THE POLYSEMY OF THE ENGLISH VERB OPENCLOSE IN “GONE WITH THE WIND” WITH REFERENCE TO VIETNAMESE

THESIS THE POLYSEMY OF THE ENGLISH VERB OPEN/CLOSE IN “GONE WITH THE WIND” WITH REFERENCE TO VIETNAMESE TÍNH ĐA NGHĨA CỦA ĐỘNG TỪ TIẾNG ANH MỞ/ ĐÓNG TRONG TIỂU THUYẾT “CUỐN THEO CHIỀU

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING

HANOI OPEN UNIVERSITY

M.A THESIS

THE POLYSEMY OF THE ENGLISH VERB OPEN/CLOSE

IN “GONE WITH THE WIND” WITH REFERENCE TO VIETNAMESE

(TÍNH ĐA NGHĨA CỦA ĐỘNG TỪ TIẾNG ANH MỞ/ ĐÓNG TRONG TIỂU THUYẾT “CUỐN THEO CHIỀU GIÓ” CÓ LIÊN HỆ VỚI TIẾNG VIỆT)

NGÔ THỊ PHƯƠNG

Field: English Language Code: 60220201

Hanoi, 2017

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING

HANOI OPEN UNIVERSITY

M.A THESIS

THE POLYSEMY OF THE ENGLISH VERB OPEN/CLOSE

IN “GONE WITH THE WIND” WITH REFERENCE TO VIETNAMESE

(TÍNH ĐA NGHĨA CỦA ĐỘNG TỪ TIẾNG ANH MỞ/ ĐÓNG TRONG TIỂU THUYẾT “CUỐN THEO CHIỀU GIÓ” CÓ LIÊN HỆ VỚI TIẾNG VIỆT)

i

CERTIFICATE OF ORIGINALITY

I, the undersigned, hereby certify my authority of the study project report

entitled, the polysemy of the English verbs open/close in “Gone with the wind” with reference to Vietnamese, submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of Master in English Language Except where the reference is indicated, no other person’s work has been used without due acknowledgement in

the text of the thesis

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 this thesis on request

Hanoi, 2017

Ngô Thị Phương

Approved by SUPERVISOR Assoc Prof Dr Hoang Tuyet Minh Date:………

ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This thesis could not have been completed without the help and support from

a number of people I would like to thank various people who provide me with considerable assistance during the whole journey of the thesis

First of all, I would like to express my sincere thanks and my deepest gratitude to Assoc Prof Dr Hoang Tuyet Minh, my supervisor, for her thorough instruction, precious guidance, ideas and constant encouragement during the time

my research endeavors lasted Without her invaluable support on research methods and her critical comments on my writings, this thesis would have never been completed

A special word of thanks goes to all my classmates and many others, without whose support and encouragement it would never have been possible for me to have this thesis accomplished I am greatly indebted to all my knowledge and understanding I got at Hanoi Open University for their constant support and encouragement

Last but not least, I am greatly indebted to my family, my husband for the sacrifice they have devoted to the fulfillment of this academic work

iii

ABSTRACT

This study is made to analyze the polysemy of the verbs open/close in English with reference to Vietnamese used in the novel “Gone with the wind” by Margaret Mitchell It is a qualitative study that focuses on the verbs open/close of the novel The data used for analysis in this study was gathered by picking up the utterances within conversation and the author started to analyze the data in conducting the

analysis from the polysemy of the verb open/close Afterwards, the author classified

the data into different categories where they belong to and gave a little comment on the cases As a result, the author found to advance an understanding of polysemy in

the semantic field of the two verbs open and close in English with reference to

Vietnamese by using statistic and descriptive method, analytic and synthetic method

to help Vietnamese translators of English use these verbs effectively

Therefore, the researcher feels the self struggle to construct this thesis to try and represent our translation as a result of interacting with a wide diversity of texts has been a rewarding one Hopefully, the study may help the translators of English develop polysemy in their mind as a reference to apply to our own translations

iv

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

Etc: et cetera i.e.: id est

ICMS: Idealized Cognitive Models N: noun

V: verb

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CERTIFICATE OF ORIGINALITY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS II ABSTRACT III LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES V TABLE OF CONTENTS VI CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION I 1.1 Rationale 1

1.2 Aims and objectives of the study 2

1.3.Research questions 2

1.4.Methods of the study 3

1.5.Scope of the study 3

1.6 Significance of the study 4

1.7.Design of the study 5

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 6

2.1.Previous studies 6

2.2 Cognitive linguistics 8

vii

2.2.1 Definition of terms 8

2.2.2 Major principles of cognitive linguistics 9

2.2.3 Cognitive semantics 10

2.3 Polysemy 13

2.4 An overview of verbs 17

2.4.1 Verbs in English 17

2.4.2 Verbs in Vietnamese 19

2.5 An over view on contrastive analysis 20

2.6 Summary 22

CHAPTER 3: THE POLYSEMY OF THE VERB OPEN/CLOSE WITH REFERENCE IN VIETNAMSE FROM COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS……23

3.1 The polysemy of the verb open/close in English 23

3.2 The English verbs open/close and their Vietnamese equivalents 38

3.2.1 Open/close in English corresponds to mở/đóng in Vietnamese 38

3.2.2 Some other Vietnamese equivalents of the English verbs open/close 42

3.3 Comparism between the verb open/close in English and mở/đóng in Vietnamese in terms their meanings 51

3.4.Summary 54

viii

CHAPTER 4: THE TRANSLATION OF THE VERB OPEN/ CLOSE IN “GONE

……… 56

4.1 The English verb open and their Vietnamese equivalents in “gone with the wind” novel 56

4.2 The English verb close and their Vietnamese equivalents in “gone with the wind” story 665

4.3 Suggestions for translators when translating open/ close in English into Vietnamese 75

4.4.Summary 75

CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION 77

5.1.Concluding remarks 77

5.2 Limitation of the study 80

5.3.Suggestions for further study 81

REFERENCES 82

APPENDICES 85

i

1

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1.1 Rationale

The researcher 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 incognitive and computational linguistics, unfortunately, it is still true that polysemy remains a somehow muddy field in linguistic research

Therefore, this study is made to analyze the polysemy of the verbs open/close in English with reference to Vietnamese used in the novel “Gone with the Wind” by Margaret Mitchell It is a qualitative study that focuses on the verbs open/close of the novel The researcher also got the materials from many books and looked for on the internet The relevant data were taken from English novel and its Vietnamese translational versions The data were gathered by picking up the utterances within conversations and the researcher started to analyze the data in conducting the

analysis from the English verbs open/ close with reference to Vietnamese

Afterwards, the researcher classified the data into categories where they belong to and gave a little comment on the cases As a result, the researcher found to advance

an understanding of polysemy in the semantic field of the two verbs open and close

in English with reference to Vietnamese by using statistic and descriptive method, analytic and synthetic method as the major methods and to help Vietnamese translators of English use these verbs effectively

2

For the reasons above, the researcher feels the self-struggle to construct this thesis

to try and represent our learning as a result of interacting with a wide diversity of

texts has been a rewarding one The research entitled: The polysemy of the English verbs open/close in “Gone with the wind” with reference to Vietnamese with

the hope to help translators to develop polysemy in their mind as a reference to

apply to their own translations

1.2 Aims and objectives of the study

The aim of this research is to high light the polysemy of the English verbs open/close in “Gone with the wind” with reference to Vietnamese to help translators use these verbs effectively

Objectives of the study are:

- To examine the semantic features of the verbs open/ close in English with

reference to Vietnamese in “Gone with the wind”

- To give some suggestions for the translators to translate these verbs effectively

3

1.4 Methods of the study

In this thesis, the researcher chose English as the first language and Vietnamese as the second language In addition, in order to achieve the goal, the study will be carried out by the combination of the following methods:

The first method is descriptive method It is used to analyze the data and to obtain a more holistic picture what goes in a particular situation or setting, and then describes the findings as to answer the research questions Therefore, the qualitative approach is employed to describe and analyze the data

The second method is qualitative and quantitative method In this study, the researcher used qualitative research approach because of some characteristics Firstly, the data of this study was in the form of words or utterances that consist of

the verbs open/close by the characters in “Gone with the wind” novel Secondly,

this study used human instrument: the researcher herself as the primary instrument for data collection and data analysis Thirdly, the purpose of this study was to high

light the polysemy of the verbs open/close in English with reference to Vietnamese

to help Vietnamese translators of English use these verbs effectively

1.5 Scope of the study

The study is limited to investigate the polysemy of the two English verbs open and close in the novel “Gone with the wind” with reference to Vietnamese within

semantic theoretical framework The study focused on displaying some major

principles of polysemy of the two verbs open and close to explores and applied the

meanings of them

The relevant data are taken from English novel and its Vietnamese translational versions It is “Gone with the wind” by Margaret Mitchell From this novels and short stories, those examples are quoted, analyzed, and used as the chief source for

comparative and one direction contrastive analysis

4

1.6 Significance of the study

Theoretically, the study helps translators to find out the characteristics of the

polysemy of the verbs open/close in English with reference to Vietnamese Practically, in this thesis, the polysemy of the English verbsopen/close in the novel

"Gone with the wind" with reference to Vietnamese are studied in order to apply

and help translators in the process of translating open/close in English into

Vietnamese effectively

1.7 Design of the study

There are five chapters in this research paper

Chapter 1: Introduction - presents a general introduction to the rationale, significance of the study, aims and objectives, the scope of the study, research questions, methods of the study and design of the study

Chapter 2 - Literature Review - involves some of previous studies This chapter also presents all related theoretical background that precedes and necessitates the formation of the research: an overview on contrastive analysis, a brief description of verbs, cognitive semantics and polysemy

Chapter 3: presents the polysemy of the verbs open/close in English and their Vietnamese equivalents from cognitive linguistics - includes the polysemy of the

verbs open/close in English with prototypical and non-prototypical meanings of open/close; encyclopedic knowledge and meanings of open/close and radial category of open/close The similarities and differences between the verbs open/close in English and mở/đóng in Vietnamese are analyzed in this chapter Chapter 4: identifies the translations of the verbs open and close in the novel “Gone

with the wind”with reference to Vietnamese

5

Chapter 5 – Conclusion - is concerned with the major findings and implications

about the polysemy of the verbs open and close within cognitive semantic

theoretical framework and suggestions for further study

References come at the end of the study

6

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW

In this chapter, a range of fundamental theoretical concepts will be introduced The researcher 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; cognitive linguistics and cognitive semantics theory will be briefly discussed in this chapter, 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 will deal with the traditional treatment of polysemy and polysemy in cognitive linguistics

2.1 Previous studies

Relevant previous studies to the current research are presented in this section The previous findings and discussions play as an evidence of contrastive analysis of

similarities and differences of the polysemy of the verb open and close in English

and their Vietnamese equivalents from the cognitive semantics perspective in terms

of its meaning There have been quite a number of studies on the verb in general Following are some of those which are going to be introduced Up to now, there have been many descriptions of questions by foreign grammarians such as Barcelona (1997), Evans, V and Green, M (2006), Evans et al (2007), Geeraerts, D (1999), and Vietnamese researcher such as Lý Toàn Thắng (2006)

Evans et al (2007) conducted a study on the fields of semantics and pragmatics in English According to the study, cognitive linguistics is the most rapidly expanding school in modern linguistics It aims to create a scientific approach to the study of language, incorporating the tools of philosophy, neuroscience and computer science Cognitive approaches to language were initially based on philosophical thinking about the mind, but more recent work emphasizes the importance of convergent evidence from a broad empirical and methodological base The

7

Cognitive Linguistics Reader brings together the key writings of the last two decades, both the classic foundational pieces and contemporary work The essays and articles - selected to represent the full range, scope and diversity of the Cognitive Linguistics enterprise - are grouped by theme into sections with each section separately introduced The book opens with a broad overview of Cognitive Linguistics designed for the introductory reader and closes with detailed further reading to guide the reader through the proliferating literature The Cognitive Linguistics Reader is both an ideal introduction to the full breadth and depth of Cognitive Linguistics and a single work of reference bringing together the most significant work in the field

Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green (2006) provides up-to-date coverage of all areas

of the field and sets in context recent developments within cognitive semantics (including primary metaphors, conceptual blending and Principled Polysemy), and cognitive approaches to grammar (including Radical Construction Grammar and Embodied Construction Grammar) While all topics are introduced in terms accessible to both undergraduate and postgraduate students, this work is sufficiently comprehensive and detailed to serve as a reference work for scholars from linguistics and neighbouring disciplines who wish to gain a better understanding of cognitive linguistics The study carried out three matters: the cognitive linguistics enterprise; cognitive semantics; and cognitive approaches to grammar In particular, cognitive linguistics is compared and contrasted with formal approaches including Generative Grammar, formal approaches to semantics, and relevance theory

In conclusion, it can be seen that many studies have been conducted on English and Vietnamese cognitive linguistics 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 linguistic, unfortunately, it is still true that polysemy remains a somehow muddy field in linguistic research Polysemy is the term widely used in semantic analysis to

a rewarding one This study has helped translators develop polysemy in our mind as

a referent to apply to our own day-to-day practices and research in communication and translation

2.2 Cognitive linguistics

2.2.1 Definition of terms

Cognitive linguistics (CL) is the study of the relationship between language and the human mind In other words, it is a school of linguistics and cognitive science, which aims to provide accounts of language that mesh well with current understandings of the human mind Workers in this field seek to understand language as it relates to models of human thinking, interpreting language in light of the social and psychological contexts in which it is generated and understood It emerged in the late seventies and early eighties, especially through the work of George Lakoff, one of the founders of Generative Semantics, and Ronald Langacker, also an ex-practitioner of Generative Linguistics As a consequence, this new paradigm could be seen as a reaction against the dominant generative paradigm which pursues an autonomous view of language (Ruiz de Mendoza, 1997)

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 (1981), Casad, Croft, Gilles Fauconnier, Mark Johnson (1987), George Lakoff (1987), Ronald Langacker (1987), Lindner, Eve Sweetser, Leonard Talmy, Tuggy, and Mark Turner

9

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

“Experiential 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

2.2.2 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 uninterested 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

10

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 experience (Barcelona, 1997:9)

2.2.3 Cognitive semantics

2.2.3.1 Definition

As the reseacher mentioned earlier, cognitive linguistics is not a uniform framework but rather a combination of approaches that share common principles Cognitive linguistics practice can be roughly divided into two main areas of research: cognitive semantics and cognitive (approaches to) grammar Although the study of cognitive semantics and the one of cognitive grammar are occasionally separate in practice, their domains of inquiry are tightly linked The area of study known as cognitive semantics, one of the two best-developed areas of cognitive linguistics, is concerned with investigating the relationship between experience, the conceptual system, and the semantic structure encoded by language It began in the 1970s as 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

11

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

2.2.3.2 Guiding principles of cognitive semantics

Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green (2006:157) identify four guiding principles that collectively characterize the collection of approaches that fall within cognitive semantics in their book) Conceptual structure is embodied (the ‘embodied cognition thesis’); ii) Semantic structure is conceptual structure; iii) Meaning representation is encyclopedic; 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

12

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 (Evan et al., 2006:159)

The third guiding principle holds that semantic structure is encyclopedic in nature This means that lexical concepts do not represent a complete package of meaning as

we may see in a dictionary “Rather, they serve as “points of access” to vast repositories of knowledge relating to a particular concept or conceptual domain” (Langacker, 1987) although words have conventional meanings associated with them Nevertheless, in order to understand the meaning of a particular linguistic unit, apart from the conventional meaning associated with 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)

13

To sum up, this data plays as a theoretical basis for comparison in this chapter 3

They are differences and similarities between the verb open and close in English

with reference to Vietnamse

2.3 Polysemy

2.3.1 The traditional treatment of polysemy

The meaning of language is the center of human communication, and the study of it has a long history in the philosophy of language, linguistics, psychology, and literature Polysemy is an ordinary linguistic phenomenon, which is the result of word meanings extension With the development of the society, old words die out, new words are added, and existing words change their meanings Actually, adding new meanings to the already-existing words is the most economical way to satisfy people’s needs of expression, which is simpler and more convenient than creating new words or borrowing words from other languages With the passage of time, the primary meaning and extended meanings coexist in the language To study polysemous words, it is very necessary to know the relation between the primary meaning and extended meanings, how the extended meanings derive from the primary meaning and what the core meaning is

The term polysemy is derived from the Greek poly- meaning many and semi

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:

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

15

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 The result of this section is finding out the semantic features of the traditional treatment of polysemy and provides information for the next following section

2.3.2 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 polysemysenses

16

There have been multiple lines of research that have sought to investigate the lexical structures of polysemywords 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 polysemy 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 polysemywords 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)

of any of the word classes.According to Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (2005),verb is “a group or a group of words that expresses an action, an event, or a state Verb is a word which occurs as part of the predicate of a sentence: carries markers of grammatical categories such as tense, aspect, person, number, and mood; and refers to an action or state” (Cambridge dictionary.com)

According to Levin (1993), verbs are put into 23 different classes based on their patternsofalternation

Biber D et al in “Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English”] classifies verbs by semantic domains

18

According to Miller and Charles (1991)verbs are divided into 15 files largely based onsemantic criteria Among the classification above, the classification by Biber D et al seems to be the most reasonable for this paper Therefore, in this

paper, it is taken for the background of the study

We often think of the verb as being the heart of the sentence because verb 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,2008) We can identify verbs on the basis of semantic, structural, and morphological clues

A word, in Jack’s 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

On the other hand, Douglas Biber et al (2007, Grammar of Spoken and Written English) states 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 valiancy patterns (copular,

verb open and close is lexical verbs represent actions

2.4.2 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 đọcsách / Anh ấy viết thư

(2) Tôi yêu Hà Nội / Nó nhớnhà / 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

20

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 vỡ

2.5 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 anthropologistBenjamin 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

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):

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

(ii) To compare the two languages item-wise-item at all levels of their structure

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

2.6 Summary

In this section, approaches to polysemy were 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

23

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

24

CHAPTER 3: THE POLYSEMY OF THE VERB OPEN/CLOSEWITH

REFERENCE IN VIETNAMSE FROM COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS

3.1 The polysemy of the verb open/close in English

3.1.1 Prototypical and non-prototypical meanings of open/close

A word is understood as polysemy if all its multiple meanings are systematically related The relation between the different polysemysenses 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 polysemy in itself It needs the help of the semantic content of other lexical items in order to obtain those polysemy 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 Prototypical meanings of the verbsopen and close

3.1.1.1.1 Prototypical meanings of the verb open

The first sense of open istoseparatetheedegesof something, ortotakeoffitscoversothatyoucanseeorremovewhatisinside As for instance examples (1), (2), (3) show:

(1) Sheopenedhershopping bag andtookoutan umbrella

(2) Canyouopenthisjam jar?

25

(3)Openyourbooksat page 25

(Macmillan Dictionary and Thesaurus)

itmovesintoitswidestpositionandyoucanseeitsfullshape in the following example:

(3) Myparachutefailedtoopen and I nearly died!

The second sense of this verb is exemplified in (4) (5) It meanstomoveadoororwindowintoappositionthatallowspeopleorthingstopassthrough

(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, 2005, 90) Ifsomethingsuchasadooropens,

itmovesintoappositionthatallowspeopleorthingstopassthrough in the following example:

(6) The door opened again, and the cold wind suddenly gusted through the

26

(Macmillan Dictionary and Thesaurus) The third physical sense is introduced as tomoveyourarmsorlegswideapart, tomoveyourlipsandteethapart, tomoveyoureyelidsapart or tomakeyourfingersstraightsothat 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

(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.Prototypical meanings of the verb close

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

movetocoveranopenarea’ Ifyouclosesomething, orifitcloses, itmovestocoveranopenarea:

(12)Closethedoorquietlybehindyou

(13)Didthefridgedoorclosecompletely?

(14) Hermouthclosedafteramomentandshesaidnothing

27

(Macmillan Dictionary and Thesaurus)

(15) I didn't even have time to close my eyes

(Twilight, 2005, 29)

A further development of this meaning is that close can also be understood as

tomovetogetherthepartsofsomethingthatwasspreadtoitsfullsize as in (16):

(16) He was as much awake to the novelty of attention in that quarter as

Elizabeth herself could be, and unconsciously closed his book

(Pride and Prejudice, 45)

(Macmillan Dictionary and Thesaurus)

(19) She closed her hand tightly over his

3.1.1.2 Non-prototypical extended meanings of the verbsopen/close

In this section, the author wasanalyzed the non-prototypical meanings of the two

verbs open/close in English Non-prototypical meanings are all those extended

meanings, both physical and metaphorical, that these verbs can convey apart from the central prototypical meaning Traditionally, these extended meanings are mentioned in terms of metaphoric and metonymic senses Based on the linguistic framework of Cognitive Linguistics, it is argued that these semantic extensions

28

were not the result of chance, but that they were grounded in our experience of the senses themselves Moreover, the extended meanings are also obtained by the interaction of the semantic content of both the verb and its complements The role

of the semantics of both the verb and its complements in the overall meaning of a sentence is not the same in all extended meanings; in some cases, the verb is more important and in some other cases, the complements are

Due to the vast number of extended meanings which relate physical activity with the intellect or mental activity, we have organized them into different groups

3.1.1.2.1 Non-prototypical extended meanings of the verbopen

It can be said that the most familiar extended meaning of open is ‘to become

available to use, to visit or to see’ This range of meanings would be discussed with

a detailed description in each particular case

First, ifa shop or a publicbuilding, etc opensataparticulartime, orifsomeoneopensit, itregularlybecomesavailableforpeopletovisitoruseatthattime This meaning is illustrated as follows:

(20) Thelibrary doesn’topentill 9.30

(21)I’mcallingtoaskwhenyouopentoday

(Macmillan Dictionary and Thesaurus)

Second, ifanewbusiness, building, etc opens, orifsomeoneopensit, itbecomesavailableforpeopletouseforthefirsttime as in the following examples:

(22) TheydecidedtomovetoSpain andopenabar

(23)Thecollegefirstopenedinthe1960s

(Macmillan Dictionary and Thesaurus)

29

Third, if something that has been private orsecretopens, orif someone opensittopeople, itbecomes available for people to visit, see, ortakepartin This meaning is specified in some following categories:

- Open something to someone:

(24)Thereareplanstoopenthegardenstothepublic

(Macmillan Dictionary and Thesaurus)

- Open something to competition/inspection/scrutiny:

(25)Thetelecommunicationsmarkethasbeenopeneduptocompetition

(Macmillan Dictionary and Thesaurus)

- Open your doors/gates to someone:

(26)Thefarmeropenshisgatestovisitorsduringthelambing season

(Macmillan Dictionary and Thesaurus)

Fourth, if a film or play opens, itstartsbeingshowntothepublic so that people can have a chance to see: