Đối chiếu các đơn vị từ vựng thuộc trường thị giác trong tiếng việt và tiếng anh ttta

Research purposes The thesis research, survey units in „eye‟ field in Vietnamese and English: figure out semantic characteristics of groups of lexical units indicating the visual organ

VIETNAM ACADEMY OF SOCIAL SIENCES

GRADUATE ACADEMY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES

-

TRAN THI HAI BINH

CONSTRASTIVE ANALYSIS ON VOCABULARY UNITS IN THE FIELD OF ‘EYE’ IN VIETNAMESE AND ENGLISH

SUMMARY OF DOCTORAL THESIS ON LINGUISTICS

HÀ NỘI - 2019

Major: Contrastive analysis

Code: 9.22.20.24

Completed at:

VIETNAM ACADEMY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES

GRADUATE ACADEMY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES

Supervisor: Prof Dr Nguyễn Văn Khang

Reviewer 1: Prof Dr Do Viet Hung

Reviewer 2: Prof Dr Lam Quang Dong

Reviewer 3: Assoc Prof Dr Le Hung Tien

The Thesis was protected at Academy-level Council at Graduate Academy of Social Sciences, Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences, No

477 Nguyen Trai st., Thanh Xuan, Hanoi

At …

The thesis is available at:

- Vietnam National Library

- Library of Graduate Academy of Social and Sciences

PREAMBLE

1 Reason to choose the topic

Semantic fields are not new in the theory of linguistics The issues of the semantic field have been studied for a long time and are traditional The study of semantic fields in the direction of contrastive analysis helps to detect similar and different characteristics, especially differences; then point out the characteristics in national thinking and culture However, there have been no in-depth contrastive studies on the group of words indicating human visual organs in Vietnamese and English Therefore, we have studied units in the „eye‟ field to figure out the characteristics in thinking and culture of Vietnamese and English people, as well as to explore the development of new meanings and their participation in phrases, idioms basing on the people‟s ideological thinking when studying this lexical group

2 Research purposes and missions

2.1 Research purposes

The thesis research, survey units in „eye‟ field in Vietnamese and English: figure out semantic characteristics of groups of lexical units indicating the visual organ and its parts, activities of the visual organ and characteristics of the visual organs; unravel the semantic development and the possibilities these groups of lexical units are combined with others according to the ideological thinking of each people

3 Research subjects, scope and resources

3.1 Research subject

The subject of the study is the units of „eye‟ field in Vietnamese and English, semantic structure of these units in Vietnamese, the method of semantic change, field transfer; detecting typical features of this lexical group, and at the same time studying these units in phrases and idioms

On the basis of the results obtained in the Vietnamese language, a contrastive analysis with the English word group is carried out

3.2 Research scope

The research scope is the lexical units of „eye‟ field in Vietnamese and English Because the number of words in the „eye‟ field is quite big, we would like to focus on studying 24 Vietnamese lexical units, from which

to compare - compare to the corresponding units in the in English

3.3 Research resources

The source of the thesis is a group of lexical units in „eye‟ field, they are classified and studied basing mainly on Vietnamese dictionaries, English dictionaries, Vietnamese – English dictionaries, English - Vietnamese dictionaries, Vietnamese and English idioms dictionaries by reputable publishers

4 Research methodology

The thesis has used some main methods and tactics such as method of semantic element analysis, description method, contrastive method, statistical tactics

5 The new of the research

The thesis is a systematic contrastive research on lexical units of „eye‟ field in English and Vietnamese, including nouns, verbs and adjectives, pointing out the similarities and differences in structure characteristics and method of semantic change, studying semantics of this lexical group Vietnamese and English idioms to figure out the similarities and differences in thinking and culture of the two peoples

6 Scientific significance of the thesis

6.1 Theoretical significance

The thesis has researched in detail and systematically the „eye‟ field in Vietnamese by the methods of linguistics and linguistic - cultural studies The results of the thesis partly contribute to the theory of semantics and the relationship between language and culture, creating theoretical as well

as practical basis for the studies in semantic field in general and Vietnamese semantic field in particular in comparison with English

6.2 Practical significance

The results of the thesis will help to study and teach „eye‟ field vocabulary in Vietnamese and English more effectively, and can also be used as a document to support dictionary compilation

7 Thesis structure

Beside Introduction, Conclusion, References, Appendix, the thesis is structured into 3 chapters: Chapter 1 Literature review and theoretical basis, Chapter 2 Contrastive analysis on semantic characteristic of the units in „eye‟ field in Vietnamese and English, Chapter 3 Contrastive analysis on units in „eye‟ field participating in Vietnamese and English

idioms

Chapter 1 LITERATURE REVIEW AND THEORETIAL BASIS

1.1 Literature review

1.1.1 Research on semantic field and ‘eye’ field

Semantic field has been studied in the world for long, applying the theory of semantic field indicating animals A Lehrer and L.P Battan (1945) studied the semantic field of animals and the common metaphorical semantic change basing on American Heritage Dictionary and Oxford English Dictionary With the purpose of studying synonym pairs and in syntax relation, Li-li Chang, Keh-jiann Chen, Chu-Ren Huang (1999) studied the semantic field of popular emotional verbs in Chinese In the direction of applying semantic field in reality, Chunming Gao and Bin Xu (2013) focused on phrases, synonyms and antonyms, thereby proposing a method of teaching this group of words in English Brother Similar research approach has been applied by Ali N H Mansouri (1985), Guo Changhong (2010) and many other researchers

Comparing the vocabulary of two or more languages has led to both theoretical and practical results Ali Mansouri (2007) solved the problem

of translation by filling in gaps in semantic field of two languages: Arabic and English Mary K Bolin (2015) carried out the contrastive analysis on semantic field of grace in English, German, Hebrew, Greek and Latin with sources from bibles Asifa Majid (2009) gave scientific evidences relating to two fields: the cognitive field and the body field to demonstrate the similarities and differences of languages

Beside semantic classes of lexical units in dictionaries, Sherali Shokirov (2017) was also interested in structure function of words related

to the word „eye‟ in English and Uzbek Jansson Kajsa (2017) uses 2 dictionaries: Oxford Thesaurus (1991) and Nordstedts Svenska Synonymordbok (2009) to implement contrastive analysis on semantic field of LOVE and ÄLSKA

In addition to the above studies, there have been many other sttudies on semantic field like the ones conducted by Ricardo Mairal Usón (1990), Zhou and Weijie (2001), Clark E V (1972),

1.1.2 Research situation in Vietnam on semantic field and ‘eye’ field

With different research methods, many semantic studies are conducted

in Vietnam, contributing to theory and practice of linguistics and sematic field In the study on the field of animal names in Vietnamese and Russian, Nguyen Thuy Khanh (1996) discovered the characteristics of Vietnamese and Russian animal names and identifies the symbolic

meaning in animal names in contrastive analysis on idioms With the same method, Cao Thi Thu (1996) conducted studies on field of plant names and field of animal names On the basis of functional linguistics, Hoang Thi Hoa (2007) studied the perceptive verbs in English and Vietnamese Do Minh Hung (2009) implemented a study on verbs indicating eyes‟ activities in English and Vietnamese with dictionary materials: Vietnamese Dictionary and Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary, with the purpose of supporting English teaching to Vietnamese people Applying the same method - seme analysis, Tran Thi Huong (2009) researched a group of words indicating human visual activities in Vietnamese and French focusing on 12 lexical units denoting visual activity and derivatives Studying the „eye‟ semantic field in Kieu story, Tran Thi Huong (2011) has divided the field into 3 smaller fields Many contrastive studies on semantic field of Vietnamese and other have been conducted by reseachers such as: Lai Thi Phuong Thao (2016), Le Thi Le Thanh (2001), Nguyen Thi Bao (2003), Nguyen Minh (2006), The study of the semantic field is about the field lexical units, the method of studying the semantic field depends on the purpose of each study Semantic fields are often divided into sub-fields for detailed study The sources for semantic field research are also diverse, most of the studies have used materials from dictionaries and literary works Contrastive analysis on semantic fields is quite popular all over the world

as well as in Vietnam, helps clarify differences and similarities of the lexical units in the field of different languages, also contritube to the solution to semantic problems

1.2 Theoretical basis

1.2.1 Some common theoretical issues about semantic field

Semantic – Lexical field

The word "Field" was first used by G Ispen in the phrase "semantic filed" (bedeutungsfeld) “Semantic field” is like a mosaic with stones placed next to each other, words are placed next to the others, each word has a different shape, but has matching borders, all creating a completion

in a high order J.Trier (1931) with his concept semantics has "raised semantics to a new level" with the term "language field" Unlike J Trier,

W Porzig (1934) discovered an intimate semantic relationship between parts of speech, suggesting the use of a syntagmatic relationship to identify lexical fields Inheriting Trier's conception of school, L Weisgerber (1950) argued that language affects members of the linguistic community by means of fields; the feature of the word exists only in field, and proposed 3-dimensional field, radiating in many different directions

and due to the difference in the semantic system of different peoples, the constituent fields are not the same F Saussure's ideology (1973) decisively promoted the formation of the theory of fields with the notion that the value of each linguistic element was determined in relation to the remained ones

In Vietnam, Do Huu Chau (1998) proposed the definition of a vocabulary field as a set of lexical units based on a certain semantic identity, each word is in contrast to the rest in a lexical system and is only valid when placed in relation to other words in the system Nguyen Thien Giap (2001) considered that field means a collection of lexical units having interrelated meaning, these lexical units can be either a word or an idiomatic unit Citing Trier's point of view, he points out the mutual relationship of meaning in the lexical field definition, in the system, all receiving meaning only through the whole Sharing the same opinion with Nguyen Thien Giap, Do Viet Hung (2011) and Nguyen Tat Thang (2008) have proposed criteria to group words into different fields with central and peripheral words Vu Duc Nghieu and Nguyen Van Hiep (2009) have defined semantic fields as sub-systems, lexical organizations, in which words are systematically related

The common view of the researchers is: a set of words that are related

to each other in terms of meaning, forming a semantic sub-system called

"lexical field", "semantic field" or "semantic-lexical field"

The concept of semantic relations in the semantic field

Based on the types of semantic relationships in the semantic field, linguists classify semantic fields into different categories, a field often refers to two main relationships: linear relation and association relation According to F de Saussure (1973), the association is broader than linear (syntagmatic) relation L Wesigerber (1950) and J Trier (1931) had a conception of a field in vertical relation: direct field Another trend with

W Porzig (1934) as a representative suggested the concept of linear fields based on horizontal relations and distinguished central fields and semantic change fields Basing on the achievements in semantic field in the world,

Do Huu Chau (1981) divided the field of semantics into 3 categories: non-linear field, linear / combined field and interlinear / general field He proposed using the highly generalized noun as the root to put the dennotation meaning of a word into an appropriate field For example, the

word eye may have the there may be denotation fields: parts of the eye,

characteristics of the eye (physical features, visual abilities), eye sensations, eye diseases/problems, etc A large denotation and connotation field can be divided into small fields

Meaning of words

According to Do Huu Chau (1981), the meaning of a word is a collection of certain components including: denotation meaning, connotation meaning, attitude meaning and grammatical meaning; There

is also general meaning In the field of semantic research, the identification of connotation and denotation is important because connotation meaning is a reflection of things, phenomena in reality in language, and the connotation meaning, through concepts, relates to objects and phenomena outside language, via denotation to relate to reality The study of semantic (semantics) needs a comprehensive view: studying both linguistic and verbal units, the semantic relation of words to perception, present, internal structure, system and combined with the meanings of other words (Hoang Phe, 2008) A word has many meanings and each meaning is made up of smaller elements called seme Each seme can be broken down into smaller semes and can continue until the basic semantic element According to Nguyen Thien Giap (2014), the definitions of the words in dictionaries are explained in detailed description so they are often used as the basis for analyzing the semantic elements

Semantic change

Researchers have mentioned a mumber of sematic change devices, often focusing on: specialization, generalization, metonymy and metaphor Among these methods metonymy and metaphor are more popular, especially metaphor - considered the sweet fruit of creative imagination The semantic change of words is often governed by the laws of perception Therefore, the meanings changed are typically national

Polysemy

Polysemy, also known as multi-meaning phenomenon, is a universal phenomenon, originating from the needs of human communication and expressing economical law of language, expressed in terms of vocabulary: The same phonetic form can express many different contents (Nguyen Thien Giap, 2014) The denotation meanings are usually developed on the basis of one or several semes in the connotation structure which is taken as the center of denotation group

Sematic change

A lexical unit can have many meanings, so it can also belong to many semantic fields This is related to a common phenomenon – the shift of semantic field (phenomenon of field change) Semantic change of a word

is the basis of field change which increases imaginative effect of words

1.2.2 Contrastive linguistics and language contrast

Contrastive linguistics is a field in Comparative Linguistics and is growing due to the need to overcome errors in foreign language learning The contrast of languages helps to see the limits of human language Linguistic contrasts as well as other comparisons, are always implemented on a defined basis, comparative objects often belong to the same category A general contrastive process is based on common principles, including: Step 1: Describe the language that is relevant to the purpose of comparison, Step 2: Identify the factors that can be compared, Step 3: Perform a collation, find out the similarities and differences of the elements in the languages compared

1.3 Vision and ‘eye’ field

1.3.1 Thị giác

Vision is visual perception, and is a process of receiving and processing information from the environment through light This process is carried out by complex visual parts, in which the eyes, also known as the visual organ, are the main part

1.3.2 ‘Eye’ field

With the method of determining the semantic field proposed by researchers such as Khanegrefs (1980) and Do Huu Chau (1981), the eye noun can be used as the basis to determine the „eye‟ field because eyes are the main organ representing vision The „eye‟ field is a system of words with denotation meanings related to distinguishing light, colors and shapes; in other words, words with denotation meanings related to the eyes

1.3.3 Units in ‘eye’ field

The „eye‟ field may be defined by the following groups of words: the

words indicating the visual organs and parts of the visual organs (eyes,

eyebrows, eyelashes, eyelids, etc - mắt, lông mày, lông mi, mí,…), the

words indicating eye activities (look, watch, see, nhìn, trông, ngó, …),

words describing eyes (shape, color, visual capacity, …), words referring

to senses of eyes (dazzling, light-headed, flowered, stinking, .), words relating to eye problems (blindness, nearsightedness, farsightedness, etc.)

1.3.4 Comparing lexical units in ‘eye’ field

The contrast of „eye‟ field in Vietnamese and English is performed as the steps described in the previous section First of all, words are categorized into semantic fields or sub-fields The researcher then commented on: the list of lexical units, the semantic structure of each field unit, the frequency of the units in a given document (for example,

Story of Kieu) or in idioms, rhetorical value of the unit Based on the comparison results, conclusions about the differences and similarities between Vietnamese and English are drawn, from which the linguistic and cultural characteristics are pointed out

1.4 Sub-conclusion

The experience of previous studies, the orientation, approach and purpose

of the research become clearer The theoretical basis has provided more depth understanding of semantic fields, concepts of semantic fields and contrastive linguistics In this study, we think that the components of the semantics field (also called lexical field, semantic - lexical field) are words that are homogeneous in terms of semantics Contrastive analysis on „eye‟ field in Vietnamese and English is to compare the meaning of the units in the traditional category to find similar and different characteristics in the semantic field of the two languages, then to find the typical characteristics

in-in Vietnamese and English culture

Chapter 2

CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS ON LEXICO-SEMATIC CHARACTERISTICS OF

WORDS IN ‘EYE’ UNIT IN VIETNAMESE AND ENGLISH

2.1 Research limit

To identify lexical units in „eye‟ field for the research, two dictionaries have been used: Hoang Phe's Vietnamese Dictionary (2018) and Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary with Vietnamese Translation - 8th Edition) (2015) Besides, Vietnamese – English dictionary by Linguistic Institution (2018) as well as many other dictionaries have been as reference The nouns indicating the eyes and parts of the eyes, the verbs describing the activities of the eyes and the adjectives describing the eyes

in the two dictionaries are listed along with explanations of related meanings to the „eye‟ field

The statistical results are as follows: noun indicating eyes and parts of the eyes: Vietnamese: 32 words, English: 24 words; verbs indicating visual activity: Vietnamese: 43 words, English: 62 words, adjectives describing eye characteristics: Vietnamese: 70 words, English: 51 words

2.2 Lexical contrastive analysis on words belong to ‘eye’ field in Vietnamese and English

2.2.1 Words indicating eyes and eye parts

The number of Vietnamese words (32 words) is higher than that of English (24 words), some words refer to parts of the vision that appear in the Vietnamese dictionary but not in the English dictionary and vice

versa: màng, ve, tròng - cannot find corresponding words in English; rim

(of sb’s eyes) (the edge (of sb‟s eyes)) cannot find the corresponding word

in Vietnamese

Among the 32 nouns indicating the visual organ and the visual department in Vietnamese, there are 22 compound words and 10 single words, all compound words are major words, the number of compound words and applications in English is 7 and 17 Vietnamese tend to take built-in word units to form visual and visual nouns The greater number of single words in English indicates the tendency to create new word units for parts of the visual organ

The number of words indicating one part of the visual organ is different in Vietnamese and English: in Vietnamese, there are 2 parts of

visual organ with 3 indicating words (lông mày/mày/chân mày, lông

mi/mi/lông nheo), 7 parts with 2 indicating words (cầu mắt/nhãn cầu, con ngươi/đồng tử, giác mạc/màng kính, lòng đen/tròng đen, lòng trắng/tròng trắng, màng lưới/võng mạc, mắt/thu ba), 8 parts with 1 word (điểm mù, hốc, quầng, thủy tinh thể, ve, chắp, khóe, tròng, màng) In English, there

are 4 parts of visual organ with 2 indicating words (eyebrow/brow,

eyelid/lid, eyelash/lash, bags/shadow), 20 parts with 1 one indicating

words (eyeball, pupil, blind spot, socket, cornea, iris, white, chalazion,

choroid, eye, retina, scela, lens, rim, shiner, socket) In the „eye‟ field,

Vietnamese vocabulary is more diverse than that of English, which has been shown in the bigger number of visual parts having more than one word indicating it in Vietnamese

The case of omitted words appears in both languages: lông mày, lông

mi can be mày, mi; eyebrow, eyelash, and eyelid - brow, lash and lid

2.2.2 Words indicating eye movements

The number of Vietnamese words (43 words) is lower than English words (62 words) The equivalent words for some verbs could not be found in both Vietnamese and English: no Vietnamese verbs found

matching meaning with linger words in Vietnamese dictionary, no

English verbs in dictionary not found equivalent for 18 Vietnamese verbs referring to eye movements 18 only for the corresponding visual activities about 12 verbs in Vietnamese However, there are 12 verbs

indicating eye movements in English equivalent to the verb nhìn in

combination with some dependent words

The number of single words is higher than other types of words in

both the Vietnamese and English verbs indicating eye activities

2.2.3 Words describing eyes

The number of Vietnamese words (70 words) is higher than English words (51 words) Adjectives referring to eyes have been divided into 4

groups: words that describe the color characteristics, words that describe characteristics related to vision, words describing eye shape and size, words describing characteristics related to the state of the visual organs Among 70 Vietnamese adjectives, there are 33 adjectives that the corresponding words in English could not be found in dictionary, of which: the group of words describing the characteristics related to the state / emotion has the greatest number: 21 words; then the word group describes eye color: 7 words; the word group for characteristics of shape and size: 4 words; the one related to eye problems: 01 word The number

of English adjectives describing eyes without the corresponding words in

Vietnamese dictionary is 5 words: beady, grey, lazy, sapphire, snow-blind and puffy; in which 3 words belong to the group describing the eye state,

2 words describing eye color, 1 word describing the eye state

In Vietnamese, the number of compound adjectives describing eyes is equal to the number of single –word ones (27 words), the number of repeated –word adjectives is 16 The number of single - word adjectives

in English is much greater than compound words (single – word adjectives: 40, compound adjectives: 11)

in English in which the number of eye filed verbs is bigger than that of the adjectives The difference in the number of words indicates that Vietnamese people are interested in eye state, and the British are interested in eye movements in communication For example, 5 degrees

of the eye color: red are relevant to 5 people‟s different states and

expressions in Vietnamese (hoe - red, or a little bit yellowish, đỏ hoe - red but bright, đỏ kè - red and dark, đỏ nọc/đỏ đọc – red, causing an

unpleasant sensation, with a blood-tinged appearance, looks frightening,

bloodshot - dark red and opaque, causing disliked feeling) English has

only 2 levels of red color for the eyes: red (đỏ) and blood-shot (đỏ ngầu) The Vietnamese verb nhìn has 14 equivalent English words (behold, look,

cast, bore, gawk, gawp, stare, devour, ogle, drop, glower, peek, penetrate, leer) expressing different emotions or attitudes: nhìn = behold/look/cast, nhìn chòng chọc = bore/gawk/gawp/stare, nhìn hau háu = devour/ogle,

The total number of word units in „eye‟ field in Vietnamese and English

is not much different: Vietnamese: 145 words, English: 137 words The

proportion of single-word words and compound ones eye field in Vietnamese is 68 - 54, English is 117 - 19 In both languages, the number

of the single -word is higher than the compound, but in English, the single word account for a much bigger number This proves that Vietnamese has the tendency of using existing lexical units to create new words referring

to concepts and phenomena relating to eyes, this is different in English

2.3 Semantic contrastive analysis on units in ‘eye’ field in Vietnamese and English

2.3.1 Semantic contrastive analysis on units indicating eyes and parts

of eyes in Vietnamese and English

We have carried the analysis on 03 Vietnamese nouns: mắt, mày, mi with the equivalent in English: eye, eyebrow, eyelid, and eyelash

Basing on explanation and seme analysis, it has been discovered that

the seme of the words eye, eyelid, eyelash, and eyebrow all include the seme referring to the location and number of these parts The word eye has the location seme: in the face and either of, eyelid with the seme

above or below and either of, eyelash with on the edge of eyelids and one

of, eyebrow with above the eye and the line of hair Meanwhile, in the

explanation of the Vietnamese words referring to the same eye parts, the

words: mắt, mi there is no seme of location and quantity It can be said

that the British are more interested in location and quantity than Vietnamese people when explaining the words indicating eyes and its parts

It can be seen from the analysis on the derivative meaning of the

words describing the eyes and parts of eyes that, the mắt / eye has the

biggest number of derivative meanings in both languages This proves the importance of eyes in the culture of the two peoples Considering the semantic change, Vietnamese and English have the same meaning The

metaphorical method creates 07 derivative meanings of the word mắt, 08 derivative meanings of the word eye, of which 06 are similar derivatives

in two languages: vision, judging by appearance, observation and judgment way, the eye-shaped protrusive object and the eye-shaped

object Mắt has a metaphorical meaning: Electronic devices have the shape of an eye and can recognize signals, eyes has a derivative meaning

that Vietnamese does not have, that is: the position under the eye The

metaphorical method creates two derivative meanings of the word mắt in combination tai mắt (the person who listens, observes then reports to

someone and the person who will become important in the future), but

does not create any derivative meanings for the word eye Words that

describe the parts of the eye almost have no derivative meanings in either