AN INVESTIGATION OF THE POLYSEMY OF OPEN CLOSE IN ENGLISH AND mở ĐÓNG IN VIETNAMESE

POST - GRADUATE STUDIES ------BÙI THỊ NGỌC AN INVESTIGATION OF THE POLYSEMY OF ‘OPEN/CLOSE’ IN ENGLISH AND ‘MỞ/ĐÓNG’ IN VIETNAMESE FROM THE COGNITIVE PERSPECTIVE NGHIÊN CỨU TÍNH ĐA N

POST - GRADUATE STUDIES

- -BÙI THỊ NGỌC

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 NHÌN TỪ GÓC ĐỘ

NGỮ NGHĨA HỌC TRI NHẬN)

M.A Minor Thesis

Field: English Linguistics Code: 60 22 15

Hanoi, 2010

POST - GRADUATE STUDIES

- -BÙI THỊ NGỌC

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 NHÌN TỪ GÓC ĐỘ

NGỮ NGHĨA HỌC TRI NHẬN)

M.A Minor Thesis

Field: English Linguistics Code: 60 22 15

Supervisor: Assoc Prof Dr Trần Hữu Mạnh

Hanoi, 2010

This thesis does not contain material which has been accepted for any other degree in any university To the best of my knowledge and belief, this thesis contains no material previously published or written by any other person, except where due reference is given in the text.

I agree that the Library may lend or copy thesis on request.

Signature: Date: September 30th 2010

Bùi Thị Ngọc

I am grateful to the group of lecturers who delivered the subject ‘Research Methods’ insemester 2, 2009 In particularly, I would like to thank Assoc Prof Dr Le Hung Tien, and

Ms Pham Minh Tam, MA, whose critical comments on my research proposals were veryvaluable to this research project

This is a great opportunity to thank Ms Nguyen Thi Lan Huong, PhD Candidate ofMelbourne University, my beloved colleague and Dr Nguyen Tat Thang, Da Lat University,who have helped me with a great source of literature for my research and encouraged me tokeep going I am pleased to thank Mr Nguyen Minh Cuong, PhD Candidate of Ha NoiUniversity of Languages and International Studies, my dear brother who was willing todiscuss the development of this research with me, who has helped me predict and overcomeadversity while doing the research by sharing his studies and experience

I owe my great gratitude towards my family and my friends for their best possible support,endless care and inspiration

This thesis is dedicated to my 5-year-old daughter, Khanh Huyen

The overall aim of this research is to advance an understanding of polysemy in the semantic

field of the two verbs open and close in English and Vietnamese from cognitive perspective

Specifically, 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 firstchapter displays my understanding of contrastive analysis, verbs, cognitive linguistics,cognitive semantics and polysemy

Chapter 2 – Methodology – describes the methods and the research procedures of the currentstudy Particularly, it describes the data collection in which considerations in selectingmaterials and the sources of data are presented Additionally, a description of data analysis isalso presented

Chapter 3 – Data Analysis– contains the core part of the study It presents, analyzes andsynthesizes 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 Although there appear to be some differences

in the meanings and in the way in which these languages express meanings, especiallydifferent non-prototypical extended meanings, these two languages share the majority ofthem And although the same meanings are expressed in different languages, the way inwhich these different languages convey such meanings can be different

Accordingly, our findings are supposed to be worthwhile to those who are interested in thefield of cognitive semantics in general and polysemy in particular

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 "blackhole" 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 howsimple this definition seems to be, polysemy is not a clear-cut concept For decades, linguistsfrom different universities have been trying to give a sound account of what polysemy is andhow it can be accounted for Although polysemy is at the moment a hot topic incognitive 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 andresearch 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 thissmall-scaled study to cover the polysemy of all kinds of verbs, a broad field and the mostcomplex part of speech Therefore, the study is limited to investigating the polysemy of thetwo verbs ‘OPEN’ and ‘CLOSE’ with their Vietnamese equivalents within cognitivesemantic theoretical framework The study focuses on displaying some major principles ofcognitive linguistics in general and cognitive semantics in particular which are applied toexplore 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:

- 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-linguisticpoint of view

- providing pedagogical implications for teaching and learning as well as languageresearch

More detailed explication as how the aforementioned objectives have been formulated andhow 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 isthe 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;

precedes and necessitates the formation of my research: an overview on contrastiveanalysis, a brief description of verbs, cognitive semantics and polysemy

in the study

and synthesizes data collected and gives some findings and discussions

The Conclusion part summarizes the major findings and implications about the polysemy ofthe verbs ‘open’ and ‘close’ within cognitive semantic theoretical framework and suggestionsfor further study

PART B: DEVELOPMENT

This part consists of three chapters A review of all related theoretical foundation is done inthe 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 onthe methodological and theoretical principles of cognitive linguistics and semantics isestablished in this chapter.

Chapter 2 – Methodology – describes the methods and the research procedures of the currentstudy Particularly, it describes the data collection in which considerations in selectingmaterials and the sources of data are presented Additionally, a description of data analysis isalso presented

Chapter 3 – Data Analysis– contains the core part of the study It presents, analyzes andsynthesizes 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 presentall related theoretical background that precedes and necessitates the formation of myresearch, 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 andcognitive semantics theory will be briefly discussed in 1.3, a review of major principles ofcognitive 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 dealwith 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 tohelp the analyst to ascertain in which aspects the two languages are alike and in which theydiffer (Filipovic, 1975) The end of 19th century and the beginning of 20th century wasgenerally 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 usedextensively 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 withthe 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 asecond language in phonological, morphological and syntactic levels Contrastive Analysis isnot merely relevant for second language teaching and learning but it can also make usefulcontributions 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 studywere suggested by Chaturvedi (1973):

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

(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 anddissimilar features for the target language

(4) To arrive at principles of text preparation, test framing and target languageteaching 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 andcultures as reflected in foreign students' writing Contrastive rhetoric research began in the1960s, 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 incomposition encountered by second/foreign language writers by referring them to therhetorical strategies of the first language It maintains that language and writing are culturalphenomena, 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 thatmany 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 usethe 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 thatprovides the central meaning to a sentence Verbs express what the subject does or describesomething about the state or condition of the subject Verbs are complex elements that notonly provide crucial sentence meaning, but that also provide support for other verbs,determine what kinds of sentence elements can come after them, combine with prepositionsand 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 thesefollowing 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 clauseconsisting 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 ofreality is that it consists of "goings-on": of doing, happening, feeling, being The basicsemantic framework for the representation of process consists potentially of threecomponents: the process itself, participants (Roles) in the process, circumstances associatedwith 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 canfunction 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 Averb 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 aresubstantives 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 eachlanguage by different authors However, the classification of the verbs by Diep Quang Banand Hoang Van Thung will be applied in this thesis They classify Vietnamese verbs intotwo kinds: transitive verbs and intransitive verbs The word “transitive” sounds prettycomplex, but in reality identifying transitive verbs is really not that difficult Transitiveverbs express an action and are followed by a direct object (thing or person that receives theaction 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 ismodified by an adverb or adverb phrase rather than being transferred to some person orobject 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 aconcatenation of concepts proposed, tested, and tempered by a variety of researchers Thepeople whose work has been most influential in the creation of this framework includeBrugman, Casad, Croft, Gilles Fauconnier, Mark Johnson, George Lakoff, RonaldLangacker, Lindner, Eve Sweetser, Leonard Talmy, Tuggy, and Mark Turner

Although Cognitive Linguistics as a general framework emerged in the late seventies, it isimportant to bear in mind that it is not a totally homogeneous framework Ungerer andSchmid (1996) distinguish three main approaches: the Experiental view, the Prominenceview and the Attentional view of language The ‘Experiental view’ focuses on what might begoing 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, aphenomenon first introduced by the Danish gestalt psychologist Rubin The prominenceprinciple explains why, when we look at an object in our environment, we single it out as aperceptually prominent figure standing out from the background The ‘Attentional view’assumes that what we actually express reflects those parts of an event which attract ourattention A main concept in this approach is Fillmore’s (1975) notion of ‘frame’, i.e anassemblage of the knowledge we have about a certain situation

Despite these three different viewpoints in Cognitive Linguistics, the majority of linguistsworking within this paradigm share the view that linguistic knowledge is part of generalthinking 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 Thismeans that meaning is grounded in the shared human experience of bodily existence Wecreate mental and linguistic categories on the basis of our concrete experiences and under theconstraints imposed by our bodies They are not a set of universal abstract features oruninterpreted symbols (Barcelona, 1997:9) They are motivated and grounded directly inexperience, 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 thatcreate and use them (Reddy, 1993) All linguistic forms act as clues activating the meaningsthat reside in our minds and brains This activation of meaning is not necessarily the same inevery person because meaning is based on individual experience as well as collectiveexperience (Barcelona, 1997:9)

a reaction against the ‘objectivist’ theories of meaning The term ‘objectivism’ is used byLakoff (1987) and Johnson (1987) to refer to those theories of linguistic meaning thatunderstand 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 ofconceptual structure: the nature and organization of mental representation in all its richnessand diversity, and this is what makes it a distinctive approach to linguistic meaning (VyvyanEvans and Melanie Green, 2006:156) Leonard Talmy, one of the original pioneers ofcognitive linguistics in the 1970s, describes cognitive semantics as follows: ‘Research oncognitive semantics is research on conceptual content and its organization in language’(Talmy, 2004:4) Cognitive semantics, like the larger enterprise of cognitive linguistics ofwhich it is a part, is not a single unified framework Though those researchers identifythemselves as cognitive semanticists, there are still a number of principles that collectivelycharacterize a cognitive semantics approach The principles that the study is based on for itsargument 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 collectivelycharacterize 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 andawareness of the external world, and to build a theory of conceptual structure that isconsonant with the ways in which we experience the world” (Vyvyan Evans and MelanieGreen , 2006:157) The experience we have of the world is embodied In other words, it isstructured 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 makesconceptual structure meaningful is the bodily experience with which it is associated It isclear 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 ourmind are the things we can perceive and conceive from the real world which cognitivelinguists call ‘concepts’ And speakers often use what they have in mind to describe an entityusing 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 areidentical Instead, cognitive semanticists claim that the meanings associated with linguisticunits such as words, for example, form only a subset of possible concepts After all, we havemany 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 adomain (Langacker, 1987) We then ‘construct’ a meaning by ‘selecting’ a meaning that isappropriate 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 haveseen, 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 asprompts 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 lexicalitem … 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 linguisticform (i.e a single phonological word from belonging to a single lexical category, i.e wordclass, 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 theform of criteria:

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

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

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

More recently, Taylor (1991:101-102) applied traditional semantic tests (or criteria) whichwere more typically used to distinguish between vagueness and ambiguity, to differentiatebetween monosemy and polysemy (cf also Geeraerts, 1989; Gouws, 1989) According toTaylor, 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 linguistictests 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 aword are unreliable and unsatisfactory

Polysemy is also always presented in opposition to homonymy The basic criterion fordifferentiating the two cases is to say that polysemy happens when one form has severalmeanings and homonymy, when two lexical items happen to have the same phonologicalform 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 theproblem 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 definingpolysemy They come to the conclusion that the difference between homonymy, polysemyand vagueness are best seen as gradations on a continuum

These traditional approaches to polysemy provide a more or less successful descriptiveanalysis of what polysemy and homonymy are; what lexical items are homonymous orpolysemous Their major problem, however, is that they fail to address several fundamentalissues: the reasons why these lexical items have several senses attached to them in the firstplace; how these meanings are structured: are these senses grouped under the same lexicalitem 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, isthe interaction with the semantic content of the other lexical items that co-occur in the samesentence necessary? These issues, neglected by traditional approaches, are at the core ofinvestigation in Cognitive Semantics In the following section, I present the explanations thatthis 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 invarious formal approaches as well as cognitive approaches With the advent of CognitiveLinguistics, with its initial focus on lexical semantics and linguistic categorization, as well aswith its view that meaning is central to and motivates linguistic structure, the question ofpolysemy was placed center-stage again This had as a natural consequence a remarkableincrease in the number and variety of studies on polysemy Polysemy has been one of thecentral research agendas in the field of cognitive semantics

Why is it that CL is a much more accommodating framework for the study of polysemy thanthe earlier frameworks? Unlike the single meaning approach, CL allows the proliferation ofthe number of senses of a word; in other words, particular referential or conceptualdifferences 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-lexicalstructures 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 theschematic structures which are generated through our perceptual interactions and bodilymovements 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 variouspolysemous words (Brugman, 1988; Dewell, 1994; Hilferty, 1999; Lakoff, 1987) There aretwo 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 polysemousword are seen to form a network or ‘radial category’ (Lakoff, 1987), in which metaphoricalsenses 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 abase from which different senses derive as a result of cognitive operations such asfocalization, 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 approachdefines 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 theetymology, the unrelatedness of meaning, the central or core meaning as well as someambiguity tests It has been argued that this model is mainly concerned with a descriptiveanalysis of polysemy, without addressing questions such as why and how polysemy iscreated

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 CognitiveModels (ICMs) The meanings in a polysemic word are tied to one another and theconnections are made through our cognitive abilities This framework provides a goodexplanation for the reasons why meanings are related to specific lexical items, but it fails toaccount for the way in which such polysemous senses are created

Semanticists working on polysemy within a cognitive linguistic framework also facedproblems Polysemy requires the researcher to determine whether two usage events areidentical 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 whichsense(s) to recognize as prototypical one(s)

CHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGY

This chapter describes the methods and the research procedures that have been utilized in thestudy First the research questions will be restated in 2.1, next the research methods of thestudy 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 datageneration 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 thethree 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 inparticular This theory takes human experience as the motivation for what is meaningful inthe human mind; thought is not a manipulation of symbols but the application of cognitiveprocesses to conceptual structures Meaning structures come not only from the directrelationship 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 someaspects based on this experience to some abstract conceptual structures Moreover, cognitivesemanticists have focused on the analysis of how different senses of a word are related toeach other although they have been aware that it is a non-trivial issue Thus, in conductingthe 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 theoreticalfoundation 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 isestablished Then examples are analyzed based on this framework to help the researchercome 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 inEnglish 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 ofwhen writing this thesis are listed as a particular subgroup in the Bibliography section Theseexamples 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 frommedia broadcasts

iii) Examples that occur without any bracketed indication of the source have for themost part been constructed by the author, occasionally on the basis of an utterance that I haveseen 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 orsalient the meanings presented are in each language, but just the fact that it is possible toinfer 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, theavailability of material and the feasibility of conducting the analysis

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

As there are three kinds of data collected in the study, three groups of measurementinstruments 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 EnglishUsage, Macmillan Dictionary and Thesaurus, English-Vietnamese Dictionary, Lac VietMTD9 MVA 2009 Dictionary, etc., and literary works like Pride and Prejudice (JaneAusten), 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 onthose two processes Regard the two broad categories as specified by the first two researchquestions, data were presented and then analyzed and synthesized in the framework ofcognitive semantics to provide evidences for the statements and assertions that are madeabout the research insights and outcomes It can be stated that, by and large, cognitivesemantic studies have traditionally been based on decontextualized data, collected andanalyzed by means of introspection As a consequence, the findings may be empiricallyproblematic: 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 incognitive semantics included image-schema theory, encyclopedic semantics approach,categorization and Idealized Cognitive Models (ICMs) approach, cognitive lexical semanticsapproach, conceptual metaphor theory, conceptual metonymy approach, Mental Spacestheory, and conceptual blending theory In this paper, some of them are applied: Cognitivelexical semantics, encyclopedic semantics approach, categorization and Idealized CognitiveModels (ICMs) approach

When speaking about polysemy, the fact that we are dealing with multiple meanings is notthe main point but the fact that those multiple meanings are related in a systematic andnatural way.

According to Lakoff (1987), polysemy has to be understood as categorization, that is to saythe idea that related meanings of words form categories and that these meanings bear familyresemblance, an idea introduced by Austin (1961) Taylor (1995: 108) explains this familyresemblance category in terms of ‘meaning chains’ He compares these ‘meaning chains’ toLakoff’s ‘radial categories’ A category is structured radially with respect to a number ofsubcategories: there is a central subcategory, defined by a cluster of covering cognitivemodels and in addition, there are noncentral extensions which are not specialized instances ofthe central subcategory, but variants of it In other words, a radial category is structured withrespect to a prototype, and the various category members are related to the prototype byconvention, rather than being ‘generated’ by predictable rules As such, word meanings arestored 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 veryprecisely 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 naturalcategory

In the present study, the author argues strongly for more dictionary/corpus-based work inlexical 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-basedmethodology that can be used to pursue cognitively-inspired lexical semantic analyses

CHAPTER 3: DATA ANALYSIS