nghiên cứu những nét nghĩa của động từ come trong tiếng anh với về trong tiếng việt từ góc độ tri nhận qua một vài tác phẩm văn học

 Investigating possible meanings of come and về, examining their typological conflations of lexicalization patterns such as Motion plus Path, Motion plus Figure.. Exploring these notio

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract i

Acknowledgement……… ii

Abbreviations……… iii

Lists of Tables and Figures………iv

Table of Contents……….v

PART I: INTRODUCTION 1

1 Rationale 1

2 Aims of the study 1

3 Hypotheses 2

4 Scope of the study 2

5 Method of the study 2

6 Design of the study 3

PART II: DEVELOPMENT 4

CHAPTER I: LITERATURE REVIEW 4

1.1 Introduction 4

1.2 Definitions of terms 4

1.2.1 Cognitive linguistics 4

1.2.2 Cognitive Semantics 5

1.3 Talmy’s theory of lexicalization patterns 5

1.3.1 Preliminaries 5

1.3.2 The Motion Event 6

1.3.3 The three-way typology: the verb root 6

1.3.3.1 Lexicalization pattern: Motion + Co-event 7

1.3.3.3 Lexicalization pattern: Motion + Path 7

1.3.3.4 Lexicalization pattern: Motion + Figure……… 8

1.3.4 The two-way typology: Path of motion 9

1.4 Image Schema 10

1.5 Summary 10

CHAPTER II: DEICTIC MOTION VERBS 12

2.1 Deictic motion verbs in English 12

2.2 Deictic motion verbs in Vietnamese 13

CHAPTER 3: APPLYING COGNITIVE SEMANTICS TO INVESTIGATE POSSIBLE MEANINGS OF THE ENGLISH VERB ‘COME’ AND VIETNAMESE VERB ‘VỀ’ 16

3.1 Syntactic features 16

3.2 Semantic features 17

3.2.1 Semantic features of Come 17

3.2.2 Semantic features of Về 19

3.3 Image schema of come and về 21

3.4 Typology for deictic motion verb come and về: A comparison 22

3.4.1 Motion plus Path 23

3.4.2 Motion plus Figure 26

3.4.3 Other conflations 28

CHAPTER 4: THE STUDY 28

4.1 Introduction 28

4.2 Hypotheses 28

4.3 Data collection 28

4.4 Data analysis 28

4.5 Results and Discussion 30

4.5.1 Hypothesis I 30

4.5.2 Hypothesis II 34

4.6 Concluding remarks 37

PART III: CONCLUSION 38

1 Recapitulation 38

2 Implications for linguistic research, English language teaching and translation 39

3 Limitations 40

4 Recommendations for further research 40

REFERENCES

APPENDIXES

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List of Tables and Figures

List of Tables

Table 1

Distribution of the equivalent and non-equivalent meanings of come and về………… 32

List of Figures Figure 1 The percentage of the occurrence frequency of come and về………30

Figure 2 The percentage of the equivalent meanings of come and về……… 32

Figure 3 The percentage of the conflation of Motion and Path………33

Figure 4 The percentage of the non-equivalent meanings of come and về……… 34

Figure 5 The percentage of the conflation of Motion and Figure……….36

PART I: INTRODUCTION

1 Rationale

Cognitive linguistics has emerged in the last twenty-five years as a powerful approach to the study of language, conceptual systems, human cognition, and general meaning construction (Fauconnier, 2006) The use of cognitive linguistics in investigating verbs in general and motion verbs in particular is frequently examined in linguistic and psycholinguistics studies because of their syntactic and semantic complexity They enter into complex relationships with other words in the sentence: each verb requires or permits the presence of other words called arguments Thus, it might be said that a verb determines the number and type of arguments within a verb phrase Additionally, verbs can have multiple meanings which are very often marked by a different argument realization:

(a) Mary came home

(b) The trees are coming into leaf

(c) John comes to work by bus

In the examples above, the verb „to come‟ has different meanings: the transition in space (a), the unfolding of an event (b) and the attendance (c) The question is whether a separate lexical representation is necessary for each meaning In linguistics, to avoid the confusion, a dichotomy of verb meaning was suggested proposing that the overall meaning of a verb is composed from its basic meaning (i.e verb root) and syntactic frame (Levin & Hovav, 2005) It

is necessary to look mainly at the verb root alone and the kinds of lexicalization involving a single morpheme when studying a verb (Talmy, 2000) Naturally, the investigation of verbs in English and Vietnamese indicated that there are similarities and differences in the meanings and use between the two languages

Up to now, there has been a vast amount of research on the linguistic expression of motion events in English and Spanish or Japanese, and of the claims about the semantics of their manner verbs In Vietnam, it seems that there hardly be any research on a particular verb and its Vietnamese equivalent from cognitive perspective Therefore, this thesis aims at filling this gap Hopefully, examining English verbs and its equivalents in Vietnamese is supposed to help language teaching or translation more effectively

From the above reason, I have decided to choose this topic for my thesis It is my assumption that this research can partly facilitate translators, teachers, students and linguists to

be more aware of the meanings of come and về in vocabulary acquisition

2 Aims of the study

Each study has its own objectives This paper investigates possible meanings of the English

verb come and Vietnamese verb về from cognitive perspectives Therefore, it is aimed at:

 Giving an overview of the concepts of cognitive linguistics, cognitive semantics, Talmy‟s theory about lexicalization patterns and their roles in this study

 Investigating possible meanings of come and về, examining their typological conflations of

lexicalization patterns such as Motion plus Path, Motion plus Figure

 Checking the occurrence frequency and the use of the English verb come and Vietnamese verb về through some prewar literary works, and then finding out the similarities as well as

differences of these two verbs

 Giving some suggestions for ELT, translation and for further research

4 Scope of the study

This study deals with exploring possible meanings of the English verb come and Vietnamese verb về Due to the limit time, knowledge and resources, the thesis only examines these two

verbs based on Talmy‟s framework The reason the author chooses Talmy‟s theory is that it helps the author find out the similarities and differences of two languages by analyzing the lexicalization patterns which may be compared across language with very different word

structure Additionally, the author does not try to propose all the meanings of come and về but

presents their typical meanings by analyzing the main conflations of semantic components

5 Method of the study

In order to accomplish the thesis, the corpus-based study is used since the role of the corpus

is not only to provide a limited and representative data-based for statistical analysis, but also to provide an authentic and realistic data (Mair, 1991:77) In this study, the corpus is over 50,000 words per language collected from some prewar literary works written by famous writers The English and Vietnamese literary works are chosen at random The number of the works, the year

of the works written, the length and the structure of each work are not considered The researcher will use Wordsmith Tool version 5.0 which provides a concordance list and Wordlist expert

According to Oakes (1998:149), a concordance is a list, arranged in an order specified by the user, such as the order of appearance, of the occurrences of items in a source text, where each occurrence is surrounded by an appropriate portion of its original context “The frequency list is very useful as a means of isolating words from the surrounding detail of the text so that they can

be surveyed in this way, but the lack of this detail also prevents us from seeing precisely how these potential labels are actually used (Barnbrook, 1996:65-66)

Therefore, concordance and wordlist can combine well in this study in order to check the

occurrence frequency of the English verb come and Vietnamese verb về From a concordance list, the author will examine whether the meanings of come is equivalent to the meanings of về

6 Design of the study

The study is divided into three parts:

Part I INTRODUCTION introduces the background, the aims, the scope, the method

and the organization of the study

Part II DEVELOPMENT

Chapter 1 LITERATURE REVIEW provides an overview of the theoretical background of

the study It deals with the concepts of cognitive linguistics, cognitive semantics, Talmy‟s theory about lexicalization patterns, image schema as well as their roles

in this study

Chapter 2 DEICTIC MOTION VERBS presents English and Vietnamese verbs of deictic

motion based theories of Levin (1993), Lai, Nguyen (1992) and Hoa, Nguyen (1996)

Chapter 3 INVESTIGATION discusses the lexical meaning, image schema as well as

typological conflations of the English verb come and Vietnamese verb về based

on Talmy‟s framework

Chapter 4 METHODOLOGY deals with the hypotheses, data collection instruments and

examines the high and low frequency of the English verb come and Vietnamese verb về through prewar literary works and find out the similarities and differences

between two verbs

Part III CONCLUSION summarizes what has been done, limitations of the study,

accompanied by suggestions for language teaching and further study

PART II: DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW 1.1 Introduction

Cognitive linguistics is one of the most interesting branches in the present–day linguistic field To have basic comprehension of this field: the notions of cognitive linguistics in general and cognitive semantics in particular that are theoretical background for this study will be briefly mentioned From these reasons, the author provides basic concepts to the readers in order to have better understanding of this branch

1.2 Definitions of terms

To provide a brief of key terms related to the issues of this study, definitions of cognitive linguistics and cognitive semantics will be presented in turn in this section This will help the readers understand clearly about the issues that are dealing with

1.2.1 Cognitive linguistics

Cognitive Linguistics is an important interdisciplinary branch of cognitive science, and is closely related to cognitive psychology and linguistics It is a new approach to the study of language which views linguistic knowledge as part of general cognition, studies the meaning and thinking According to Ungerer & Schmid (1996), cognitive linguistics is an approach to language that is based on our experience of the world and the way we perceive and conceptualize

it

Gilles Fauconnier (2006) describes cognitive linguistics as follows: „Cognitive linguistics goes beyond the visible structure of language and investigates the considerably more complex backstage operations of cognition that create grammar, conceptualization, discourse, and thought itself The theoretical insights of cognitive linguistics are based on extensive empirical observation in multiple contexts, and on experimental work in psychology and neuroscience Results of cognitive linguistics, especially from metaphor theory and conceptual integration theory, have been applied to wide ranges of nonlinguistic phenomena.‟

Taylor (2002) argues that cognitive Linguistics (with a capital „C‟) approaches the relation between language and cognition rather differently than the Chomskyan tradition (with a small „c‟) which describes the rules of a formalized grammar as generation of the well-formed sentences of a language Language is best regarded as an integral part of cognition and that it will be insightful to study language in the light of what is known about the mind, whether this is from experimentation, introspection, or even common-sense observation

1.2.2 Cognitive Semantics

Apparently, cognitive semantics is a branch of cognitive linguistics Like cognitive linguistics, cognitive semantics is not a single unified theory It studies language as a container

and an organizer (or as a gateway to knowledge, provided by Langacker [1]:58) of knowledge within the human mind

According to Vyvyan Evans (2006:156), cognitive semantics sees linguistic meaning as a manifestation of conceptual structure: the nature and organization of mental representation in all its richness and diversity, and this is what makes it a distinctive approach to linguistic meaning However, Talmy (2000:4) describes cognitive semantics and the main methodology as follows:

„Research on cognitive semantics is research on conceptual content and its organization in language and hence, on the nature of conceptual content and organization in general‟

In summary, cognitive semantics is concerned with the relationship between experience, embodied cognition and language, with the result that it explores the connections between human bodily experience, the conceptual system and the semantic structure encoded by language

1.3 Talmy’s theory of lexicalization patterns

1.3.1 Preliminaries

In volume II of Toward a Cognitive Semantics (2000), Talmy explores the systematic

relations in language between meaning and surface expression which means overt linguistic forms, not derivational theory He describes lexicalization in the following words: “lexicalization

is involved where a particular meaning component is found to be in regular association with a particular morpheme” (Talmy, 2000:24)

Under his basic assumption, it is possible for linguists to isolate elements separately within the domain of meaning and within the domain of surface expression He also emphasized that this relationship is not one-to-one because a combination of semantic elements may be expressed by a single surface element, or a single semantic element may be expressed by a combination of surface elements In addition, different types of semantic elements may be expressed by the same type of surface element, and the same type of semantic elements may be expressed by several different surface elements

In general, Talmy‟s particular concern is to understand how such patterns compare across languages For a particular semantic domain, language exhibits a wide variety of patterns, a small number of patterns (defined as a typology), or a single pattern (a universal) One of the domains which Talmy concerned is the semantic domain of Motion, a dynamic domain of

experience and entails the movement of an entity through space In volume II of Toward a Cognitive Semantics (2000), he examines the conceptual structure of motion events as well as

typological patterns Exploring these notions will be theoretical background for using semantic components of Motion Event such as Figure, Ground, Path and Motion to study the typology of

Motion Verbs come in English and về in Vietnamese in Chapter 3 Language differs in their

linguistic expressions; using Talmy‟s framework will identify and compare the elements of the

meaning of the deictic motion verb „Come‟ and „Ve‟ as well as the conflations of semantic components in English and Vietnamese

1.3.2 The Motion Event

The motion event which is described clearly in volume II of Toward a Cognitive Semantics is one of the most important concerns of Talmy Motion is defined as a dynamic

domain of experience and entails the movement of an entity through space An event is a portion

of reality which has been delimited or bounded by the human mind (Talmy, 2000)

Talmy (2000:25) claims that a situation containing motion and the continuation of a stationary location alike are treated as a Motion Event (with a capital M) A motion event, therefore, is an event where an entity moves from place to place or is identified as located at a particular place It is basically composed of four semantic components such as the Figure, i.e the object that is in movement or that is located with respect to another object; the Path, i.e the path followed or site occupied by the Figure object with respect to the Ground object; a Ground, i.e the reference object with respect to which the Path is characterized; the Motion, i.e the occurrence of motion or location per se For example:

(1) The napkin blew off the table

Figure Motion Path Ground

Nonetheless, Talmy (1972) also gives a distinct semantic interpretation of the terms Figure and Ground compared to ones taken from Gestalt psychology: “The Figure is a moving or conceptually movable object whose path or site is at issue The Ground is a reference frame, or a reference object stationary within a reference frame with respect to which the Figure‟s path or site is characterized” (Talmy, 2000: 26)

In sum, the sketch of a Motion event has been presented in this part Definitions of Motion, Event as well as Motion events have been offered and the semantic components of motion events have been examined as well In addition, manner verbs and causative verbs also are defined and the relation between the Co-event and Motion event is explored

1.3.3 The three-way typology: the verb root

According to Talmy (2000), when studying the verb, it is necessary to look mainly at the verb root alone and the kinds of lexicalization involving a single morpheme Therefore, lexicalization patterns may be compared across language with very different word structure Languages are categorized by the characteristic lexicalization pattern they exhibit However, in most cases, a language uses only one of three types for the verb in its most characteristic expression of Motion (icid:,27)

1.3.3.1 Lexicalization pattern: Motion + Co-event

In the first typological pattern for the expression of Motion, the verb expresses both the fact of Motion and a Co-event, usually either the manner or the cause of the Motion

 English expressions of Motion with conflated Manner or Cause (Talmy 2000:28)

The rock rolled down the hill The napkin blew off the table

I slid the keg into the storeroom I kicked the keg into the storeroom

Let‟s look at the following Vietnamese examples that also exemplify this type of conflation:

From the examples above, non-agentive motion and agentive motion can be understood

as follows: non-agentive motion refers to situations which entities are incapable of motion on their own; agentive motion means that the motion is caused by the agent but the verb expresses its Cause or the Manner in which the Figure moves

1.3.3.2 Lexicalization pattern: Motion + Path

In the second typological pattern for the expression of Motion, the verb root expresses both the fact of Motion and the Path (Talmy, 2000:49) Languages such as Romance, Semitic, Japanese, Korean, Turkish, Tamil, Polynesian, Nez Perce, and Caddo are of this type Spanish,

in addition, is a prototypical example of this type

 Spanish expressions of Motion (non-agentive) with conflation of Path

(2) La botella entró a la cueva (flotando)

The bottle MOVED-in to the cave (floating)

„Cái chai trôi vào trong động‟

CL bottle to float to enter in cave

“The bottle floated into the cave”

 Spanish expressions of Motion (agentive) with conflation of Path

(3) Metí el barril a la bodega rodándolo

I-AMOVED-in the keg to the storeroom rolling-it

„Tôi lăn cái thùng vào trong kho‟

I to roll CL keg to enter in storeroom

„I rolled the keg into the storeroom‟

As can be seen from the above examples, both Spanish non-agentive motion and agentive motion show the same pattern of conflating Path in the verb On the contrary, both Vietnamese ones perform the different pattern of Path conflation in the verb because of showing Manner of

Motion verb trôi „to float‟ and a prototypical Path of Motion verb, vào „to enter‟ Talmy

(2000:49) defines that “a Co-event of Manner or Cause is expressed in the same sentence; it must be as independent, usually adverbial or gerundive type constituent In many languages like Spanish, such a constituent can be awkward, so that information about Manner or Cause is often either established in the surrounding discourse or omitted altogether […] languages of this type have a whole series of surface verbs that express motion along various paths” Nevertheless, Talmy also claims that English has a number of verbs that incorporate Path, as in the Spanish

case such as enter, exit, ascend, descend, cross, pass, circle, ect These verbs require a type of

sentence similar to the Spanish type, with manner or cause expresses in a separate constituent as

in The rock passed by our tent (in sliding) In addition, he points out that these verbs are not the

most typical in English and that most of them but the last four words listed are borrowings from Romance language

1.3.3.3 Lexicalization pattern: Motion + Figure

In the third major typological pattern for the expression of Motion, the verb expresses the fact of Motion together with the Figure Languages of this type are Atsugewi (a Hokan language

of northern California) English has a few forms to confirm it The nonagentive verb (to) rain refers to rain moving, and the agentive verb (to) spit refers to causing spit to move:

In sum, languages with this type as their characteristic pattern have a whole series of surface verbs that express various kinds of objects or materials as moving or located (Talmy, 2000:57) Language, therefore, can sometimes incorporate the same kind of semantic distinctions but in a very distinctive ways

1.3.4 The two-way typology: Path of motion

In the previous parts, a connected set of semantic categories that appear lexicalized in an open-class type of surface element, the verb root has been examined But lexicalized in a closed-class type of surface element will be examined in this section Thus, this leads to the typological distinction between verb-framed and satellite-frame languages Satellite, abbreviated, is the grammatical category of any constituent other than a noun phrase or prepositional-phrase complement that is in a sister relation to the verb root (Talmy, 2000:102) A verb root together with its satellites forms a constituent in its own right, called the verb complex The following

examples taken from Toward a Cognitive Semantic (Talmy, 2000:103) illustrate the satellite in

English:

a Satellite over mis-

b Verb complex start over fire mis-

c Example sentence The record started The engine misfired

over

 Satellite-framed languages, e.g English

(6) The bottle floated into/out of the cave

Verb-framed languages, on the other hand, such as Spanish, express Path which appears

in the verb root They have a number of verbs of inherent motion such as entrar, i.e enter, or salir, i.e exit

 Verb-framed languages, e.g Spanish

(7) La botella flotó a la cueva

The bottle floated to the cave

“The bottle floated to the cave

It is different from English and Spanish, Vietnamese has motion verbs that seem to act both as verb-framed and as satellite-framed Vietnamese can show both Manner of Motion verbs and Path of Motion verbs in the same sentence Path of Motion verbs in Vietnamese can function

as prepositions or directional adverbs in English such as up, down, etc

(8) „Cái chai trôi vào trong động‟

CL bottle to float to enter in cave

“The bottle floated into the cave”

Nagawa (2008) claims that the sentence above shows both a prototypical Manner of

Motion verb, „trôi‟,(to float) and a prototypical Path of Motion verb, vào (to enter)

Thus, it is ambiguous to define whether Vietnamese is a verb-framed or satellite-framed language As many Vietnamese sentences have more than one lexical main verb in the encoding

of motion verbs, it seems that Talmy‟s theory is not appropriate for serial verb languages such as Vietnamese or Cantonese…

(9) Cô ấy bước vào trong một ngôi nhà nhỏ

She that step enter inside a CL house small

“She entered into a small house”

However, by attempting to analyze Manner of Vietnamese motion verbs (coverbs) Cassandra Pace (2009) argues that Vietnamese fits typologically with a satellite-framed language instead of a verb-framed language Perhaps, the reason is that Vietnamese is a part of the Austro-asiatic language family; much Vietnamese vocabulary has been borrowed from Chinese There is also some influence from Frech because of the French invasion According to Talmy (2000), French, English or other languages belong to Indo-European languages This reason can be taken

as explanation that Vietnamese can be considered as satellite – typed language

1.3 Image Schema

The first pace in acquiring a category is forming a structural description of an entity that consists of the most elementary properties of entities such as lines, surfaces, weight, vertical or horizontal extension, roughness or softness, etc When these experiences happen again and again, specific schematic structures begin to emerge and get represented in the mind Such structures are called image schemas “An image schema is a recurring dynamic pattern of our perceptual interactions and motor program that gives coherence and structure to our experience… „Experience‟… is to be understood in a very rich, broad sense as including basic perceptual, motor-program, emotional, historical, social and linguistics dimensions” (Johnson 1987:xiv, xvi)

According to Vyvyan Evans (2006:178-179), the term „image‟ in „image schema‟ is equivalent to the use of this term in psychology, where imagistic experience relates to and derives from our experience of the external world Another term for this type of experience is sensory experience The term „schema‟ in „image schema‟ means that image schema are not rich

or detailed concepts, but rather abstract concepts consisting of patterns emerging from repeated instance of embodied experience Image schemas provide the basis for more richly detailed lexical concepts

In short, image schemas play an important part of our knowledge of the world It is difficult

to make sense of experience without accessing image schemas at our disposal Therefore, an image schema is a recurring structure of, or within, our cognitive processes establishing patterns

of understanding and reason Image schemas emerge from our bodily interactions, linguistics experience and historical context They are considered embodied prelinguistic structure of experience that motivates conceptual metaphor mappings

1.4 Summary

The chapter has dealt with the key terms related to cognitive linguistics which serve as fundamental understanding for this study Cognitive linguistics is concerned with investigating the relationship between human language, the mind and socio-physical experience In cognitive linguistics, language and cognition are embodied, i.e our linguistic and conceptual categories are grounded in physical, social and cultural experiences There are common structuring principles across all language areas such as phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics Cognitive semantics considers linguistics meaning as a manifestation of conceptual structure which emerges from bodily experience It is concerned with the relationship between experience, cognition and language As a result, it explores the connections between human bodily experience, the conceptual system and the semantic structure expressed by language

This chapter has also presented Talmy‟s theory of lexicalization patterns concerning the systematic relations in language between meaning and surface expression that are fundamental

theory for the analysis of the study One of the most important notions of this theory is Motion Event which is composed of four basic semantic components: Figure, Ground, Path and Motion Moreover, it is my initial assumption that Vietnamese belonging to Austro-asiatic and English belonging to Indo-European might be the same type of language: satellite-framed language It is necessary to conduct further research to define what type of language Vietnamese belongs to

Image schema is the last notion mentioned in this chapter Image schemas are considered structures between perception and conception They are pervasive organizing structures in human cognition which emerge from our bodily and social interaction with the environment at a preconceptual level They are also dynamic patterns which recur in everyday action and thought and allow us to mentally structure our experiences and perceptions

CHAPTER II: DEICTIC MOTION VERBS

In recent years, many researchers have been studied motion verbs in general and deictic motion verbs in particular using Talmy‟s framework in various languages The aim of this chapter is to briefly define deictic motion verbs in English and Vietnamese from the differently theoretical background that helps the author limit the scope of the study

2.1 Deictic motion verbs in English

Talmy (2000:56) defines that deictic motion verbs are a kind of Path-conflating verbs with a special choice of the Path and the Ground, and „the Deictic component of Path typically has only the two member notions „toward the speaker‟ and „in a direction other than toward the speaker According to some authors, all verbs encoding the direction of movement (directed motion verbs, cf Talmy 1975, 1985, 2000) are deictic in the sense that all of them imply to a particular

configuration of space (a particular path) such as up-down (go down, descend), inside-outside enter, leave, run off)

In this study, I am interested in the contribution of Levin & Hovav (1999) and Levin (1993) for classification of English motion verbs with regard to transitive and intransitive motion verbs They claim that some verb classes are only implied direction of motion if an explicit directional phrase is presented They identify motion verbs class based on their syntactic behaviour or the close relation between their syntax and semantics Levin & Hovav (1992: 252-253) proposes

motion direction class such as go, come, depart, arrive, return, ect These verbs express inherent

direction as their meaning includes a specified direction of motion

However, Beth Levin in her book, English Verb class and Alternations (1993: 263-270) proposes some more verbs denoting inherently directed motion such as arrive, come, depart, descend, ascend, enter, go, leave, return, exit, fall, advance, rise, tumble, and flee She claims

that the meanings of these verbs include a specification of the direction of motion – that is Path, even in the absence of a directional complement None of these verbs specifies the Manner of motion Verbs differ as to how they can express the goal, source, or trajectory of motion These may be expressed in a prepositional phrase

(10) The thief escaped from the police/ The thief escaped the police

In addition, verbs of motion using a Vehicle like balloon, bike, bus, coach, cycle, etc or that mean „go using the vehicle named by the noun‟ or non-using vehicle names such as fly, drive, ride, etc do not imply direction of motion unless there is an explicit directional phrase

present

(11) He skated across the river

(12) She drove over the bridge

Finally, waltz verbs like dance, tango, cancan, tapdance, waltz, ect that mean roughly

„perform the dance‟, there is no specific direction of motion implied unless there is an explicit directional phrase present

(13) They danced across the room

So far, almost verbs are regarded as encoded motion in their meaning There are many verbs appearing with directional phrases, whose meanings are only indirectly connected to movement Some verb classes are not implied direction of motion unless an explicit directional phrase is presented

2.2 Deictic motion verbs in Vietnamese

As stated by Talmy (2002), motion verbs are categorized languages as either verb-framed

or satellite-framed depending on how the core schema „motion‟ is mapped onto an expression Vietnamese has motion verbs that appear to function both as verb-framed and as satellite-framed

In this part, I am interested in the contribution of Lai, Nguyen (1992) and the study of Dinh - Hoa Nguyen (1996) about verbs of motion direction in Vietnamese

Lai, Nguyen (1992) proposes that words denoting a motion appear as a result of a process of cognition of a form of motion in which the aim in space the speaker is moving to us constantly in opposition (in some form or other) to the point departure

As stated by Dinh-Hoa Nguyen (Speak Vietnamese, 1966), there is a group of important verbs denoting motion in a given direction Such verbs as vào „to enter‟, ra „to go out of‟, đi „to go‟, lại „to come‟, lên „to go up‟, xuống „to go down‟ denote motion The category of direction is

expressed by means of postverbs or coverbs, that is, verbs which occur following the main verb and play a secondary role They are reduced to the status of morphemes by the mere fact of appearing after full verbs: đi will mean „off, away‟ when occurring after such a main verb of

motion as bay, „to fly‟ or chạy „to run‟

Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen (1996) also claims that the pairs đi and lại are similar to the pairs of verbs of motion such lên-xuống „to go up‟ and „to go down‟, ra-vào „to go out‟ and „to go in‟, tới-lui „to move forward‟ and „to move backward‟ add the idea of a to-and-from movement: (16) bay đi bay lại „to fly back and forth‟

(17) bay lên bay xuống „to fly up and down‟

The same verb đi expresses the idea of destruction, erasure, severance, or just wear and tear: (18) bỏ đi „to abandon, leave out, discard‟

(19) cưa đi „to saw off, cut off, amputate‟

or a change for the worse:

(20) già đi „to age‟ Adj + đi

(21) gầy đi „to become thinner‟ Adj + đi

Besides, it means „to urge or induce‟:

(22) đánh đi „to strike + prostitute‟

The verb ra, which ordinarily indicates a movement „from the interior to the exterior,

from one state to another, from a void to existence‟, with the starting point comparatively less spacious and less well lit then the area of destination, also denotes growth, expansion,

dismantling, separation or disentanglement (Hoa, Nguyen, 1996:145, Vietnamese verbs)

(23) cởi ra „untie, take off (clothes)‟

or a movement from the seacoast to the ocean, from the shore to the water

Furthermore, within the context of Vietnamese geography, „to go north‟ is đi ra bắc („go + exit + north) – from Hue On the other hand, vào „to enter‟ is used when one moves from a given location to another situated further south: vào Huế means „to go (south) to Hue – (from

Hanoi)

The postverb lên „to ascend‟ denoted an upward motion both literally and figuratively

speaking The movement may indeed to toward a higher altitude (e.g gửi lên Hà Nội, „to send up

to Hanoi), or toward a higher-ranking agency or official (e.g trình lên Thủ tướng „to report to the Premier‟)

According to Lai Nguyen (1992), Vietnamese verbs of motion cannot act as affixal elements He also concludes that the morphological identity between the stem and the affix, the fusion between the motion factor and the direction factor from the semantical viewpoint are two inseparable aspects determining the most basic characteristic of word groups denoting the direction of motion Vietnamese

In short, a brief overview of the above scholars‟ studies provides the researcher with clear understanding into the semantic and syntactic nature of deictic motion verbs in terms of their

characteristics in general and the verbs English come and Vietnamese về in particular More specifically, when exploring the meanings of the verb về, it is necessary to examine the link

between the motion and verbs of motion acted as prepositional meanings Thus, this proves that both English and Vietnamese might be satellite – typed languages From then, the scope of the study is defined and the research will investigate all possible meanings of these two verbs

Motion verbs in general and deictic motion verbs in particular have been the subject of a great deal of studies from different theoretical frameworks because they present interesting semantic and syntactic characteristics This chapter reviews briefly deictic motion verbs in English and Vietnamese Section 2.2 reviewed Levin‟s framework of classification of motion verbs that helps to define inherently directed motion verbs and some verbs classes can be implied direction of motion only when they are combined with a directional phrase Section 2.3 presented Vietnamese verbs of directed motion basing on studies of Lai, Nguyen (1992) and

Hoa, Nguyen (1996) Vietnamese verbs of directed motion can be built when motion verbs are combined with spatial motion In some cases, motion direction is built combined with motion verbs However, these authors do not mention how cultural factor affects to Vietnamese people‟s perception of these two verbs Needless to say, an overview of deictic motion verbs is a basis for

studying the verb come and về in terms of syntactic and semantic structure It seems that no

earlier contrastive study analyzes the meanings of deictic motion verbs in English and Vietnamese from cognitive semantics From this reason, the research conducts contrastive analysis of two deictic motion verbs that will be discussed in the next chapter with aim to being a fundamental study for further research

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CHAPTER 3 APPLYING COGNITIVE SEMANTICS TO INVESTIGATE POSSIBLE MEANINGS

OF THE ENGLISH VERB ‘COME’ AND VIETNAMESE VERB ‘VỀ’

The aim of this chapter is an attempt to investigate and compare possible meanings of

deictic motion verbs come in English and về in Vietnamese using Talmy‟s framework First, the author will define syntactic features of come and về to realize the difference of

morphological features of these two verbs And then, semantic features of these two verbs will

be explored Image schema which plays an important role in defining their meanings also will

be discussed The most important part in this chapter is a comparison of the lexicalization

patterns between come and về More specifically, the mainly typological patterns of

lexicalization such as Motion plus Path and Motion plus Figure will be examined to compare the similarities and differences between these two verbs

3.1 Syntactic features

The verb come consists of one morpheme as a root Like many other English verbs, it

has four actual forms: the –s form „comes‟, the past form „came‟, the past participle „come‟,

the –ing participle „coming‟ The base morpheme come designates a kind of activity and the time at which the activity is instantiated is not specified The past form came consists of the base verb come plus the past-tense morpheme The combined expression came designates a past-time instance of the activity It also can be combined with the agentive affix –er: comer

This word is a noun, which designates a person who performs the activity designated by the

base verb In addition, come combines with derivational prefixes „over‟ and „out‟: overcome

(v) – to succeed in dealing with or controlling a problem that has been preventing you from

achieving something, outcome (n) – the result or effect of an action or event

(24) “Sometimes Mrs St John comes over and drops off a casserole or some cookies or

something.” (The Secret City by Chris Archer, p.69)

On the contrary, „Về‟ is a monosyllabic word like any other Vietnamese verbs Is has

only one form in any mood, voices and tenses It has no derivates This means there is no changes in the appearance of it in any statement or sentence For example:

(25) Chị Thảo về rồi (Bài học quét nhà, Nam Cao, p.1)

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(Thao came home.)

(26) Lý Cường đã về! (Chí Phèo, Nam Cao)

(Ly Cuong is coming.)

As can be seen from the examples above, the motion verb came denotes the action finished in sentence (25) whereas is coming is a signal link of the action in sentence (26) However, the verb về still keeps one form even though the tense of these sentences is past or

future

The verb về can combine with other words to create principle and accessory compound

words and jargons belonging to different parts of speech such as nouns, verbs, or adjectives:

(27) Ấy là một cái khăn tay Hàn đã đặt làm ngoài tỉnh, rưới vào mấy giọt nước hoa rồi gói

vào một mảnh giấy bóng, đem về tặng Tơ… (Nam Cao)

(That is a handkerchief which Han ordered in the provincial capital, sprinkled a few drops of perfume, wrapped it in the polished paper and gave it to To…)

3.2 Semantic features

3.2.1 Semantic features of Come

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, come is a basic intransitive verb of

motion which expresses movement towards or so as to reach the speaker, or the person spoken

to However, come has other meanings in accordance with different combinations This issue

will be presented in turn in this chapter

As mentioned in Chapter 2, the English verb come belongs to category of deictic

motion verb Deictic motion verbs are a kind of Path-conflating verbs with a special choice of the Path and the Ground, and „the Deictic component of Path typically has only the two member notions, „toward the speaker‟ and „in a direction other than toward the speaker‟

(Talmy, 2000:56) Thus, the lexical meaning of come taken from Nakazawa (2006) may be

seen as conflated with the speaker or the addressee as the Ground as follows:

COME

MOVE TOWARD a point which is the location of the speaker or the address

[Motion] [Vector] [Conformation] [Ground]

[ Path ]

(28) Will you come to my house tomorrow?

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(29) “Alright, Charlie I‟m coming Will you wait for a minute?”

(The summer of the swans by Betsy Byars, p.28)

MOVE is an abstract verb which represents motion in a Motion event, and TOWARD

is a component of the Path called Vector The Vector is a component of the Path, and expresses „the basic types of arrival, traversal and departure that a Figural schema can execute with respect to a Ground schema‟ (Talmy, 2000:53) Typically, it is represented with regard to

abstract prepositions such as toward or to The Conformation is another component of the Path

and specifies the spatial relation of the Path to the Ground The Vector TOWARD and the Ground „the speaker‟ express the Path information conflated within the semantics of deictic motion verbs

Fillmore (1975) proposes that the central meaning of come is basically that the speaker

or the addressee is at the goal of motion at utterance or at arrival time In other words, the

lexical meaning of come is defined as „movement toward the speaker‟s location at coding

time, reference time‟; „movement toward the addressee at coding and reference time‟ and movement toward any other goal distinct from the speaker and address Take a look at the following examples:

(30) "I have come to you for some information that's not in my line…”

(Coming, Aphrodite! by Willa Cather)

(31) “I think I will come to the village with you”

(Lord Emsworth and the girl friend by P.G.Wodehouse et al, p.26)

In sentence (30), it can be assumed that the goal is the „expected‟ location of the speaker/addressee at the time of arrival In (31), the assumption is that the speaker or the addressee is making the same journey

On the other hand, come has other different meanings in accordance with different combinations The typical path conflated with come is to with the meaning of a movement

However, it has other meanings like recovering consciousness or occurring to the mind, ect The following examples will illustrate the statement:

(32) The fainting victim came to

(33) The truth suddenly came to me

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Additionally, come conflated with the path from has the meaning of being produced from a

particular thing or the result, ect apart from the meaning of having as the place where someone lives For example:

(34) Understanding comes from experience

(35) A cry came from the frightened child

Come also can conflate with the adjectives that also make its meanings change:

(36) My fondest dreams have at last come true

In sentence (36), come means becoming or happening as predicted while it means turning out

to be

Similarly, come has the meaning of occurring in time or take place when it conflates with a

noun:

(37) The game will be played tomorrow, come rain or shine

In sum, the core meaning of come is to denote a movement However, it has different

meanings when it is conflated with different prepositions or Paths This will be discussed in

section 3.4.1 In this study, to compare meanings of the English verb come and Vietnamese verb về, the author will base on Talmy‟s framework (2000) instead of Fillmore‟s framework

(1975) As for Talmy‟s framework, it is possible to compare elements of meaning of the deictic motion verbs such as Path, Vector or Conformation across different languages (Nakazawa, 2009)

3.2.2 Semantic features of Về

As defined in the chapter 2, về belongs to the groups of deictic motion verbs In other words, về denotes motion in a given direction In addition, one important matter Than, Nguyen Kim (1999) defines that deictic motion verb về itself implies the meaning of direction Về

indicates a movement from the starting point to the area of destination It should not be

confused with về denoting possession Take a look at the following example:

(38) Chính quyền sẽ về tay nhân dân

(The Government will belong to people.)

(39) Bao nhiêu của nả sẽ về tôi

(All the property will be mine)

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Về is often used to denote motion when the destination is the speaker‟s homeland or

even not the starting point:

(40) „Lát nữa, để tôi cùng về bàn với bác trai giúp bác‟ (Ngô Tất Tố, 185)

(Later on, I will come to talk with him to help you)

From the sentence above, the speakers do not mention that they return to the starting

point because they are in another place What is more, về in sentence (40) means „going to the

countryside‟

„Về‟ also expresses motion to the place where someone feels like home or where he or she is

treated as a member of family or fellows:

(41) Tuy lần này về Bản Sing, ông chỉ có mục đích xem hội

(Sáu mạng người, Nguyễn Công Hoan) (But come back to Sing at this time, his aim is to see festival…)

Về indicates a movement against the direction that someone leaves:

(42) Lúc trở về nhà, nó thấy bố và hai em đã dậy rồi (Một đám cưới, Nam Cao)

(When coming home, she saw her dad and brothers getting up.)

In addition, Than, Nguyen Kim (1999) considers deictic motion verb về as not only

head verbs but also directional postverbs or coverbs to identify a verb of action (or functive verb) The following example taken from Than, Nguyen Kim (1999) illustrates this case:

(43) Rồi hàng tháng, chị sẽ gửi tiền về cho các em tiêu (Cô hàng xén, Thạch Lam)

(Monthly, I will send money to you)

Directional postverb về denotes motion directed to the starting point where village or

homeland is defined:

(44) Con là Bính, gửi vài hàng về kính chúc thầy mẹ (Bỉ vỏ, Nguyên Hồng, 160)

(I‟m Binh, I‟m sending some … to you)

(45) Mẹ con mua ở Lầu Cai đem về cho con (Tắt đèn, Ngô Tất Tố, 79)

(My mother bought them for me from Lao Cai)

Than, Nguyen Kim (1999) also mentions that về indicates motion toward the location

of the speaker and motion which is not toward the location of the speaker Take a look at the following examples:

(46) “À, Anh Sử đã về.” (Vùng Mỏ, Võ Huy Tâm)

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(Ah, Su is coming home)

(47) “Tôi thế nào cũng phải về.” (Bước đường cùng, Nguyễn Công Hoan)

(Whatever it is, I have to come home.)

Apart from the meaning of a movement, về denotes the meaning of stative motion:

(48) Ông ấy về hưu cách đây 3 năm rồi

(He retired 3 years ago)

By investigating the meanings of motion verb về, the author found out that về can act as an

adverb when accompanying with a verb

(49) Hôm qua, em đi tỉnh về (I came back from the provincial capital yesterday.)

(50) Đi đâu về thế con? (Where have you been?)

Or it can act as a preposition:

(51) Hàng ngày, anh đều nghĩ về em (I think of you everday)

In sum, to some extent, the core lexical meaning of come is the same as that of về Both of them denote the destination where someone is directed to However, về tends to express motion toward the homeland or familiar places, come normally indicates motion

toward the place where someone is familiar to or not The reason might be due to Vietnamese society and history In old society, most people came from the countryside Today they still

consider it as their homeland even though they moved to other places Moreover, both of come and về express the meaning of change of state One significant difference between two verbs is that come only acts as a main verb whereas về can act as an directional postverb to support

head verbs, an adverb and a preposition Therefore, in this study, the researcher explores the

meaning of về as a head verb, a directional postverb, an adverb and a preposition This issue

will be discussed in the next sections

3.3 Image schema of come and về

Langacker (1987) makes great use of the concepts Trajector and Landmark To

characterize image schema of come and về, his concepts of Trajector, Landmark and domain

are used A trajector is defined as the figure in a relational profile and Landmark functions as grounds to the trajectory (Langacker 1987:217) In other words, trajector is someone or

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something that moves from some domain to other and landmark is the domain from which someone or something moves

As the English verb come indicates the meaning of a movement, the following image

schema shows that someone or something moves from some domain into other, where focus is

on the motion that trajectory comes into landmark (Ueda, 2001)

Image Schema of come (1)

Lm

Tr



Moreover, the English verb come denotes the meaning of change of state

Image Schema of come (2)

of come and về will help the author to have general view about these two verbs in order to

conduct the study in the right way

3.4 Typology for deictic motion verb come and về: A comparison

As stated in the chapter 1, the three main typologies of lexicalization patterns are

Motion plus Co-event, Motion plus Path and Motion plus Figure However, come and về are

deictic motion verbs or path-verbs They do not have any characteristics of manner-verbs or cause-verbs but path-verbs Therefore, in this section, the author focuses on investigating the conflations of Motion, the Path and Figure of these two verbs

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3.4.1 Motion plus Path

As previously mentioned, three main components of this conflation are the Vector, the Conformation, and the Deictic The Vector is a component of the Path, and expresses „the basic types of arrival, traversal, and departure that a Figural schema can execute with respect

to a Ground schema It is represented by abstract prepositions such as toward and to The

conformation is another component of the Path and specifies the spatial relation of the Path to the Ground

Firstly, the conflation of Vector and motion verbs will be considered Vector can

denote motion from a source (e.g., move from), past or along a milestone (e.g., move along, via), and to or toward a goal (e.g., move to, towards) Take a look at each formula exemplified with specific examples of possible meanings of come as follows:

a A point BELOC AT a point (for a bounded extent of time)

(52) She came back Haiphong from Hanoi in 2 hours

b A point MOVE TO a point (at a point of time.)

(53) "I have come to you for some information that's not in my line…”

(Coming, Aphrodite! By Willa Cather)

c A point MOVE FROM a point (at a point of time.)

(54) “One morning he was coming out of the bathroom at the front end of the hall.”

(Coming, Aphrodite! By Willa Cather)

d A point MOVE TOWARD a point (for a bounded extent of time)

(55) …Angus came towards her at forty-five miles an hour

(P.G.Wodehouse et al, Lord Emsworth and the girl friend, p.42)

e A point MOVE AWAY-FROM a point (for a bounded extent of time)

(56) “When he lay out on the dunes, watching the moon come up out of the sea…”

(Coming, Aphrodite! By Willa Cather)

f A point MOVE ALENGTH a bounded extent of time

(57) We came through the white forest in 2 hours

g A point MOVE ALONG – TO an extent bounded at a terminating point, at a point of

time/in a bounded extent of time

(58) "… They always come home about five o'clock Where do they live?"

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(Coming, Aphrodite! By Willa Cather)

h A Point MOVE FROM-ALONG an extent bounded at a beginning point, since a point

of time/for a bounded extent of time

(59) We have come 100 km from Ha Noi for 3 hours

The Vietnamese verb về also has a few forms that conform to it:

a A point BELOC AT a point (for a bounded extent of time)

(60) Anh ấy về Hà Nội từ Hải Phòng trong 2 tiếng

(He came back Hanoi from Haiphong in 2 hours)

b A point MOVE TO a point (at a point of time)

(61) Khoảng 5 phút nữa, tớ sẽ về tới chỗ bạn

(About 5 minutes later, I will come to your place)

b A point MOVE ALONG – TO an extent bounded at a terminating point

(62) Khoảng 5 giờ chiều tôi sẽ về đến nhà (By 5.00 p.m, I will have come home)

In the Motion-aspect formulas above, vectors are shown as deep prepositions written in capitals The fundamental Figure schema presented „a point‟ appears first The fundamental

Ground schema always follows the Vector The typical vector of the English verb come is to

To specifies a bounded path with an end point Besides, like the verb come, deictic motion verb về also can conflate with the vectors such as tới or đến (to), với (with) For example: (63) Đến bây giờ, nó mới về tới/đến nhà (Till now, he has just come home)

(64) Đừng lo, mai tớ sẽ về với cậu (Don‟t worry; I‟ll go with you tomorrow)

The second matter needed to discuss is the conflation of the vector and conformation The conformation is related to the geometry of Grounds, which can be conceptualized as

containers (e.g., move into, out of), surfaces (e.g., on), etc The examples below show that the English satellite into combines both Vector and Conformation; the Figure reached its goal or

endpoint of motion which is a container:

(65) “Sara was lying in bed with the lights out when Wanda came into the bedroom” (The

summer of the Swans by Betsy Byars, p.36)

Another example shows that the Figure moves from a point which is a container:

(66) He felt an unreasoning antipathy toward the well-dressed women he saw coming out of

big shops… (Coming, Aphrodite! by Willa Cather)

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In Vietnamese, về also expresses the meaning of moving to a point which is of inside of an

enclosure although it does not need a path to make it meaningful:

(67) Ông không nói gì, rồi quay về phòng của mình

(He did not say anything and then came into his room)

However, về cannot denote a motion that Figure moves from a point that is container The reason might be explained that in Vietnamese về indicates a motion toward the place

where someone was born or grown up or feels familiar

Talmy (2000) defines the Path and Ground in the lexical meaning of come as the starting point or the location of the speaker For example:

(68) “Come on in and watch my cousin cut my hair, can you?”

(The summer of the Swans by Betsy Byars, p.25)

(69) “Come on over to the spigot and let me wash your hands See, Aunt Willie‟s coming

back now (The summer of the Swans by Betsy Byars, p.18)

The motion in the above examples is directed toward the speaker where he or she will

be located The speaker is expected to be at a particular place, waiting for the addressee In other words, the motion is toward where the speaker is located when he or she utters the

sentences by vectors or prepositions Similarly, the ground is the location of the speaker; về conflates with the Paths với „with‟ or đến „to‟:

(70) Biết bao giờ mẹ lại về với con? (Từ ngày mẹ chết, Nam Cao)

(When will you come to me again?)

(71) Chị Dậu về đến nhà đã nghe tiếng khóc khàn khàn của hai đứa trẻ

(Ngô Tất Tố, Tắt đèn)

(When Dau came home, she heard hoarse cries from her two children)

However, a locative phrase directly follows deictic motion verb về without a preposition; take

a look at the following example:

(72) Liên về chợ (Sống mòn, Nam Cao, p.226)

(Lien goes back to the market)

In short, exploring the three components of Path with the specified examples helps to

confirm English as Path-typed language The lexical meaning of deictic motion verb come is viewed as Path-conflating verb The typical vector of come is to Thus, it is represented that

26

the motion is directed toward the location of the speaker as Talmy‟s notion However, it is difficult to define whether Vietnamese is Path-typed language or Verb-typed language In

some cases, the verb về either conflates with a Path or doesn‟t conflate with any path

Studying other motion verbs should be conducted in further research instead of a specified motion verb

3.4.2 Motion plus Figure

In this type of conflation, the verb expresses the fact of Motion together with the Figure As mentioned by Talmy (2000), motion verbs depict agentive and non-agentive motion Agentive motion expresses the motion which is caused by the agent Non-agentive motion refers to entities that are in capable of motion in their own

Firstly, it is necessary to explore how agentive motion conflates with Figure Take a look at the below examples that express the motion acted by the agent:

(73) “I promised Bennie Hoffman I‟d come to his party tonight”

(Betsy Byars, The summer of the swans, p.92)

(74) And thrice, after all manner of hardship and suffering, the survivors have come back to

Kamchatka (An Odyssey of the North, Jack London, p.130)

It can be seen that the agentive verb to come refers to agent moving to the particular places such as house, party, the fire or Kamchatka by conflating with the prepositions or vectors to

In Vietnamese, deictic motion verb về also denotes a movement by agent:

(75) Họ sống ở thành phố, một năm về quê một hai lần

(They live in the city and come back to the country once or twice a year)

In sentence (75), it seems that using the motion verb về with the meaning of returning

is originated from Vietnamese culture In the old days, most of Vietnamese people lived in the countryside and then moved to other places However, they still consider it as their homeland

This can be explained that về mostly means returning home in Vietnamese

In some cases, the Figure is non-human and is not capable of motion in its own The

following example shows that the non-agentive verb came refers to moving words uttered by

Shannon:

(76) “Well,” Shannon‟s voice came from inside the chimney…

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(Chris Archer, The secret city, p.49)

The movement of air is only indirectly experienced via the motion of other objects (leaves moved by the wind) or via a shift in temperature In other words, the non-agentive verb

(to) come expresses to fresh air moving:

(77) Fresh air had come in

(Katarzyna Jaszczolt &al, Meaning through language contrast)

Natural forces such as wind and rain can be conceptualized either as a kind of mass in

motion or as a process, which is reflected in the alternation between expressions like the rain came or it rained The nonagentive verb (to) come refers to a breeze moving:

(78) A breeze was coming through the hole in the kitchen wall

( Katarzyna Jaszczolt &al, Meaning through language contrast)

In Vietnamese, there are a few forms that conform to it:

(79) Người ta lại dấy lên nỗi lo lên khi mùa lũ về

(People get worried when the flood comes/happens)

(80) Tháng 7, bão về

(In July, storms comes/storms normally happens in July/July sees storms)

The non-agentive verb về implies the flood moving However, the heavy rain and wind

cause flood and storm The flood itself cannot cause motion but natural forces affect to it

There are many ways to translate two sentences above and using the verb come is one of those choices Về in sentence (79) and (80) also means the appearance or occurrence of something

Take a look at another example:

(81) Mưa về sáng

(The rain came/It rained in the morning)

From the example above, the non-agentive figure conflates with motion of action

which refers to the rain moving Moreover, về in Vietnamese implies a period of time in a day (về sáng or về chiều, for instance)

In summary, English and Vietnamese or any languages have the conflations of figure with non-agentive and agentive motion It should be noted that either English or Vietnamese can incorporate the same kind of semantic distinctions but in a very distinctive ways

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3.4.3 Other conflations

The core meanings of come and về have been discussed in the previous section Yet, these

two verbs have other meanings apart from their core meaning In this part, the author does not

list the meanings from the dictionary but view other meanings of come and về in terms of

other conflations of Figure and Motion

It can be known that Figure (also called Subject) has two types: non-human and human ones Non-human figure is inanimate entities that cannot cause motion in their own On the contrary, agentive figure is animate entities that can cause motion Apart from the meaning of come as a movement, it also expresses stative motion This conflation of figure with motion of state will be discussed in this part Take a look at this conflation with the specified examples

as follows:

 Non-human Figure + non-agentive motion

(82) A picture came into her mind of the laughing…

(Betsy Byars, The summer of swans, p.128)

The non-agentive motion to come does not refer to entity moving but just expresses change of state even though it is conflated with the preposition to In sentence (82), the verb came may be understood as „appear‟

 Human Figure + non-agentive motion

(83) At last, summer comes to an end

(84) He came to power in 2009

From the examples above, stative motion to come also expresses the meaning of

reaching a particular state By looking at figure and motion in a Motion event, it can be seen

that there are more meanings of motion verb come except for its meaning of a movement

Like English motion verb come, Vietnamese motion verb về has other meanings as

follows:

 Human Figure + non-agentive motion

(85) Cụ ông đã về từ tối hôm qua (He died/went away last night.)

Stative motion về implies to talk about someone who died Instead of expressing any movement or action, về is used as a euphemism for „die‟ in Vietnamese in sentence (85)

 Non-human Figure + non-agentive motion

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(86) Trời đã về chiều (Evening has set in)

The above example shows that the motion verb về refers to changing state It is an inevitable rule in the nature Về also indicates a period of time in a day

It seems that there is an overlap of the meanings between these two verbs by analyzing the specific examples above It is necessary to base on the concrete situations or contexts to understand those different meanings

In summary, the chapter is an attempt to explore the possible meanings of English

motion verb come and Vietnamese motion verb về from cognitive perspective basing on

Talmy‟s framework The similarities and differences of these two verbs have been revealed with some examples to illustrate a typology for motion verbs Firstly, the chapter started with

a look back at the syntactic features of come and về from cognitive perspective Next, their semantic features and image schemas are defined in turn It is clear that their core meaning is

not much different To some extent, the lexical meanings of these two verbs indicate a motion toward a point which is the location of the speaker, the addressee or none of these Both verbs

can conflate with the Path even though về cannot conflate with the Path as much as come can Another thing is that both come and về denote non-agentive and agentive motion Moreover,

human and non-human figure can conflate agentive and non-agentive motion These conflations will be illustrated clearly in the next chapter: The Study

apply corpus-based approach, which is analyzing the occurrence frequency of these two verbs

in a given text in order to understand how come and về play a role in English and Vietnamese

academic texts as well as the meaning and the use of these two verbs Therefore, the readers may have a whole view about their meanings

4.2 Hypotheses

Based on the aim and scope of the study, the hypotheses might be raised as follows:

Hypothesis I: The English verb come is used more frequently than the Vietnamese verb về

from cognitive perspective

Hypothesis II: The meanings of the English verb come are equivalent to the meanings of the

Vietnamese verb về

4.3 Data collection

The data are collected from some Vietnamese and English well-known literary works Due to the limited time as well as the scope of the study, the author will investigate over 50,000 English words and 50,000 Vietnamese words from these prewar literary works The Vietnamese works are randomly chosen from Vietnamese short stories written by famous writers such as Nam Cao, Thach Lam, Nguyen Minh Chau, Nguyen Khai and Vu Trong Phung The English works are also chosen at random from English and American short stories written by Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling and O‟Henry, Jack London and Willa Cather The year of the works written, the length and the structure of each work are not considered The reason why the author chooses these prewar literary works is that they are familiar to the readers and represent natural languages Moreover, they are considered to be their notable works

4.4 Data analysis

In order to analyze the corpus data, Wordsmith Tools latest version 5.0 (Mike Scott 2009)

is used The author only uses Concordance tool and does not use Wordlist Tool because this

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software does not help to list a single word but all the words Therefore, Wordlist expert 2.0.1

is used in this study

Wordlist provides essential textual statistics of a corpus or sub-corpus, including the overall numbers of tokens, types and sentences, type/token ratio and average sentence length

It furthermore displays all the words of the texts chosen for examination in alphabetical order and in order of frequency

The concordance tool displays the items selected for detailed analysis in their original context, thus enabling the linguist to draw conclusions about their use: “A concordance is a list, arranged in an order specified by the user, such as the order of appearance, of the occurrences of items in a source text, where each concurrence is surrounded by an appropriate portion of its original context” (Oakes 1998:149)

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N Concordance

1 promote harmony in your family, I won't come in You go and get your dinner at

2 Will you come home? Will you come with me, Kitty?" Kitty answered

3 step of the door, waiting for the clerk to come down the street with his key and

4 and to look after your people till we come back; you'll find he'll have made

5 directions concerning Lanrean Will you come home? Will you come with me,

6 "Who wanted you? Where did you come from? Why couldn't you rest in

7 of a wicked stranger? Why did you ever come here?" she apostrophised the

8 I do I wish this gentleman had never come near us;" whereupon the captain

9 hard and cruel captain, that you should come and serve me so?" And then they

10 good fortune equally well, if it was to come? " "I hope so I thankfully and

Therefore, Wordlist and Concord combine well in this study „Wordlist strips the words of their surrounding context so that we can concentrate on them as individual words and make decision based on their potential linguistic behaviour‟ (Barnbrook 1996:66), whereas Concord provides the items indentified in their context Based on the data, the author will compare their meanings exploited in two languages The researcher does hope that this procedure will give reliable findings of the frequency as well as the meanings of these two verbs

4.5 Results and Discussion

As the aim of the study is to investigate the meanings of the English verb come and Vietnamese verb về, it is essential to consider the occurrence frequency of these two verbs

through the prewar literary works in terms of the conflations of semantic components of inherently deictic motion such as Motion plus Path and Motion plus Figure Due to the limited time and understanding, the author only considers the frequency of these two verbs and demonstrates the specific examples The author will not mention which groups these two verbs belong to when conflating with the Paths Based on the data, two hypotheses will be examined

4.5.1 Hypothesis I

The result displays in Figure 1 make it plain that, rather surprisingly, the hypothesis I

does not make correction prediction about the frequent use of the English verb come The data

do not confirm the expectations that the English verb come is used more often than the Vietnamese verb về

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The corpus the author studied is some literal works of English and Vietnamese In both literal works of English and Vietnamese, there are over 100,000 words with different types A number of words in each language are relatively equivalent Specifically, there are 50,925 English words and 50,617 words in Vietnamese Of which, verbs play a very important role in the texts After using Wordlist Expert, the result shows that the occurrence frequency of

Vietnamese verb về is higher than that of English verb come In detail, English verb come appears 188 times in total 50,925 words, accounting for 0.37%, whereas Vietnamese verb về

occurs 233 times (0.46 % of all the words) (See more Appendix) Take a look at Figure 1:

Figure 1 The percentage of the occurrence frequency of come and về

Although there is not much difference between a number of words in English and

Vietnamese, the finding shows that come is used less often than về The reason can be explained that về in Vietnamese mainly acts as a head verb but also acts as an adverb, a

preposition, a postverb or a coverb which is followed by a head verb In other words, the

occurrence frequency of về is higher Therefore, về plays an indispensable role in the Vietnamese prewar literary works On the contrary, come in English just performs as a main

verb so this will lower its occurrence This issue is presented clearly in chapter 2 Let‟s look at the following examples to illustrate this statement:

(87) Hồi tôi còn tại ngũ, tôi gửi về nhà có trăm (Nam Cao, Chí Phèo)

(When I was in the army, I sent a hundred home)

(88) Bây giờ nó đã về đến nhà chưa? (Thạch Lam, Cô hàng xén)

(Has she come home yet?)

(89) “I shall come and have another look at you, before I leave, this afternoon."

(Charles Dickens, A message from the sea)