an investigation of the polysemy of open close' in english and mở đóng in vietnamese (from the cognitive perspective) = nghiên cứu tính đa nghĩa của động từ mở đóng trong tiếng anh và tiếng việt

Therefore, the study is limited to investigating the polysemy of the two verbs „OPEN‟ and „CLOSE‟ with their Vietnamese equivalents within cognitive semantic theoretical framework.. The

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART A: INTRODUCTION 1

1 RATIONALE OF THE STUDY 1

2 SCOPE OF THE STUDY 1

3 OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY 1

4 RESEARCH QUESTIONS 2

5 ORGANIZATION OF THE STUDY 2

PART B: DEVELOPMENT 4

CHAPTER I: LITERATURE REVIEW 5

1.1 AN OVERVIEW ON CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS 5

2.2 A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF VERBS 7

2.2.1 Verbs in English 7

2.2.2 Verbs in Vietnamese 8

3.3 COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS 9

3.3.1 Definition of terms 9

3.3.2 Major principles of cognitive linguistics 10

3.4 COGNITIVE SEMANTICS 10

3.4.1 Definition 10

3.4.2 Guiding principles of cognitive semantics 11

3.5 POLYSEMY 13

3.5.1 The traditional treatment of polysemy 13

3.5.2 Polysemy in cognitive linguistics 14

3.5.3 Summary 15

CHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGY 16

2.1 RESEARCH QUESTIONS 16

2.2 RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHOD 16

2.3 METHOD AND SOURCES OF THE LANGUAGE MATERIAL 17

2.3.1 Sources of the language material 17

2.3.2 Method of data collection 18

2.4 ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK 18

CHAPTER 3: DATA ANALYSIS 20

3.1 THE POLYSEMY OF OPEN/CLOSE IN ENGLISH 20

3.1.1 Prototypical and non-prototypical meanings of ‘open/close’ 20

3.1.1.1 Physical meanings of ‘open’ and ‘close’ 20

3.1.1.1.1 Physical meanings of the verb ‗open‘ 20

3.1.1.1.2 Physical meanings of the verb ‗close‘ 21

3.1.1.2 Non-prototypical extended meanings of ‘open/close’ 22

3.1.1.2.1 Non-prototypical extended meanings of the verb ‗open‘ 22

3.1.1.2.2 Non-prototypical extended meanings of the verb ‗close‘ 24

3.1.1.3 Summary 25

3.1.2 Encyclopaedic knowledge and meanings of ‘open/close’ 26

3.1.3 Radial category of ‘open/close’ 29

3.2 THE ENGLISH VERBS ‘OPEN/CLOSE’ AND THEIR VIETNAMESE EQUIVALENTS 30

3.2.1 ‘Open/close’ in English corresponds to ‘mở/đóng’ in Vietnamese 31

3.2.1.1 ‘Open’ in English corresponds to ‘mở’ in Vietnamese 31

3.2.1.2 ‘Close’ in English corresponds to ‘đóng’ in Vietnamese 32

3.2.2 Some other Vietnamese equivalents of the English verbs ‘open/close’ 33

3.2.2.1 Some other Vietnamese equivalents of the English verb ‘open’ 33

3.2.2.1 Some other Vietnamese equivalents of the English verb ‘close’ 35

3.3 SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERNENCES BETWEEN ‘OPEN/CLOSE’ IN ENGLISH AND ‘MỞ /ĐÓNG’ IN VIETNAMESE 37

3.3.1 Similarities 37

3.3.2 Differences 39

3.4 SUMMARY 39

PART C: CONCLUSION 41

1 CONCLUSIONS 41

2 IMPLICATIONS 42

3 LIMITATIONS OF THE RESEARCH AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER STUDY 43 REFERENCES 44

PART A: INTRODUCTION

1 RATIONALE OF THE STUDY

I had some troubles with the self-referential nature of the material Since the subject is the

"meaning of meaning" at various levels, it's easy to become confused and fall into a "black hole" where text seems meaningless Polysemy is the term widely used in semantic analysis

to describe the situation in which a word has two or more related meanings No matter how simple this definition seems to be, polysemy is not a clear-cut concept For decades, linguists from different universities have been trying to give a sound account of what polysemy is and how it can be accounted for Although polysemy is at the moment a hot topic in cognitive and computational linguistics, unfortunately, it is still true that polysemy remains

a somehow muddy field in linguistic research

Despite this, I feel the self struggle to construct this thesis to try and represent my learning as

a result of interacting with a wide diversity of texts has been a rewarding one It has helped

me develop polysemy in my mind as a referent to apply to my own day-to-day practices and research in communication, teaching and learning

2 SCOPE OF THE STUDY

Within a short time and with limited reference materials, it would be too ambitious for this small-scaled study to cover the polysemy of all kinds of verbs, a broad field and the most complex part of speech Therefore, the study is limited to investigating the polysemy of the two verbs „OPEN‟ and „CLOSE‟ with their Vietnamese equivalents within cognitive semantic theoretical framework The study focuses on displaying some major principles of cognitive linguistics in general and cognitive semantics in particular which are applied to explore the meanings of these two verbs

3 OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY

Due to time limitation, the study aims to primarily seek for evidences of the polysemy of the

two verbs open/close and their Vietnamese equivalents from cognitive perspective More

specifically, it focuses on:

- displaying major notions of cognitive semantics

- uncovering a semantic description of the English verbs “ open/close” in light of

cognitive semantics

- investigating potential Vietnamese equivalents of the English verbs “open/close”

- finding out the similarities and differences of these two verbs from cross-linguistic point of view

- providing pedagogical implications for teaching and learning as well as language research

More detailed explication as how the aforementioned objectives have been formulated and how these objectives can be attained is specified in chapter 2: Methodology

(2) What are potential Vietnamese equivalents of the English verbs

‗open/close‘ in various senses?

(3) How are these verbs similar and different between English and Vietnamese in the light of cognitive semantics?

5 ORGANIZATION OF THE STUDY

The study is divided into three main parts: Part A is the Introduction to the study Part B is the Development with the three chapters Part C is the Conclusion

Part A discusses the rationale, the scope of the study, the objectives of the study, methodology used in the study and the organization of the study

Part B includes three chapters as follows;

- Chapter I is Literature Review which presents all related theoretical background that precedes and necessitates the formation of my research: an overview on contrastive analysis, a brief description of verbs, cognitive semantics and polysemy

- Chapter II – Methodology – describes the research procedures that have been utilized

PART B: DEVELOPMENT

This part consists of three chapters A review of all related theoretical foundation is done in the first chapter, serving as a background for the study to be carried out in the rest of the part

Particularly, the first chapter displays my understanding of contrastive analysis, verbs, cognitive linguistics, cognitive semantics and polysemy A theoretical framework based on the methodological and theoretical principles of cognitive linguistics and semantics is established in this chapter

Chapter 2 – Methodology – describes the methods and the research procedures of the current study Particularly, it describes the data collection in which considerations in selecting materials and the sources of data are presented Additionally, a description of data analysis is also presented

Chapter 3 – Data Analysis– contains the core part of the study It presents, analyzes and synthesizes data collected This chapter applies the theoretical framework that is established

in chapter 2 into analyzing the meanings of the two verbs open/close and find out

Vietnamese equivalents of these English verbs

CHAPTER I: LITERATURE REVIEW

In this chapter, a range of fundamental theoretical concepts will be introduced I will present all related theoretical background that precedes and necessitates the formation of my research, especially the cognitive semantic framework of the study, i.e an overview on

contrastive analysis, a brief description of verbs in 1.1 and 1.2; cognitive linguistics and cognitive semantics theory will be briefly discussed in 1.3, a review of major principles of cognitive linguistics in general and cognitive semantics in particular which have been applied

in analyzing linguistics expressions will be included in this part; the final part 1.4 will deal with the traditional treatment of polysemy and polysemy in cognitive linguistics

1.1 AN OVERVIEW ON CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS

Contrastive analysis (CA), traditionally defined, is a linguistic branch whose main aim is to help the analyst to ascertain in which aspects the two languages are alike and in which they differ (Filipovic, 1975) The end of 19th century and the beginning of 20th century was generally recognized as the traditional period of contrastive studies The very term

„contrastive linguistics‟ was actually coined by American linguist and anthropologist

Benjamin Lee Whorf in his article „Languages and logic‘ published in 1941, where he

drew the distinction between comparative and contrastive linguistics Then it was defined

as "a sub discipline of linguistics concerned with the comparison of two or more languages

or subsystems of languages in order to determine both the differences and similarities between them", (Fisiak, 1981:1)

Robert Lado, an American linguist and EFL methodologist, is unanimously regarded as the

founder of contrastive analysis with the publication of his seminal book „Linguistics across cultures‘ in 1957 He wrote that: "… those elements that are similar to this native language will be simple for him, and those elements that are different will be difficult." Contrastive

analysis is the systematic study of a pair or more of languages (usually two languages), with

a view to identifying their structural differences and similarities This term was used extensively in the field of Second Language Acquisition in the 1960s and early 1970s Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (CAH), which was originally formulated in Lado's

Linguistics Across Cultures (1957), is the extension of the notion of CA attributed the ability

to predict errors to a CA of two languages, a predictability that practitioners associated with the degree of similarity between the two systems

Along this line, Richard, J.C et al (1992) defined CA as “the comparison of the linguistic systems of two languages, for example the sound system or the grammatical system,‖

The Contrastive Analysis emphasizes on the influence of the mother tongue in learning a second language in phonological, morphological and syntactic levels Contrastive Analysis is not merely relevant for second language teaching and learning but it can also make useful contributions to machine translating and linguistics typology It is relevant to the designing of

teaching materials for use in all age groups Some guiding principles for contrastive study were suggested by Chaturvedi (1973):

(1) To analyze the mother tongue and the target language independently and completely

(2) To compare the two languages item-wise-item at all levels of their structure (3) To arrive at the categories of similar features, partially similar features and dissimilar features for the target language

(4) To arrive at principles of text preparation, test framing and target language teaching in general

On the other hand, it is necessary to refer to the term „contrastive rhetoric‟ in this section It

is the study of the differences that occur between the discourses of different languages and cultures as reflected in foreign students' writing Contrastive rhetoric research began in the 1960s, started by the American applied linguist Robert Kaplan Then, Ulla Connor states in

his book ‗Cross-cultural aspects of second language writing‘(1996) that contrastive rhetoric

is also an area of research in second/foreign language learning that identifies problems in composition encountered by second/foreign language writers by referring them to the rhetorical strategies of the first language It maintains that language and writing are cultural phenomena, and, as a direct consequence, each language has unique rhetorical conventions When people use language in different social and communication contexts, their language

often differs in terms of both grammatical and lexical choice Biber et al (1999:24) indicate

that different registers or genres demonstrate consistent patterning The authors find that many descriptions of general English, based on an averaging of patterns across registers, often obscure such register variation and are thus inaccurate and misleading People who use the same language in different regions and countries may also talk differently

2.2 A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF VERBS

2.2.1 Verbs in English

We often think of the verb as being the „heart‟ of the sentence because it is the verb that provides the central meaning to a sentence Verbs express what the subject does or describe something about the state or condition of the subject Verbs are complex elements that not only provide crucial sentence meaning, but that also provide support for other verbs, determine what kinds of sentence elements can come after them, combine with prepositions and adverbs to make special, idiomatic verbs known as phrasal verbs (Andrea DeCapua,

Grammar for Teachers, 2008:121) We can identify verbs on the basis of semantic,

structural, and morphological clues

A word, in Jack‟s (Jack C Richards et al, 1992:938) words, is a verb when it satisfies these following criteria:

- Occurring as part of the predicate of a sentence;

- Carrying markers of grammatical categories such as tense, aspect, person, number, and mood; and as

- Referring to an action or state

According to Halliday (1994, 2004), language is „a system of meanings‟ and clause consisting of a head verb and participants involved is the most significant grammatical unit, because it functions as the representation of process The most powerful conception of reality is that it consists of "goings-on": of doing, happening, feeling, being The basic semantic framework for the representation of process consists potentially of three components: the process itself, participants (Roles) in the process, circumstances associated with the process The process types are given by Halliday in the following frame:

On the other hand, Douglas Biber and his numerous colleagues wrote in their book Grammar

of Spoken and Written English (2007) that verbs are classified into three major classes

according to their roles as main verbs and auxiliary verbs They are lexical verbs (also called

full verbs, e.g open, close), primary verbs (be, have, do), and modal verbs (e.g can, will, might) Lexical verbs comprise an open class of words that function only as main verbs; the

three primary verbs can function as either main verbs or auxiliary verbs; and modal verbs can function only as auxiliary verbs In addition, verbs can be classified on the basis of their

semantic domains and valency patterns (copular, intransitive and transitive) This

classification shares the view with Quirk R et al (1985)

2.2.2 Verbs in Vietnamese

Unlike the English verbs, whose inflections serve to denote number, person, gender, voice, mood, and tense, verbs in Vietnamese do not have the concord with other parts of speech A verb is a syntactic word which denotes an action, a progress, a state or a quality According

to Le Bien (1999:70), and Diep Quang Ban (2001:21), in terms of general meaning, verbs are substantives referring to progress, forms of movements They may be activities (1), states (2), changing progresses (3), and movements (4), etc as follow:

(1) Cô ấy đọc sách./ Anh ấy viết thư

(2) Tôi yêu Hà Nội./ Nó nhớ nhà./ Em hiểu bác mà

(3) GS Ngô Bảo Châu đã trở thành nhà toán học nổi tiếng thế giới

(4) Bạn tôi đi thành phố Hồ Chí Minh rồi

Moreover, verbs can combine with other modal auxiliary components when functioning as

central component of a verb phrase to indicate scope of the action or activity such as ‗cũng‘,

‗đều‘, ‗cứ‘, etc.; to indicate continuation, for example: ‗còn‘, ‗vẫn‘, etc.; to indicate tense, aspect such as ‗đã‘, ‗đang‘, ‗sẽ‘, ‗sắp‘, etc.; to refer to negative meaning like ‗chưa‘,

‗không‘, ‗chẳng‘, etc.; to indicate advice or prohibit such as ‗hãy‘, ‗đừng‘, ‗chớ‘, etc and so

on

With regards to linguistics, there have been many different ways to classify verbs in each language by different authors However, the classification of the verbs by Diep Quang Ban and Hoang Van Thung will be applied in this thesis They classify Vietnamese verbs into two kinds: transitive verbs and intransitive verbs The word “transitive” sounds pretty complex, but in reality identifying transitive verbs is really not that difficult Transitive verbs express an action and are followed by a direct object (thing or person that receives the action of the verb) They cannot stand alone and need help from other words to complete

their meaning For example: Lan đưa cho tôi cuốn sách, Tôi yêu Hà Nội, etc In contrast, an

intransitive verb is an action verb, but it does not have a direct object The action ends or is modified by an adverb or adverb phrase rather than being transferred to some person or object It can stand alone with complete meaning without help from other words For

example: Trời mưa, Cô ấy hát, etc

However, in both languages, many verbs have both a transitive and an intransitive function,

depending on how they are used The verb break, for instance, sometimes takes a direct

object such as Julia breaks my heart, Julia làm tan vỡ trái tim tôi and sometimes does not like When I hear your name, my heart breaks; Khi tôi nghe đến tên anh ấy, trái tim tôi tan

Cognitive linguistics has not developed fully-formed from a single source It is a concatenation of concepts proposed, tested, and tempered by a variety of researchers The people whose work has been most influential in the creation of this framework include Brugman, Casad, Croft, Gilles Fauconnier, Mark Johnson, George Lakoff, Ronald Langacker, Lindner, Eve Sweetser, Leonard Talmy, Tuggy, and Mark Turner

Although Cognitive Linguistics as a general framework emerged in the late seventies, it is important to bear in mind that it is not a totally homogeneous framework Ungerer and Schmid (1996) distinguish three main approaches: the Experiental view, the Prominence view and the Attentional view of language The „Experiental view‟ focuses on what might be going on in the minds of speakers when they produce and understand words and sentences.The „Prominence view‟ is based on concepts of profiling and figure/ground segregation, a phenomenon first introduced by the Danish gestalt psychologist Rubin The prominence principle explains why, when we look at an object in our environment, we single it out as a perceptually prominent figure standing out from the background The „Attentional view‟ assumes that what we actually express reflects those parts of an event which attract our attention A main concept in this approach is Fillmore‟s (1975) notion of „frame‟, i.e an assemblage of the knowledge we have about a certain situation

Despite these three different viewpoints in Cognitive Linguistics, the majority of linguists working within this paradigm share the view that linguistic knowledge is part of general thinking and cognition

3.3.2 Major principles of cognitive linguistics

The most fundamental principle in cognitive linguistics is embodiment (Johnson, 1987; Lakoff, 1987) Cognitive linguistics works from the premise that meaning is embodied This means that meaning is grounded in the shared human experience of bodily existence We create mental and linguistic categories on the basis of our concrete experiences and under the constraints imposed by our bodies They are not a set of universal abstract features or uninterpreted symbols (Barcelona, 1997:9) They are motivated and grounded directly in experience, in our bodily, physical, social and cultural experiences (Janda, 2000)

The second main principle of cognitive linguistics is the theory of linguistic meaning Cognitive linguists believe that meanings do not exist independently from the people that create and use them (Reddy, 1993) All linguistic forms act as clues activating the meanings that reside in our minds and brains This activation of meaning is not necessarily the same in every person because meaning is based on individual experience as well as collective

a reaction against the „objectivist‟ theories of meaning The term „objectivism‟ is used by Lakoff (1987) and Johnson (1987) to refer to those theories of linguistic meaning that understand objective reality as independent from human cognition In contrast to this view, cognitive semantics is concerned with modeling the human mind as much as it is concerned

with investigating linguistic semantics It states that linguistic meanings come from our mind

or rather as in the prime slogan for cognitive semantics: Meanings are in the head

(Gardenfor, 1994) Cognitive semantics also 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 (Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green, 2006:156) Leonard Talmy, one of the original pioneers of cognitive linguistics in the 1970s, describes cognitive semantics as follows: „Research on cognitive semantics is research on conceptual content and its organization in language‟ (Talmy, 2004:4) Cognitive semantics, like the larger enterprise of cognitive linguistics of which it is a part, is not a single unified framework Though those researchers identify themselves as cognitive semanticists, there are still a number of principles that collectively characterize a cognitive semantics approach The principles that the study is based on for its argument and discussion will be briefly presented in the following section

3.4.2 Guiding principles of cognitive semantics

Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green identify four guiding principles that collectively characterize the collection of approaches that fall within cognitive semantics in their book,

Cognitive Linguistics: An Introduction (2006:157) namely i) Conceptual structure is

embodied (the „embodied cognition thesis‟); ii) Semantic structure is conceptual structure; iii) Meaning representation is encyclopaedic; iv) Meaning construction is conceptualization

“Cognitive semanticists set out to explore the nature of human interaction with and awareness of the external world, and to build a theory of conceptual structure that is consonant with the ways in which we experience the world” (Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green , 2006:157) The experience we have of the world is embodied In other words, it is structured in part by the nature of the bodies we have and by our neurological organization The nature of conceptual organization arises from bodily experience, so part of what makes conceptual structure meaningful is the bodily experience with which it is associated It is clear that conceptual structure (the nature of human concepts is a consequence of the nature

of our embodiment and thus is embodied)

The second principle is that semantic structure is conceptual structure What are stored in our mind are the things we can perceive and conceive from the real world which cognitive linguists call „concepts‟ And speakers often use what they have in mind to describe an entity using language That is why this principle asserts that language refers to concepts in the mind

of the speaker rather than to objects in the external world In other words, semantic structure

(the meanings conventionally associated with words and other linguistic units) can be

equated with conceptual structure (i.e., concepts) (Evan et al., 2006) However, the claim that

semantic structure can be equated with conceptual structure does not mean that the two are identical Instead, cognitive semanticists claim that the meanings associated with linguistic units such as words, for example, form only a subset of possible concepts After all, we have many more thoughts, ideas and feelings than we can conventionally encode in language

it, hearers/readers must have an understanding of its frame of semantics (Fillmore, 1982) or a domain (Langacker, 1987) We then „construct‟ a meaning by „selecting‟ a meaning that is appropriate in the context of the utterance

The fourth guiding principle associated with cognitive semantics is that language itself (containing words, sentences of the language) does not encode meaning Instead, as we have seen, words (and other linguistic units) are only „prompts‟ for the construction of meaning According to this view, meaning is constructed at the conceptual level: meaning construction

is equated with conceptualization, a dynamic process whereby linguistic units serve as prompts for an array of conceptual operations and the recruitment of background knowledge

It follows from this view that meaning is a process rather than a discrete „thing‟ that can be

„packaged‟ by language (Evan et al., 2006:162)

3.5 POLYSEMY

3.5.1 The traditional treatment of polysemy

The term „polysemy‟ is derived from the Greek poly- meaning „many‟ and sem meaning

„sense‟ or „meaning‟ Traditionally, polysemy has been defined as the case when “a lexical item … has a range of different meanings” (Crystal 1991: 267) This definition could seem to

be very simple and straightforward It referred to a lexical relation where a single linguistic form (i.e a single phonological word from belonging to a single lexical category, i.e word class, say either N or V) has different senses that are related to each other by means of

regular shifts or extensions from the basic meaning (Allen 1986:147, De Stadler 1989:61-62, Taylor 1991: 99) Lyons (1977:550) states the following features of lexical polysemy in the form of criteria:

(a) There must be a clear derived sense relation between the polysemic senses of a word

(b) The polysemic senses of a word must be shown to be etymologically related to the same original source word

(c) Lexical polysemy is a sense relation within a particular syntactic category, i.e lexical polysemy does not cut across syntactic word class boundaries

More recently, Taylor (1991:101-102) applied traditional semantic tests (or criteria) which were more typically used to distinguish between vagueness and ambiguity, to differentiate between monosemy and polysemy (cf also Geeraerts, 1989; Gouws, 1989) According to Taylor, a word is monosemous (i.e it has only one sense) if it is vague, and it is polysemous (i.e it has more than one sense) if it is ambiguous However, these definitions and linguistic tests are problematic in some ways such as methodological problems, conceptual confusion, etc It is clear that the tests that are meant to distinguish polysemy as a lexical property of a word are unreliable and unsatisfactory

Polysemy is also always presented in opposition to homonymy The basic criterion for differentiating the two cases is to say that polysemy happens when one form has several meanings and homonymy, when two lexical items happen to have the same phonological form It seems to be easy to differentiate these two definitions when we consider the typical

examples of polysemy, like the noun school, or examples of homonymy such as bank (river

bank and money bank) However, Allen (1986:148) and De Stadler (1989:63) identify the problem of differentiating between polysemy and both homonymy and vagueness (i.e multiple significances of the same sense in particular contexts) as the main issue in defining polysemy They come to the conclusion that the difference between homonymy, polysemy and vagueness are best seen as gradations on a continuum

These traditional approaches to polysemy provide a more or less successful descriptive analysis of what polysemy and homonymy are; what lexical items are homonymous or polysemous Their major problem, however, is that they fail to address several fundamental issues: the reasons why these lexical items have several senses attached to them in the first place; how these meanings are structured: are these senses grouped under the same lexical item by chance or is there any motivation for the lexical item to convey specific meanings? Is

the semantic content of a single lexical item enough to create polysemy or, on the contrary, is the interaction with the semantic content of the other lexical items that co-occur in the same sentence necessary? These issues, neglected by traditional approaches, are at the core of investigation in Cognitive Semantics In the following section, I present the explanations that this model provides for these questions

3.5.2 Polysemy in cognitive linguistics

In recent years, polysemy as a lexical or semantic relation has received much attention in various formal approaches as well as cognitive approaches With the advent of Cognitive Linguistics, with its initial focus on lexical semantics and linguistic categorization, as well as with its view that meaning is central to and motivates linguistic structure, the question of polysemy was placed center-stage again This had as a natural consequence a remarkable increase in the number and variety of studies on polysemy Polysemy has been one of the central research agendas in the field of cognitive semantics

Why is it that CL is a much more accommodating framework for the study of polysemy than the earlier frameworks? Unlike the single meaning approach, CL allows the proliferation of the number of senses of a word; in other words, particular referential or conceptual differences in the uses of a word are allowed to make up different polysemous senses

There have been multiple lines of research that have sought to investigate the intra-lexical structures of polysemous words such as over (Brugman, 1981; Dewell, 1994; Lakoff, 1987; Tyler and Evans, 2001, 2004), in, on (Beitel et al., 1997; Goddard, 2002; Herskovits, 1986) and through (Hilferty, 1999) One of the key concepts in such analyses is image-schema (Johnson, 1987; Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Lakoff, 1987), which can be defined as the schematic structures which are generated through our perceptual interactions and bodily movements in our physical environment that „make it possible for us to experience, understand, and reason about our world‟ (Johnson, 1987: 19) Making use of image-schema, researchers in cognitive semantics have sought to visualize the sense network of various polysemous words (Brugman, 1988; Dewell, 1994; Hilferty, 1999; Lakoff, 1987) There are two major approaches to polysemy, the lexical network approach (Lakoff, 1987; Taylor, 1988; Tyler and Evans, 2001, 2004) and the core-schema approach (Dewell, 1994; Tanaka, 1987a, 1987b, 1990) In the lexical network approach, various senses of a given polysemous word are seen to form a network or „radial category‟ (Lakoff, 1987), in which metaphorical senses are derived from the central prototype The core-schema approach, on the other hand,

suggests that the various senses can be derived from a single core schema which serves as a base from which different senses derive as a result of cognitive operations such as focalization, vantage point shift (Langacker, 1987) and image-schema transformations (Gibbs and Colston, 1995; Kreitzer, 1997; Lakoff, 1987)

3.5.3 Summary

In this section, two approaches to polysemy have been presented The traditional approach defines polysemy as the case when a lexical item has a range of different meanings Polysemy can be differentiated from homonymy by using a set of criteria, such as the etymology, the unrelatedness of meaning, the central or core meaning as well as some ambiguity tests It has been argued that this model is mainly concerned with a descriptive analysis of polysemy, without addressing questions such as why and how polysemy is created

For Cognitive Semantics, a lexical item is polysemous when it has multiple meanings related

in a systematic way These related meanings are using meaning chains or Idealized Cognitive Models (ICMs) The meanings in a polysemic word are tied to one another and the connections are made through our cognitive abilities This framework provides a good explanation for the reasons why meanings are related to specific lexical items, but it fails to account for the way in which such polysemous senses are created

Semanticists working on polysemy within a cognitive linguistic framework also faced problems Polysemy requires the researcher to determine whether two usage events are identical or sufficiently similar to be considered a single sense, what the degree of similarity

is between different senses, where to connect a sense to others in the network, and which

sense(s) to recognize as prototypical one(s)

CHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGY

This chapter describes the methods and the research procedures that have been utilized in the study First the research questions will be restated in 2.1, next the research methods of the study will be introduced in 2.2, sources of the language material will be described in 2.3, particularly, considerations in selecting materials will be presented in this part, then the data generation procedures and the analytical framework will be described in 2.4

2.1 RESEARCH QUESTIONS

Based on the theoretical background presented in chapter 1, the thesis attempts to address the three following questions:

(1) From a cognitive semantic perspective, what meanings do the English verbs

‗open/close‘ have? How are they variedly used in this language?

(2) What are potential Vietnamese equivalents of the English verbs ‗open/close‘ in various senses?

(3) How are these verbs similar and different between English and Vietnamese in the light of cognitive semantics?

2.2 RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHOD

This study is based on the theory of cognitive linguistics and cognitive semantics in particular This theory takes human experience as the motivation for what is meaningful in the human mind; thought is not a manipulation of symbols but the application of cognitive processes to conceptual structures Meaning structures come not only from the direct relationship with the external world but also from the nature of bodily and social experience (how humans experience with the world) and from human capacity to project from some aspects based on this experience to some abstract conceptual structures Moreover, cognitive semanticists have focused on the analysis of how different senses of a word are related to each other although they have been aware that it is a non-trivial issue Thus, in conducting the study, a variety of different research methodological approaches were employed in order

to focus on the polysemy of the verbs open/close in English and their equivalents in

Vietnamese

First of all, the descriptive method is applied in this study to present the theoretical foundation which then is illustrated by examples with explanations and discussions and then

to reach conclusions by conductive reasoning

Next, in order to answer the first research question, a theoretical framework which is based

on the methodological and theoretical principles of cognitive linguistics and semantics is established Then examples are analyzed based on this framework to help the researcher come to conclusions

Then, regard the second research question, one of the study‟s purposes is to find out the

potential Vietnamese equivalents of the English verbs open/close Therefore, contrastive

analysis is incorporated in attempt to seek for evidence to answer this question

Also, a detailed explanation of the similarities and differences between these two verbs in English and Vietnamese will be provided to serve the last research question

2.3 METHOD AND SOURCES OF THE LANGUAGE MATERIAL

2.3.1 Sources of the language material

The linguistic material used in support and illustration of the discussions in the various parts

of the study belongs to three different sources

i) Monolingual and bilingual dictionaries The dictionaries that I have made use of when writing this thesis are listed as a particular subgroup in the Bibliography section These examples are followed by an abbreviated reference within brackets

ii) Corpora of written English and Vietnamese used in this thesis contain literary, journalistic, scientific and technical texts, transcriptions from spoken language and from media broadcasts

iii) Examples that occur without any bracketed indication of the source have for the most part been constructed by the author, occasionally on the basis of an utterance that I have seen or heard used In addition, some of them have been taken from other linguistic studies

I would also like to point out that the main aim of this study is not to show how frequent or salient the meanings presented are in each language, but just the fact that it is possible to infer them Therefore, I have not included any data on frequencies

2.3.2 Method of data collection

The material selection was managed under three considerations: the field of the study, the availability of material and the feasibility of conducting the analysis

The investigation processed from the general to the more specific data collection Qualitative methods were used to gather data, narrowing the focus of the research scope as the research progresses

As there are three kinds of data collected in the study, three groups of measurement instruments were employed:

(i) For the collection of examples of the English verbs open/close, I made use of some

dictionaries such as: Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary, Dictionary of Modern English Usage, Macmillan Dictionary and Thesaurus, English-Vietnamese Dictionary, Lac Viet MTD9 MVA 2009 Dictionary, etc., and literary works like Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen), Eclipse (Stephenie Meyer), Twilight (Stephenie Meyer), etc

(ii) Online-material: Thanks to useful websites such as google.com, yahoo.com, en.wikipedia.org, etc., I could find a rich source of material that is useful for my study, especially the part of literature review and data collection

(iii) Some examples were constructed by the author from personal experience

2.4 ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK

According to Burnes (1999), data analysis involves „the describing‘ and ‗explaining‘ In the

light of this view, the collected data from different sources as presented in 2.3 were put on those two processes Regard the two broad categories as specified by the first two research questions, data were presented and then analyzed and synthesized in the framework of cognitive semantics to provide evidences for the statements and assertions that are made about the research insights and outcomes It can be stated that, by and large, cognitive semantic studies have traditionally been based on decontextualized data, collected and analyzed by means of introspection As a consequence, the findings may be empirically problematic: not all fine-grained sense distinctions are necessarily supported by the data (cf Gries and Divjak, submitted)

Some significant theories and approaches best exemplify the four guiding principles in cognitive semantics included image-schema theory, encyclopedic semantics approach, categorization and Idealized Cognitive Models (ICMs) approach, cognitive lexical semantics approach, conceptual metaphor theory, conceptual metonymy approach, Mental Spaces theory, and conceptual blending theory In this paper, some of them are applied: Cognitive lexical semantics, encyclopedic semantics approach, categorization and Idealized Cognitive Models (ICMs) approach

When speaking about polysemy, the fact that we are dealing with multiple meanings is not the main point but the fact that those multiple meanings are related in a systematic and natural way

According to Lakoff (1987), polysemy has to be understood as categorization, that is to say the idea that related meanings of words form categories and that these meanings bear family resemblance, an idea introduced by Austin (1961) Taylor (1995: 108) explains this family resemblance category in terms of „meaning chains‟ He compares these „meaning chains‟ to Lakoff‟s „radial categories‟ A category is structured radially with respect to a number of subcategories: there is a central subcategory, defined by a cluster of covering cognitive models and in addition, there are noncentral extensions which are not specialized instances of the central subcategory, but variants of it In other words, a radial category is structured with respect to a prototype, and the various category members are related to the prototype by convention, rather than being „generated‟ by predictable rules As such, word meanings are stored in the mental lexicon as highly complex structured categories of meanings or senses ICMs are complex structured wholes or gestalts They do not necessarily fit the world very precisely Polysemy is therefore the result of the extension of ICMs to form radial categories Sometimes, a single ICM can be the basis for a collection of senses that form a single natural category

In the present study, the author argues strongly for more dictionary/corpus-based work in lexical semantics in general and cognitive semantics in particular, a domain that is considered

by many not to be particularly well-suited for corpus-linguistic studies This approach is used

to bear on polysemous near-synonyms that express „open/close‘ in a contrastive

English-Vietnamese analysis Hence, the focus of the study is on presenting a corpus-based methodology that can be used to pursue cognitively-inspired lexical semantic analyses

CHAPTER 3: DATA ANALYSIS

In this chapter, I analyze the different meanings that the two verbs open/close can convey in

the two different languages under investigation: English and Vietnamese The organization

of this chapter is as follows: Section 3.1 focuses on the prototypical physical meanings and the different non-prototypical extended meanings of these two verbs from the point of view

of cognitive semantics Section 3.2 offers an account of Vietnamese equivalents that these verbs can convey from a cross-linguistic point of view Section 3.3 describes the similarities and differences of these two verbs between English and Vietnamese Section 3.4 summarizes the results from previous sections

3.1 THE POLYSEMY OF OPEN/CLOSE IN ENGLISH

3.1.1 Prototypical and non-prototypical meanings of ‘open/close’

A word is understood as polysemous if all its multiple meanings are systematically related The relation between the different polysemous senses of a word is not whimsical and random, but motivated This motivation finds its grounds in our understanding and bodily experience of the world in which we live A lexical item is not generally polysemous in itself

It needs the help of the semantic content of other lexical items in order to obtain those polysemous senses

In this section, the different meanings of „open/close‟ in general as well as its synonyms are

discussed in the light of cognitive semantics According to Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary, Dictionary of Modern English Usage (Henry Fowler, Oxford University Press), Macmillan Dictionary and Thesaurus, Lac Viet MTD9 MVA 2009 Dictionary, English-

Vietnamese Dictionary, Wikipedia, and some other dictionaries, the English verbs „open‟ and

„close‟ have some physical and extended meanings as follows:

3.1.1.1 Physical meanings of ‘open’ and ‘close’

3.1.1.1.1 Physical meanings of the verb ‘open’

The first sense of open is to separate the edges of something, or to take off its cover so that

you can see or remove what is inside As for instance examples (1), (2), (3) show:

(1) She opened her shopping bag and took out an umbrella

(2) Can you open this jam jar?

(3) Open your books at page 25

(Macmillan Dictionary and Thesaurus)

if something such as a flower opens, it moves into its widest position and you can see its full shape in the following example:

(3) My parachute failed to open and I nearly died!

The second sense of this verb is exemplified in (4) (5) It means to move a door or window into a position that allows people or things to pass through

(4) I opened the window — surprised when it opened silently, without sticking, not

having opened it in who knows how many years (Twilight, 2005:72)

(5) He opened the passenger door, holding it for me as I stepped in, (Twilight,

(7) The kitchen door opens onto a patio (Macmillan Dictionary and Thesaurus)

The third physical sense is introduced as to move your arms or legs wide apart, to move your lips and teeth apart, to move your eyelids apart or to make your fingers straight so that they are closed as in the following examples:

(8) He opened his arms for me and I sat on his lap, nestling into his cool stone

embrace (Eclipse, 2007:19)

(9) I opened my mouth to ask, but he spoke before I could (Twilight, 2005:174) (10) When I opened my eyes in the morning, something was different (Twilight,

2005:27)

(11) His hand closed for a brief second, his fingers contracting gently, and then it

opened again (Eclipse, 2007:258)

3.1.1.1.2 Physical meanings of the verb ‘close’

The first physical meaning of close is expressed in (12), (13), (14) and (15) as „to move to

cover an open area‟ If you close something, or if it closes, it moves to cover an open area:

(12) Close the door quietly behind you

(13) Did the fridge door close completely?

(14) Her mouth closed after a moment and she said nothing

(Macmillan Dictionary and Thesaurus)