimilarities and differences in the semantic structure of these adjectives
c Identifying the similarities and differences in the mechanism andmanners of spacial cognition by the Russian and Vietnamese through therelations between thought, culture and language
d Pointing out cultural and linguistic cross-sections and causes oferrors by learners of Russian, and proposing solutions to restricting errorsand error correction in Russian teaching and learning
5 Methodology of the Study:
To implement the study, we use the following basic methods:
5.1 Description and analysis
5.2 Contrastive analysis
5.3 Statistics and classification
5.4 Survey and experimental method
6 Contributions of the dissertation
- This is the first dissertation dealing with adjectives of size inRussian and Vietnamese in the bilingual and inter-cultural patterns.These adjectives are studied in the light of the spacial cognition in three-aspect relationships: thought, language and culture
- The dissertation has a practical value not only of helpingunderstand more deeply with a deeper look at the spacial cognition ofRussian and Vietnamese nations, but also making some contributions to
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Trang 4improving the quality of Russian teaching and learning, the translationfrom Russian into Vietnamese and vice versa
7 The Design of the Study
The dissertation has four chapters:
Chapter 1: Concepts and Basic Premises related to the dissertationChapter 2: Semantic Features of Adjectives of Size in the VerticalDirection
Chapter 3: Semantic Features of Adjectives in the Horizontal Direction.Chapter 4: An Application of the study to teaching and learning Russianand Vietnamese
- The dissertation ends up with the introduction, conclusion,references, appendices and other related research
CHAPTER 1 CONCEPTS AND BASIC PREMISES RELATED TO THE
Language, thought (or broader: cognition) and culture have a closerelationship with each other Language is the place where to store andexpress the characteristics of the national culure, and it is a criterion toidentify the nation Language is a real mirror of the national culture
We contrast languages in a certain aspect to figure out the similaritiesand differences between them, and discover useful and valuableinformation for the understanding of national identity and the cognition
of different nations with their languages
Semantics and Lexical-semantic fields
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Trang 5Congnitive Linguistics considers language a mental competence, andhuman language ability is defined as a cognitive ability, process andstrucutre in interaction with other abilities, processes and structures (such
as perception, thought, memory, attention, and learning)
Cognitive Semantics stresses the role of human factors in thelanguage, paying attention to the experience, and focusing on the analysis
of concept and conceptualization, category and categorization Thesemantics of each language reflects the outlook, thinking, or perceptionmanners and conceptualization of the native speakers’ objective worldand their cultural-lingustic community Different nations may see theworld with some dissimilarity through their language prism Thesemantic structure, therefore, is both universal and idiosyncraticCognitive Semantics particularly investigates some “lexical-semanticfields”(such as of space, time, colour, emotions, etc.), which have theiridiosyncratic characteristics
Spacial field is one of the lexical-semantic fields bearing theirpeculiar national culture in language thought, expressed through thespatial structure The group of size adjectives which we investigate inthis dissertation is a lexical sub-field of the spatial field
Adjectives and those of size
Russian adjectives have the following properties: denoting the stateand quality of people, objects and phenomena in the objective world, e.g.белый, длинный, etc.; gradable and nongradable, e.g.: очень хороший,etc.; adjective – noun agreement in morphology, e.g.синнее небо,большой дом, etc.; adjectives used as nouns: новое, данное, столовая,etc Apart from the descriptive meaning, adjectives have pragmaticmeaning, the relation between language units – adjectives and the users.Unlike Russian, Vietnamese adjectives are characterized by: Thelexical and grammatical meanings without their own morphologicalstructure and without adjectives of relations and belonging
Adjectives of size in Russian have the same morphological,syntactical and semantic features as other adjectives They also denotepeculiar properties such as quality – evaluation (качественно -
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Trang 6оценочное); the relative properties of objects classified by human inevaluative location; in the contrast of each pair in terms of meaning; aspolysemantic adjectives with open structure for a certain number ofsenses
Language space from the perspective of linguistic cognition
Adjectives of size are used to denote the properties of spacial entities.Space conceived in human thought and conciousness is not theobjective physical space but the space refracted through the humanperception influenced by cultural factors and experiences of thecommunity and the individual human beings
Space in general include objective physical space, space (be)conceived and space (expressed) in language Language space differsfrom objective physical space in the outside world as well as from spacewhich is reflected in the human brain as a cognitive subject Languagespace is the result of selective reflection of space conceived, whichmeans that language space does not reflect the whole cognitive space Related to the common properties of language space (such as shape,distance, posture, location, direction, etc) and spatial dimensions, thedissertation has identified and clarified the following concepts:
1.4.4 The Concept of Reference points
1.4.5 The Concept of Direction
1.4.6 The Concept of Position
1.4.7 The Concept of Size Scale
1.4.8 Properties of Identified Standard Objects
1.4.9 Especially H Clark’s theory about:
- Identification of objects in space
- People as the center of space cognition
- Peculiar biologial formation by which human beings can perceivethemselves, objects, space, time and relationships between them
- Referring to the outlook of people and space from many angles.According to the geographers: people’s location and their surroundings,gravity and Earth’s plane In physicists’ and geometricians’ viewpoint,the location of an object in space is always in consideration with other
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Trang 7objects in space From the biologists’ standpoint: the human body andmany parts of the human body are nearly symmetrical with each other onthe right and left sides by a vertical line, along the center of the body.Human beings have a complex cognitive structure with symmetricalsides.
- The concept of language space “L-Space”, the concept of referencepoint…
CHAPTER 2 SEMANTIC FEATURES OF THE ADJECTIVES OF SIZE IN
THE VERTICAL DIRECTION
высокий – низкий, глубокий – мелкий, толстый – тонкий cao – thÊp, s©u – n«ng, dµy – máng (High – Low, Deep –shallow, thick – thin)
Semantic features of adjectives of size denoting the concepts of
height - low: высокий – низкий; cao (high) – thÊp (low)
The semantic contrast of the adjectives of size высокий – низкий; cao – thÊp on the basis of linguistic data from Russian and Vietnamese
() The number in brackets is the number of senses.
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Trang 8the water in the seas, rivers, lakes, … and marked derivative plane,(заметная плокость) the planes of the furniture, the floor, the book inhorizontal dimension, etc…
Regarding the uses of the adjectives denoting the concepts of
HEIGTH, LOW, we can see that: the adjectives высокий – низкий; cao
thÊp
– combine with the words denoting different entities in space:human, animals, hills, mountains, mounds; trees and grasses;construction works; labour tools, entertainment, activities, means oftransport; sky, clouds, moon, stars etc
From the spacial cognitive perspective on the senses and uses of thetwo pairs of Russian – Vietnamese adjectives it can be shown that:
- Man is the most complex entity compared with other animal speciesand inanimate objects: man is both the subject directly involved in theprocess of space location and an objective entity located
- The standard of height – the implicit standard has the variability,changing over time, social conditions and economy The standard ofheight is influenced by human feelings and depends on many factorssuch as human shape, clothes, color and subjectivity The observer takeshimself as a basis for evaluation and comment
- In Russian and Vietnamese, the meanings of stretch and position areexplicit
- In some cases, the contexts of the meaning of the object’s positionare “hidden”, which causes ambiguity in cognition, especially when theVietnamese do not use prepositions
- The phenomena of meaning shift, implicitness, and implicationfrom Russian into Vietnamese are interesting In these cases theVietnamese have to use similar adjectives to express the similar sense ofsize
Semantic features of adjectives of size denoting the concepts of
DEPTH and SHALLOWNESS: глубокий – мелкий; s©u – n«ng
It is revealed in the semantic contrast of the adjectives of size
глубокий – мелкий; s©u – n«ng (deep – shallow) on the basis oflinguistic data from Russian and Vietnamese dictionaries that:
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Trang 9+ There is a difference in the numbers of meanings in general
- The adjective pair мелкий - n«ng (shallow) bears a relatively large difference in the number of meanings: мелкий (6) - n«ng (2)
- The adjective pair глубокий - s©u has the same number of meanings: глубокий (6) - s©u (6), but the numbers of spatial deconcepts are different: глубокий - s©u
The adjective глубокий - s©u is rich in the range of expression,
carrying the meaning traits which do not exist in Vietnamese
+ The order of size sense of the two adjectives глубокий - s©u is different: мелкий with the sense “shallow” is at the sixth position, but in Vietnamese nông in the same meaning is in the first one
The adjectives глубокий – мелкий; s©u – n«ng denoting theconcept of DEPTH and SHALLOWNESS have the basic properties: thestretch, the distance from the surface to the bottom, or to a certain pointdownwards, the distance to the surface, edge; three-dimensional space,hollowness, concaveness, depth
With regard to the uses of adjectives denoting the concepts ofDEPTH and SHALLOWNESS , it can be seen that: the adjectives
глубокий – мелкий; s©u – n«ng have collocations with wordsdenoting the following spatial entities: the entities with great depth:пруд - ao (pond), река - s«ng (river), море - biÓn (sea), пучина - vùc(abyss) ; the entities with a depth, stretching horizontally: ров - hµo(trench), долина - thung lòng (valley), канава - m¬ng (dike) ; ; entitywith a depth, self-containedness, containing: пещера - hang (cave),контейнер - c«ngten¬ (container) ; entities as human body, parts:носовая впадина - hèc mòi (nasal cavity), ротовая полость - khoangmiÖng (oral cavity), …
It can be seen in the senses and uses of the two pairs of Vietnamese adjectives from the spacial cognitive perspective that:
Russian When denoting the concept of DEPTH, the Russian and Vietnamesehave the same way to look at things: containedness, three-dimensional
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Trang 10space, hollowness, concaveness, inwardness, a mouth edgedness,distance from top to bottom, depth and stretching depth
- The description of the spatial entities of self-containedness andcontaining depends on the positions of the observer – the objects
described as s©u (deep) or s©u (long), depending on the observing
position
- The entities such as trời (sky), vũ trụ (universe) are both high andfar, vast, and difficult to imagine, but in the human mind, “trời”, and “vũtrụ” are limited (horizon), looking like a building dome, towards themouth, edging toward the Earth, with a depth - shallowness, height -lowness
- When denoting the LENGTH and position of these adjectives,Russian people’s expression of meaning is more explicit than theVietnamese’s in many cases
Semantic features of adjectives of size denoting the concepts of
THICKNESS and THINNESS: толстый – тонкий; dµy – máng The semantic contrast of the adjectives of size толстый – тонкий; dµy máng– (thick - thin) on the basis of linguistic data fromRussian and Vietnamese dictionaries indicates that:
+ The numbers of senses in general of толстый – тонкий; dµy –
máng are not similar: толстый ( 3) – dµy (4); тонкий (5) – máng (2)
+ The positions and numbers of spatial denotations bear similarity:
both in the first position; толстый - dµy, has two senses; тонкий –
máng one
Adjectives толстый – тонкий; dµy – máng denoting the concepts
of THICKNESS and THINNESS have basic properties of: stretch,
distance between two surfaces or edges, vertical, three-dimensional,external, deep, no properties of the position
The uses of the adjectives denoting the concepts of THICKNESS
and THINNESS can be shown that the adjectives толстый – тонкий;
dµy – máng can be collocated with spatial entities of the followingtypes:
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Trang 11Strata, layers, blocks: лёд - băng (ice), почва - đấtất (soil), бетон - bêtông (concrete), снег- tuyết (snow); bức: стена - bức tờng (wall),картина - bức tranh (picture); thanh: полено- thanh củi (wood chip ofwood), меч - thanh kiếm (sword); tấm: доска - tấm ván (plank),облицовочная плитка - tấm gạch lát (floor tiles); viờn: кирпич - viêngạch (brick), таблетка - viên thuốc (tablet); lỏ: письмо - lá th (letter),флаг - lá cờ (flag), селезёнка - lá lách (spleen); cõy, cọc, gậy: колчёрного дерева - cọc gỗ mun (ebony pile), шест - cây sào (pole),бамбуковая палка - gậy tre (bamboo stick), lỏt: кружок колбасы - látgiò (slice of lean pie), ломоть торта - lát bánh ga tô (slice of gateau); air,fog, mist, smoke: дымовая завеса - màn khói (smoke screen), столбдыма - cột khói (column of smoke), росинка - giọt sơng (dewdrop).
It can be seen in the senses and uses of the two pairs of Vietnamese adjectives from the spacial cognitive perspective that:
Russian Spatial perceptions of the Russians and the Vietnamese are basically
similar in nature the sense of dày (thick) denotes size, shape of the
object and ordered first in the dictionary
- The numbers of senses of тонкий – thin in Russian and Vietnameseare different, indicating the implications of cognition, thoughts, andassociations
When describing the human body, body parts and objects of
cylindrical shape cõy, cọc, gậy, there are differences in spatial perception
by the Russian and Vietnamese The Russian regarded human body, andbody parts as cylindrical objects, and thickness as a two-plane section,while the Vietnamese notice the breadth of a cylindrical object, thus
causing the meaning shift; unlike Russian, the Vietnamese often use: to,
lớn, to bố, mập bộo, rộng, or nhỏ, gầy, mỏng, etc to describe
- Objects denoting the sense of thickness in Russian and Vietnamesepeople’s congition and classification are various in types, sizes andmaterials To denote the objects with a size, thickness – thinness,Vietnamese has an extremely abundant system of nouns denoting units,
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