A contrastive analysis of syntactic structures employed in describing trends in english and vietnamese business articles

Phạm thị hà trangA contrastive analysis of syntactic structures employed in describing trends in English and Vietnamese business articles phân tích đối chiếu cấu trúc ngữ pháp dùng trong

Phạm thị hà trang

A contrastive analysis of syntactic structures employed in describing trends in English and Vietnamese business articles

(phân tích đối chiếu cấu trúc ngữ pháp dùng trong mô tả chiều h-ớng trong

các bài báo th-ơng mại tiếng anh và tiếng việt)

MA Minor thesis Major: Linguistics Code: 60.22.15

Hà nội - 2009

Phạm thị hà trang

A contrastive analysis of syntactic structures employed in describing trends in English and Vietnamese business articles

(phân tích đối chiếu cấu trúc ngữ pháp dùng trong mô tả chiều h-ớng trong

các bài báo th-ơng mại tiếng anh và tiếng việt)

MA Minor thesis Major: Linguistics Code: 60.22.15 Supervisor:Đinh Hải Yến, M.A

Hà nội - 2009

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page PART I - INTRODUCTION

1 Rationale of the study 1

2 Aims of the study 2

3 Scope of the study 2

4 Methodology of the study 3

5 Design of the study 3

PART II - DEVELOPMENT Chapter 1: Literature Review 1.1 Contrastive Analysis and Transfer Theory 5

1.1.1 Contrastive Analysis 5

1.1.2 Language transfer and its influence on foreign language teaching and learning 6 1.2 Syntax and syntactic structures 7

1.2.1 Syntax 7

1.2.2 Syntactic structures 9

1.2.2.1 Definition 9

1.2.2.2 Categories 10

1.3 Journalistic register 15

1.4 Trend description in English and Vietnamese 17

Chapter 2: A contrastive analysis of syntactic structures used in describing trends in English and Vietnamese business articles 2.1 An overview on the business and economic newspapers used in the contrastive analysis 19

2.1.1 The English business newspapers 20

2.1.2 The Vietnamese business newspapers 21

2.2 A contrastive analysis of syntactic structures used in describing trends in English and Vietnamese business articles 22

2.2.1 Clause structures 22

2.2.1.1 Clause structures in general trend description 22

2.2.1.2 Clause structures in terms of movements 29

2.2.1.3 Summary 33

2.2.2 Phrase structures 33

2.2.2.1 Verb phrase 33

2.2.2.2 Noun phrase 35

2.2.2.3 Prepositional phrase 36

2.2.2.4 Adjective phrase 37

2.2.2.5 Adverb phrase 38

2.2.2.6 Summary 39

2.3 Conclusion 39

Chapter 3: Implications and recommendations 3.1 For translation: difficulties in translating syntactic structures used in describing trends from English into Vietnamese and vice versa and some recommendations 40 3.2 For teaching students to describe charts and graphs in English 41

3.2.1 Students’ difficulties in describing trends, the causes and recommendations to improve the situations 41

3.2.2 Suggested exercises for practising to describe charts and graphs 43

PART III - CONCLUSION 1 Review of the study 45

2 Conclusion 45

3 Suggestions for further research 46

References 47

LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES

8 Table 8 Adverb phrase patterns used in describing trends in

English and Vietnamese business articles (p.38)

3 Figure 3 Clause patterns used in describing downward movement

in English and Vietnamese business newspapers (p.30)

4 Figure 4 Clause patterns used in describing stability in English andVietnamese articles (p.32)

PART I - INTRODUCTION

1 Rationale for the study

As Heraclitus (540 BC – 480 BC), a Greek philosopher, once said ‘nothing endures butchange’, the world we live in today is the world of changes and development – the world

of trends It is therefore necessary to keep pace with the flow of life everyday by gatheringchangeable information about that world Here comes the indispensable role of massmedia in general and newspapers in particular As Tom E Rolnicki, C Dow Tate and

Sherri Taylor (2001) remark in their book Scholastic Journalism ‚Immediacy or timeliness

is the most essential element of most news‛ (p.8), thus we are updated, thanks tonewspapers, with latest news about stock markets, unemployment rate, trends ofconsumer spending or cases of bankruptcy somewhere in the world etc

Given that English is an international language, there are a vast number ofnewspapers printed in English regardless of the countries of origin Together with

famous newspapers in America or Britain like International Herald Tribute, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, The Guardian etc., we also have Business Standard from India, China Daily from China, Vietnam News from Vietnam, Business Day from South

Africa and so on The domination of English as a common language of newspapers isgreater and greater, which has gradually been eradicating our knowledge barriers

As a teacher of Business English, it is compulsory for me to read English newspapers, magazines or journals regularly, especially business ones in order to keep me updated and help me understand more about journalistic register What is more, I can enrich my Business English vocabulary and expressions as well as exploit a potential source of teaching materials Consequently, my lessons can be more informative and lively In fact, one of my concerns while meditating English business articles is the structures used in describing trends The upward and downward movements appear to be more and more interesting as I take further steps into investigating them The syntactic structures seem to be varied with a

great deal of significant organizations The flexible semantic features in English trend

descriptions are worth being paid attention to as well There is a variety of words and expressions to denote the movements, which adds much color into a piece of news.

In addition, the syntactic structures used in describing trends play an integral part during the course of my Business English teaching at Vietnam National University, College of Economics Course books like Business English, Market Leader or English for Business Communication contains activities such as writing reports, making presentations or describing charts or graphs, which requires my students a considerable knowledge in using such structures to produce correct and appropriate texts or utterances English business articles, to my mind, can serve as a fertile land to be cultivated for the sake of describing trends Teachers can employ business articles to design a lot of activities and exercises relating to describing changes for students as the way

Peter Grundy (1993) does in his resource book Newspapers.

Finally, it is my curiosity to explore the differences and similarities between syntacticstructures used in describing trends in English and Vietnamese business articles Forone thing, I could diagnose the difficulties my students may encounter when usingsuch structures due to language transference Thus, remedies would be prescribedtimely and properly For the other, I hope to apply some of the findings into improvingthe accuracy and appropriateness in translation works

2 Aims of the study

This research is directed to accomplish three goals:

-To investigate the syntactic structures used in describing trends in English and in Vietnamese from the perspective of traditional grammar

-To make a contrastive analysis between English and Vietnamese syntactic structures used in describing trends in business articles to deduce their differences and similarities

- To propose some pedagogical implications for better teaching and learning of describing charts or graphs and some recommendations for more effective translation works

3 Scope of the study

Due to the constraint of time and effort, the study only investigates the English and Vietnamese syntactic structures on the levels of clauses and phrases

Also, as suggested in the title of the thesis, the object of the research is narrowed down to syntactic structures used in trend description in business news The trends are either concerned with specific statistics and figures or with general remarks about changes or tendency.

The resources of the analysis are English and Vietnamese business articles frombusiness and economic newspapers

4 Methodology of the study

As the title of the thesis suggests, the study is aimed at comparing and contrasting the syntactic structures used in describing trends in English and Vietnamese business articles; therefore, three methods namely descriptive, comparative and contrastive are employed.

By descriptive method, a systemic list of structures used to describe trends in businessarticles will be presented Their syntactic features will be shown explicitly Comparativeand contrastive methods enable the author to discover the similarities and differencesbetween structures used in describing trends in the two journalistic languages

The basic process of the research is as follows Firstly, four English and four Vietnamesebusiness and economics newspapers are chosen with two copies each Three articles aretaken from each copy, so in total forty-eight articles are selected for the examination.Then the samples are thoroughly analyzed, calculated in percentage and put into charts

or tables in order to find out the prominent syntactic structures frequently used indescribing trends in the two languages Next, English and Vietnamese syntacticstructures are contrasted to highlight the similarities and differences between the twogroups The findings of this process are finally applied into improving English-Vietnamesetranslation and teaching students how to describe charts and graphs effectively

5 Design of the study

The thesis is divided into three main parts namelyIntroduction, Developmentand

Conclusion.

In the first part of the study, the author introduces the reasons for choosing the topic, theobjectives to be obtained in conducting the research, the scope of the study, the methodsemployed to facilitate the realization of the paper and the design of the study

The second part, Development, is the focus of the thesis, to which most time and effort are

devoted This part consists of three chapters In the first chapter, Literature Review, the writer

presents the theoretical background knowledge about contrastive analysis, syntax and syntactic structures, journalistic register and trend description in books and newspapers These will serve

as a springboard for the writer to dash into the exploration of the topic The next chapter, A

contrastive analysis of syntactic structures used in describing trends in English and

Vietnamese business articles, studies the syntactic structures i.e clauses and phrases used to describe changes in English and Vietnamese business articles.

Similarities and differences are accordingly presented with a view to the data shown

in charts and tables The last chapter, Implications and recommendations is a practical application one because the outcome of the contrastive analysis will be used

to improve English Vietnamese translation of trend description as well as helpingstudents how enhance their skills of describing charts and graphs in English

Lastly, the Conclusion part includes a review of the study, some concluding remarks

and suggestions for further research

PART II - DEVELOPMENT

CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW

In this chapter, some basic theoretical issues related to contrastive analysis, syntacticstructures, news language and trend description will be reviewed to form a theoreticalframework for the next chapter First, the history of contrastive analysis and theory oflanguage transfer will be revisited Then an overview on English and Vietnamese syntaxand syntactic structures in comparison will be provided Also, journalistic register with itsparticular characteristics and types will be briefly mentioned Last is a description of thelanguage of trend and trend description in books and mass media of communication

1.1 Contrastive analysis and transfer theory

1.1.1 Contrastive analysis

Contrastive analysis (CA), according to Richards (1992:83), is simply ‚the comparison

of the linguistic systems of two languages, for example the sound system or thegrammatical system.‛

Comparatively, the definition put forward by James seems to be more specific, ‚CA is

a linguistic enterprise aimed at producing inverted (i.e contrastive, not comparative)two-valued typologies (a CA is always concerned with a pair of languages), andfounded on the assumption that languages can be compared.‛ (1980:3)

Ellis points out that CA derived from the need to teach a L2 in the most effective way

or in other words, the origins of Contrastive Analysis ‚were pedagogic‛ (1985:23).Evidently, when making a comparison between the foreign language and the nativelanguage of the students, teachers can identify their actual difficulties in learning anew language and find out suitable solutions to accommodate the teaching work,according to Lado (1957) as quoted in Ellis (1985:23)

As far as the history of CA is concerned, an early example of CA was found by Di Pietro (1971:9) in C H Grandgent’s book on the German and English sound systems, published in

1892 (James, 1980:8) James also cites another milestone document paving the way

to modern CA, which is Lado’s Linguistics across Cultures (1957)

Richards states that this branch of linguistics was developed and practiced in the 1950s and 1960s and is based on the following assumptions:

a the main difficulties in learning a new language are caused by

interference from the first language

b these difficulties can be predicted by contrastive analysis

c teaching materials can make use of contrastive analysis to reduce the effects of interference (1992:83)

Characteristically, James (1980) believes that ‚CA belongs to interlanguage study, and, since

‘emergence’ is an evolutionary concept, it follows that CA is to be viewed as diachronic rather than synchronic in orientation.‛ (1980:3) Also, he points out the relation between CA and language learning, especially foreign language learning, ‚CA is concerned with the way in which native language affects foreign language learning in the individual ‛ (1980:9)

1.1.2 Language transfer and its influence on foreign language teaching and learning

The idea of language transfer started from the post war years and continued its influence into the 1960s It was defined by Ellis (1965) as ‚the hypothesis that the learning of task A will affect the subsequent learning of task B‛ (Quoted in James, 1980:11) At that time, it was strongly believed that ‘most of the difficulties facing the L2 learner were imposed by his or her first language.‛ (Ellis, 1985:6) Specifically, where there were differences between the L1 and L2, the learner’s L1 knowledge would interfere with the L2, and where the L1 and L2 were similar, the L1 would actively aid L2 learning (Ellis, 1985:7) Therefore, by identifying the similarities and differences between L1 and L2, teachers might find the ways to make use of the positive transfer and eliminate the negative transfer during students’ learning process Odlin presents similar ideas while claiming that "teaching may become more effective through

a consideration of differences between languages and between cultures." (2000:4) Also, according to this author, research on language transfer may result in goals other than pedagogical ones, for example, "For historical linguists, such knowledge can lead to insights about the relation between language contact and language change." (2000:4)

Controversially, some inappropriateness and irrationality in language transfer theory hasbeen found up to now The findings of some researchers such as Dulay and Burt (1973;1974a) question the role of negative transfer as a major factor in the process of secondlanguage acquisition A great number of grammatical errors could not be explained by L1interference (Ellis, 1985:7) However, it is a matter of fact that language transferinherently takes place in various aspects of linguistics such as discourse, semantics,phonetics and phonology and syntax Studies in language transfer still play a crucial role

in improving second language teaching and learning With a view to the thesis’sobjectives, the author focuses on syntactic transfer i.e the transfer happening in studies

of word order, relative clauses, and negation etc (Odlin, 2000:85)

Within the scope of the paper, the investigation will deem to cover the similarities anddifferences between syntactic features of English and Vietnamese phrases andclauses in business newspapers

1.2 Syntax and syntactic structure

1.2.1 Syntax

As implied in the title of the thesis, a study on syntax and syntactic structures is one of the research targets to be aimed at Syntax together with lexicon, morphology, semantics, phonetics and phonology compose of grammar of a language (Fromkin et al, 2000:7) In other words, it is an integral part of grammar in particular and linguistics in general As a result, linguists and grammarians have put a lot of efforts and time into cultivating this appealing field In the early 1950s, ‘approaches to syntax subsequently formalized as phrase structure grammar’ (Borsley, 1999:10) Modern syntax originates itself from Transformation Grammar

approach specified in the book Syntactic Structures written by Noam Chomsky (1957) Since

then, Chomsky has reinforced his dominance in syntax study by many other related theories

presented in books such as Aspect of the Theory of Syntax (1965), Lectures on Government and Binding (1981) or A minimalist program for linguistic theory (1993) Together with the

founder of modern Syntactic Theory, Pollard and Sag were also great authors who put more colors to the syntax mosaic with their so-called Phrase Structure Grammar in the books

Information-based Syntax and Semantics Volume I: Fundamentals (1987) and driven phrase structure grammar (1994).

Head-Evidently, syntax has quite a long history of independent development and has been

an indefinite source of inspiration for grammarians and linguists A preliminaryquestion is then put forward, ‘what is syntax?’

To put it simply, according to Delahunty and Garvey (1994), ‚the word ‘syntax’, in its root sense, means ‘arranging together’ The –tax root is the same one as in tactics Syn means ‘with’ or

‘together’ Syntax concerns the combining of words into phrases and sentences.‛ (p.175)

Miller (2002) asserts that ‚syntax has to do with how words are put together to buildphrases, with how phrases are put together to build clauses or bigger phrases, and withhow clauses are put together to build sentences.‛ (p.xiii) He also emphasizes that wordsalone cannot help us communicate easily and effectively Syntax has an indispensablerole to play ‚because without syntax human beings would be unable to construct complexmessages conveying information about complex situations, proposals or ideas‛ (p.134)

In his book English Syntax, Jacob (1995) defines syntax as ‚the grammatical

principles, units, and relations involved in sentence structure.‛ (p.4) This body of rulesand principles governs the way people produce sentences grammatically andacceptably in their own language even if they are aware of it or not

Fromkin et al (2000) confirms the above idea by defining syntax as a part of ourlinguistic knowledge that decides what constitutes a well-formed string of words andhow to put words together to form phrases and sentences The grammaticality andungrammaticality can be differentiated through the two following examples:

Lear had three daughters

*Had three Lear daughters (p.8)Obviously, native speakers or learners of English will notice at once that the second isill-formed and thus ungrammatical

Though Universal Grammar approach suggests that there is a common set ofgrammar and linguistic knowledge in human brain, syntax varies from one language

to another This acceptable rule in this language is unacceptable in another language.Let us consider the following English and Vietnamese examples:

The oil price has increased.

Giá dầu đã tăng lên.

The two given statements have the same message but the forms are slightly different In English, the order of compound nouns is opposite to that in Vietnamese Thus, we can notice

in the former sentence, ‘oil’ stands before ‘price’ but in the latter, the order is reversed.

In summary, syntax is the arrangements of phrases, clauses or sentences to produce utterances and text acceptably and grammatically basing on particular rules of a language Beside the shared components of universal grammar, different languages exhibit distinctive syntactic characteristics Therefore, contrastive analysis always has a role to play in this field.

1.2.2 Syntactic structures

1.2.2.1 Definition

According to Richards et al (1992), syntactic structures are defined as ‚the arrangement

of words and morphemes into larger units (phrases, clauses, and sentences) Languagesmay be compared for differences in syntactic structures.‛ (p.369)

Fromkin et al (2000) believe that ‚ linguists posit the existence of rules of syntax in the unconscious mental grammar, which specify how words may be combined with each other to produce grammatical, well-formed sentences.‛ (p.90) She also points out that there exist two fundamental properties governing the syntactic organization of natural languages namely constituent structure and syntactic dependencies The latter includes selection, case, agreement, movement, negative polarity item licensing and antecedent/ reflexive relations As can be seen from the two definitions, both Richards and Fromkin pay attention to the arrangement or combination of words to produce grammatical units However, Richards specifies further the components of a syntactic structure (words, morphemes, phrases, clauses and sentences) whereas Fromkin only mentions words and sentences It is also important to know that Richards’s definition is an entry taken from his dictionary of language teaching and applied linguistics while Fromkin’s idea is elaborated as part of a book about linguistics Thus, Fromkin provides a deeper understanding of syntactic structures and their characteristics Meanwhile, Jacob (1995) makes a specific investigation into English syntax through three

organizations, sentence structures, clause structures and phrase structures He indicatesthree basic properties of sentence structure namely linearity, hierarchy and categoriality.

To conclude, syntactic structures demonstrate a relationship between words and largerunits such as phrases, clauses and sentences They also own fundamental propertieslike constituent structure (or linearity and hierachy), selection (or categoriality), case etc

1.2.2.2 Categories

Basically, there are three classes of syntactic structures including phrases, clausesand sentences However, within the scope of the thesis, only the first two types aregoing to be examined

a Phrases

Richards (1992) states that a phrase ‚is a group of words which form a grammatical unit‛ and ‚does not contain a finite verb and does not have a subject-predicate structure.‛ (p.153) Delahunty and Garvey (1994) show their disagreement with the traditional

definition of a phrase by suggesting arguments against the propositions that can cause misleading interpretation First, they argue that a phrase is not necessarily a group of words; it can be one single word For example, ‘birds’ and ‘most of the members of the genus avis’ in the two sentences below have the same function:

‘Birds fly.’

‘Most of the members of the genus avis fly.’ (p.176)

They are both subjects of the sentences and can both be considered as noun phrases Second, when stating that a phrase does not contain a verb and a subject-predicate structure, we fall into defining clauses and phrases in terms of each other Consequently, they give their own adjusted definition of a phrase as ‚a group of one or more words that combine to create a unified grammatical structure, e.g an NP, a VP, a PP, etc.‛ (1994: p 255)

These two authors discuss five major types of phrases in English including Noun phrase,Verb phrase, Adjective phrase, Adverb phrase and Prepositional phrase, among whichNoun phrase and Verb phrase are paid more attention to (1994:175-204)

A noun phrase, according to Delahunty and Garvey (1994), ‘must contain a headword’(which is a noun) and may include a premodifier and a postmodifier (p.181) Itsformula can be realized in four following possibilities:

Head

Premodifier(s) + Head

Head + Postmodifier(s)

Premodifier(s) + Head + Postmodifier(s) (p.181)

A verb phrase, with a verb as its head, has five formula possibilities as follows:

Head

Auxiliary (ies) + Head

Head + Object(s)/Complement

Head + Modifier(s)

 Combinations of the above(p.191)

A prepositional phrase has a simple functional formula: Head + Object with a

preposition as the head and a noun phrase as the object (p.177)

An adjective phrase with an adjective as the head belongs four formula possibilities below:

Head

Intensifier(s) + Head

Head + Complement

Intensifier(s) + Head + Complement (p.179)

The final category is adverb phrase which contain a head adverb and an optional intensifier Its formula possibilities are

main-subordinate (such as của, cho, bằng, do, vì, để, mà, ở, tại, với, về, trong, ngoài, trên d-ới,

nh-) and those that indicate equal relations (và, với, cùng, hay, thì, chứ etc.) (2007:132)

Also, Diep Quang Ban (2007) categorizes phrases into five types namely Noun phrasewith a noun as the head, Verb phrase with a verb as the head, Adjective phrase with anadjective as the head, Numeral phrase with a numeral as the head and Pronoun phrasewith a pronoun as the head (pp.15-16)Obviously, the first three types are similar with theEnglish categorization and the rest are different From my personal viewpoint, it is better ifnumeral phrase and pronoun phrase are included in noun phrase to avoid confusion.Meanwhile, Doan Thien Thuat (2006) presents only three types of Vietnamese phrases namely Noun phrase, Verb phrase and Adjective phrase The first type is defined as ‚a free combination of a noun nucleus and one or more subordinate elements which are of two types: front elements and end elements.‛ (p.100) Let us take a look at the following examples:

A clause, according to Richards (1992), is ‘a group of words which form a grammaticalunit and which contain a subject and a finite verb A clause forms a sentence or part of asentence and often functions as a noun, adjective, or adverb.‛ (p.53) He also mentionstwo types of clause namely dependent and independent clauses.

Delahunty and Garvey (1994) suggest that ‚Clauses are combinations of two phrases,specifically an NP and a VP, that are grammatically and semantically related to eachother.‛ (p.255) They put clause patterns into eight types in accordance with the type ofthe main verb in verb phrases

(1) Intransitive: Subject Verb Head(2) Simple transitive: Subject Verb Head(3) Subject complement: Subject Verb Head(4) Object complement: Subject Verb Head Direct Object Object

Complement

(5) Indirect Object: Subject Verb Head Indirect Object Direct Object

(6) Recipient/benefactive: Subject Verb Head Direct Object Recipient(7) Location: Subject Verb Head Direct Object Location

(8) Passive: Subject Be Verb Head Agentive phrase

Quirk and Greenbaum (1973) classify clauses into seven types with reference to the main elements S, V, O, C, A as follows:

Regarding clauses in Vietnamese, in the book ‚Vietnamese Grammar – Volume 2‛, DiepQuang Ban (2008) implies that considering a clause (Subject-Predicate composition) asthe basic syntactic structure of a sentence is not reasonable because it may exclude the

‘special simple sentence’ (bearing no Subject-Predicate combination) Another reason isthat using ‘clause’ concept may cause confusion while distinguishing simple, complex andcompound sentence (2008:107) Thus, he takes two-component simple sentence as thesyntactic unit The hierarchy of sentence construction includes sentence nucleus (subject+ predicate), sentence frame (nucleus + subordinate elements such as adverbials,thematic parts, particles etc.) and other parts namely conjunctions and annotation Hesuggests 12 types of sentence patterns as follows:

(1) Noun + là (be) + Noun

(2) Noun + bằng (in) + Noun (material)

(3) Noun + tại, do, bởi (due to/ because of) + Noun

(4) Noun + để (for) + Noun or Subject-Predicate

(5) Noun + của (of) + Noun or Subject-Predicate

(6) Noun + Adjective (quality)

(7) Noun + Verb (relation)

(8) Noun + Verb (modality)

(9) Noun + Verb (intransitive)

(10)Noun + Verb (transitive)

(11)Noun + Verb or Adjective (result/ consequence)

(12)Noun + Verb (command)

(p.128)

In the book ‚English and Vietnamese syntax: A contrastive analysis‛, Tran Huu Manh(2007:388) demonstrates numerous similarities and differences in the two syntactic systems among which are the shared Vietnamese clause/sentence types with 7 patterns presented in A University Grammar of English by Quirk and Greenbaum (1973) Apart from the similarities

in English and Vietnamese clause types, Tran Huu Manh also specifies some differences For instance, the Vietnamese pattern S + C (a noun phrase or an adjective phrase) is sometimesequivalent to the English pattern S + V + C

E.g Anh ta ng-ời Thanh Hóa đấy (He_ person Thanh Hoa)

(We elect him be chairman three terms of office continual)

~ We elected him our chairman for three running terms of office

SVOC

(2007:390)

These typical constructions in Vietnamese clauses lead to the assertion by some expertssuch as Nguyen Tai Can and N Stankievich that the number of Vietnamese clause typescan be up to nine or ten (2007:391), not just seven patterns like in English.

In brief, there exist different viewpoints from linguists in researching English and Vietnamese clause constructions Nevertheless, in this thesis, only seven clause types will be referred to while the contrastive analysis is carried out to avoid overlapping cases and confusion.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/news ; news is ‘the presentation of a report on recent or new events in a newspaper or other periodicals or on radio or television.’ Also, in the book

Professional Journalist by John Hohenberb (1972), news is defined as ‘a recent happening or

idea that can relates to or affect the majority of a community and can be understood by them‛ (p.76) [Quoted in Nguyen Thi Thoa (2008:8)] We can assume from these definitions that news is recent, changeable, various and have some impact on a certain group of people.

As far as news language is concerned, Nguyen Thi Thoa (2008:35) proposes that

‚news language includes a system of morphology, words, active and stative images,sound signals etc and the rules of combining them used by journalists as the means

to express the contents, topics and ideology of a journalistic product‛

The author introduces three main characteristics of news language namely accuracy,conciseness and emotiveness Accuracy means that language must reflect the truth atcertain moments, in certain contexts The second feature, conciseness, is guaranteedwith careful word choice as well as coherent expressions to meet the needs of busyreaders Emotiveness can be interpreted as using language effectively to express ofthe writer’s opinions and feelings to a certain event (2008: 36-37)

Rolniki (2001) shares the first two characteristics of journalistic style, i.e accuracy and conciseness with Nguyen Thi Thoa (2008) He put a special emphasis on the accuracy of news ‚News must be accurate Factual accuracy means that every statement, name and date, age and address, and quotation is a verifiable fact.‛ In order to obtain accuracy, news reporters must ‚check every note‛ and ‚learn to question sources carefully‛ (2001:6) Besides, news writing should be concise and clear to reach the average audience although the news writer can still make it lively and personally creative (2007:7) However, this author shows a different point of view from Nguyen Thi Thoa (2008) in that news must be ‚balanced‛; ‚Balance

in a news story is a matter of emphasis and completeness.‛ (2001:6) Rolniki also focuses on the objectiveness of news writing though admits that this feature is often difficult to master as the personal opinion can ‚easily interfere with factual presentation in stories about which strong biases are held.‛ (2001:7) The last feature that Rolniki mentions is the intermediacy of news ‚timeliness is of great importance in this era of fast communication.‛ (2001:8)

In addition, Vu Quang Hao claims that news should be standardized but at the sametime personally creative to appeal to the audience and build up the distinctiveness injournalists’ writing styles (2009:12)

Besides, news language is considered to be a product of culture Reah (2002) confirms that

"Newspapers are cultural artifacts The print media of different countries and different cultures differ in a variety of ways." (p.54) The difference may lie in writers’ beliefs, thoughts, ways of reasoning, style of writing, and, more importantly, language Language, in Reah’s opinion, is a channel of communication in which messages encoded with emotional and cultural values are transmitted (2002:55) Consequently, when we study news language in a particular country,

we can feel the touch of its own culture "Everything that is written in a newspaper has to be transmitted through the medium of language The transmission of a message through language almost of necessity encodes values into the message Language gathers its own emotional and cultural 'loading'." (Reah, 2002: 55)

To sum up, journalistic register can be said to possess eight traits namely accuracy, conciseness, balance, objectiveness, standardized, distinctiveness, immediacy and bearing cultural aspects These features should serve as the criteria for the process of evaluating the

language in general and the syntax of any business newspaper articles in particular In fact, syntax involves the combination or the relationship that exists among elements in a clause This, to some extent, enables journalists to use the medium of language to convey their opinion or belief or create a remarkable impression on the audience about a certain event.

1.4 Trend description in English and Vietnamese

Up to now, there have not been any systematic studies about language of trenddescription in English and Vietnamese in general as well as that in English andVietnamese business newspapers in particular Accordingly, it is both a disadvantageand an advantage for the investigator The disadvantage lies in scarce and scatteredreference resources, the lack of evidence verification and the frequent disorientationduring the research However, the advantage of novelty and magnetism of the topicbecomes an obvious advantage for the writer to be ready for a promising exploration

In the first place, trend is understood as ‚the general way in which a particular situation is changing or developing‛ (Longman Business English Dictionar, 2007: 560) or simply ‚general tendency or direction‛ (Oxford Advanced Learner’s Encyclopedic Dictionary, 1998: 970).

In fact, business trend and trend description are widely seen in mass media such asnewspapers, television, the internet etc everyday Trends are visualized in the form ofcharts, graphs, or table i.e the so-called non-textual means or visual aids so thatcomplicated information can be transferred to the audience more effectively andeasily Also, trend analysis is available in business news or reports on the marketcondition, GDP indicators, or stock indexes etc

Besides, trend description appears as a requirement in course book or referencebooks such as TOEFL, IELTS, TOEIC in the form of chart or graph description

It is important to notice that effective trend description is concerned with the use oflanguage in general and the constructions of syntactic structures in particular.Therefore, the thesis will approach the topic from syntactic perspective to find out therules of structure building to describe trends successfully

In conclusion, the first chapter, Literature Review, has covered primary information aboutfour matters related to the research To start with, the discussion on Contrastive Analysisand Transfer Theory was given which serves as a manual script to orientate the flow ofthe research Next, efforts have been invested in reviewing English and VietnameseSyntax and Syntactic Structures so as to build the framework for the contrastive analysislater on In addition, since the research is concerned with newspapers, some briefinformation about journalistic register was also included Finally, the language of trendand trend description in business articles was mentioned to position the thesis’s role.

CHAPTER 2: A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES USED

IN DESCRIBING TRENDS IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE BUSINESS

ARTICLES

This chapter mainly discusses the similarities and differences between syntactic structures used

in describing trends in eight business newspapers among which four English newspapers and four Vietnamese ones were analysed In the first place, a brief introduction on the eight papers is provided for general background Then, the contrastive analysis is made with reference to clause patterns and phrase patterns found in the English and Vietnamese articles.

2.1 An overview on the business newspapers used in contrastive analysis

Among a variety of business newspapers and magazines in English and Vietnamese, eight were selected English publications included two British English ones and two American

English ones namely The Economist, The Financial Times Asia, Business Week, and Wall Street Journal Asia respectively Vietnamese publications involved two Northern Vietnamese ones and two Southern Vietnamese ones i.e The Vietnam Economic Times, Investment, The Saigon Times, and Saigon Financial Investment respectively.

The resource choices were made because of three reasons First, these are the major business newspapers in English and Vietnamese, so the business news language will be representative for the mass Second, it would be possible to find out the similarities and differences between English and Vietnamese trend description as well as discover the distinctive features due to

regional and cultural factors i.e between American English and British English, NorthernVietnamese and Southern Vietnamese Third, the variety of the papers will be useful incomparison because the news language varies from one newspaper to another.

The general procedure of the analysis was carried out as follows For clause structures,three business articles in each copy was selected and read carefully so that clause andphrase patterns could be highlighted For phrase patterns, only two articles of eachnewspaper exhibiting trends most prominently were selected to keep the analysis focusedand detailed That means 16 articles were searched for differences and similarities with aview to five categories of phrases The findings are calculated in percentage and put intotables or figures in order to exhibit the outstanding similarities and differences Finally, theanalysis would be implemented basing on the statistics worked out

Before the analysis is further implemented, some background information about theeight newspapers and magazines will be given below

2.1.1 The English business newspapers

* The Economist:

This is an English-language weekly news and international affairs publication owned

by The Economist Newspaper Ltd and edited in London Its primary focus is worldnews, politics and business However, in recent years the paper has also improved itsdiversification by adding sections such as Europe, Asia, Latin America, internationalissues, and science and technology, books and arts

With over 1 million copies being sold out every week, and more than four-fifths

circulated outside Britain, the figures indicate that The Economist, though a British

newspaper, mainly looks for subjects to write about and for circulation abroad

* The Financial Times

The Financial Times, one of the world’s leading business news organizations, is recognized

internationally for its authority, integrity and accuracy The paper's main focus is British and international business and economic news Providing extensive news, comment and analysis, the newspaper is printed at 23 print sites across the globe, has a daily circulation of 411,988

(ABC figures, June, 2009) and a readership of 1.3 million people worldwide in printand online.

* Business Week

Business Week is a business magazine published by McGraw-Hill at the

headquarters in New York City Since 2005, Business Week has delivered a single global edition instead of providing separate regional ones Business Week is a global

source of essential business insight that inspires leaders to turn ideas into action As amarket leader, it has more than 4.8 million readers each week in 140 countries

* The Wall Street Journal (Asia)

The Wall Street Journal is an English-language international daily newspaperpublished by Dow Jones & Company, a division of News Corporation, in New YorkCity, with Asian and European editions

The Journal newspaper primarily covers U.S and international business and financialnews and issues—the paper's name comes from Wall Street, the heart of the financialdistrict in New York In 2007, it has a worldwide daily circulation of more than 2 million,with approximately 931,000 paying online subscribers

The Wall Street Journal Asia is a regional edition of this paper Since 1976, it hasprovided latest news and analysis of regional and global business developments forAsian audience of corporate and government decision-makers

2.1.2 The Vietnamese business newspapers

* Thêi b¸o Kinh tÕ ViÖt Nam (The Vietnam Economic Times)

The paper is a major economic publication focusing on many aspects of economic life

in Vietnam and other countries

38.900 copies are released every weekday and Saturday Its topic ranges from domesticand international business news, stock market reports, monetary and banking, estateinformation to socioeconomic issues, information technology and health care service

* §Çu t- (Investment)

§Çu T-, the representative of Ministry of Planning and Investment, was started on June 6,

1991 It focuses on informing laws and policies concerning international collaboration and