Linguistic features of the “annoying” verb group in english and vietnamese equivalents

Aims and objectives of the study The overarching aim of this current study is exploring the linguistic features syntactic and semantic features of “ANNOYING” verb group in English and c

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING

HANOI OPEN UNIVERSITY

M.A.THESIS

LINGUISTIC FEATURES OF THE

“ANNOYING” VERB GROUP IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE EQUIVALENTS

(Đặc điểm ngôn ngữ của nhóm động từ “ANNOYING” trong Tiếng Anh và tương đương trong Tiếng Việt)

HOANG DIEM TUYET

Field: English Language

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING

HANOI OPEN UNIVERSITY

M.A.THESIS

LINGUISTIC FEATURES OF THE

“ANNOYING” VERB GROUP IN ENGLISH AND

VIETNAMESE EQUIVALENTS

(Đặc điểm ngôn ngữ của nhóm động từ

“ANNOYING” trong Tiếng Anh và tương đương

trong Tiếng Việt)

HOANG DIEM TUYET

Field: English Language

Code: 8.22.02.01

Supervisor: Dr Dang Ngoc Huong

Hanoi-2020

CERTIFICATE OF ORIGINALITY

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

entitled “LINGUISTIC FEATURES OF THE ANNOYING VERB GROUP IN

ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE EQUIVALENTS” 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

Hanoi, 2020

Hoang Diem Tuyet

Approved by SUPERVISOR

Date:………

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

First and foremost, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor, Dr Dang Ngoc Huong who has patiently and constantly supported me through the stages of the study, and whose stimulating ideas, expertise, and suggestions have inspired me greatly through my growth as an academic researcher

A special word of thanks goes to all the lecturers in the Falculty of graduate studies, Hanoi Open University many others Without whose support and encouragement it would never have been possible for me to have this thesis accomplished

Last but not least, I am greatly indebted to my family and my loving daughter for the sacrifice they have devoted to the fulfilment of this academic work

ABSTRACT

This study is an attempt to uncover the linguistic features of the English

ANNOYING verbs: annoy, trouble, disturb, bother and worry from the analysis of

their syntactic and semantic features based on the theoretical framework of componential analysis Special attention was paid to different senses by contexts where these five verbs are used In order to help Vietnamese learners of English to have a deep understanding of other nuances of meanings conveyed by these English verds, their Vietnamese translational equivalents are examined The result of the study showed that the five English verbs under discussion can occur in the same syntactic patterns, but may have different meanings depending on the situation in which they are used and they can occur in different syntactic patterns that reflect various meanings in real-life communication They also reveal that the meaning of verb is determined by its relations with other words That is why we can only identify exactly the meaning of any word when we have to put it in a certain context A further implication resulting from the findings included in this study could be equally beneficial for teacher and learners who would like to expand their knowledge The most typical ways of perceptivity the linguistic is analyzed by

means of five English ANNOYING verbs annoy, trouble, disturb, bother and

worry

LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES

Table 4.1: Subject (S) element of English Annoying verb group and their

Figure 4.1: Type of Annoying verb group in corpus 36 Table 4.2: A summary of the meaning nuances of Annoying verb group and their

2.3.1 Syntactic features of verbs in term of sentence elements 21

CHAPTER 4: SYNTACTIC AND SEMANTIC FEATURES OF THE ANNOYING VERB GROUP AND THEIR VIETNAMESE EQUIVALENTS 32

4.1 Syntactic features of English Annoying verb group in terms of sentence

4.2 Semantic features of the Annoying verb group in English 43

4.3 Comparison between the syntactic and semantic features of annoying verb

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1.1 Rationale

In the shedding lights of globalization and economic integration, English has become more important than ever before in Vietnam; English is known as the communication tool between Vietnam and other countries worldwide In Vietnam, besides the English major graduates the non-English major graduates who can successfully achieve the certificate of TOEIC (Test of English for International Communication) will have more accesses to the employment opportunities offered

by companies, organizations and institutions in the near future Unfortunately, studies (Ngo, 2011; Nguyen et al., 2014; Nguyen & Tran, 2015) reported that despite the certificates, there are still many inherent problems in English communications of Vietnamese learners due to the lack of word understanding Language is an essential form of communication It allows people to convey and elaborate their perspective It means that language is the bridge to connect people all over the world Therefore, language is a subtle and complex instrument used to communicate an incredible number of different things Being a basic component of language, word plays an important role in communication Word helps us to express many shades of meaning at different levels of style It means that word-meanings can be understood in different ways depending on contexts For that reason, learners, users or translators of English often meet a lot of difficulties in expressing what need to be said or written

Among language units, Verbs play a vital role in grammar and have multitude of assignments in English and Vietnamese It is defined Wegner (2006) that verb is a part of speech that is used to describe motion or convey a subject in action Due to the significance of verbs in both English and Vietnamese, there are

an abundance of studies investigating the linguistic features of Verbs English and their counterpart language, Vietnamese Such significant studies include “Re-thinking THINK in contrastive perspective” by Karlsson (2008), “Verbs of thinking and speaking” by Faure (2009), “Some English verb phrases versus Vietnamese verb phrases” by Pham (2009), “A contrastive analysis of grammatical and semantic features of “hearing” in English and Vietnamese” by Le (2011),

“Syntactic and semantic features of THINKING verb group in English and their Vietnamese equivalents” by Bach (2016), etc However, there is hardly any significant study exploring the syntactic and semantic features or such emotion

verbs as to hate, to dislike, to fear, to envy, to mind, etc It is also realized that

verbs related to senses of human beings are used regularly In such emotion verbs, English learners really concern with “ANNOYING” because they not only have meanings as shown in dictionaries but also relate to attitudes and feelings that are not easy for English learners to understand and translate into Vietnamese

In Vietnamese, the verb group “annoying” (“tức giận” or “chọc tức”) does not only indicate an emotional status but also imply other situations in real life communication To some extent, it is not too difficult to find such circumstances in which people use the verb “ANNOYING”: tức nổ ruột”, “tức anh ách”, etc Especially, in Vietnamese language “annoying” may refer to such other meanings

as “phiền nhiễu” or “quấy rầy”, “quấy rối”, etc Due to the varied expressions of

“annoying” in English and their equivalents in Vietnamese, it is difficult for English learners to understand the conveyed meanings of “ANNOYING” in different circumstances and translate this verb group into Vietnamese, and vice versa

Last but not least, during the teaching experiences, it is identified that English learners may know a lot of English lexical items by learning vocabulary word-lists

by heart but they do not know how to use them in appropriate contexts As a result, they often have failure in communication In addition, no studies have mentioned this annoying verb group, so the thesis hopes to contribute to the research "gap" The researcher chooses to study on the topic “An investigation into linguistic features of “ANNOYING” verb group in English and Vietnamese equivalents” It is expected that the findings of this current study would provide a meaningful understanding for the teachers, the learners and the translators to understand and use

“ANNOYING” in English and Vietnamese effectively

1.2 Aims and objectives of the study

The overarching aim of this current study is exploring the linguistic features (syntactic and semantic features) of “ANNOYING” verb group in English and comparing this verb group with their equivalents in Vietnamese to provide more insights into the meaning and usage of this verb group

The following specific objectives are derived from the overall aim:

(1) To describe and analyze linguistic features (syntactic and semantic features) of “ANNOYING” verb group in English and their equivalents in Vietnamese;

(2) To compare linguistic features (syntactic and semantic features) of

“ANNOYING” verb group in English and their equivalents in Vietnamese;

1.3 Research questions

The following research questions are formulated:

(1) What are linguistic features (syntactic and semantic features) of

“ANNOYING” verb group in English and their equivalents in Vietnamese?

(2) What are the similarities and differences in linguistic features (syntactic and semantic features) of “ANNOYING” verb group in English and their equivalents in Vietnamese?

1.4 Method of the study

In this current study, the descriptive and contrastive methods are employed to describe, analyze and find out the relationship between syntactic and semantic features of “ANNOYING” verb group in English and their Vietnamese equivalents Corpora of literature work and Web corpus are used to collect the data for the analysis Data is described, classified, and analyzed systematically for the contrastive analysis Since the whole research work relied on the corpora, it was important that these works should be carefully read and that examples should be cautiously selected to ensure a satisfying reliability of the results The patterns from the data collection are used from dictionaries and grammar books for confirming the reliability and validity of the study

1.5 Scope of the study

In order to effectively communicate, there are various language aspects included in the usage of each word in both English and Vietnamese such as syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, pronunciation, etc However, under the scope of the

MA thesis this current study only focuses on two linguistic categories of studied word, including syntactic features and semantic features Additionally, the similarities and differences in syntactic and semantic features of “ANNOYING” verb group in English and their equivalents in Vietnamese” are also the major areas

of concern in this study

Also, this study only compares - contrasts linguistic features (syntactic and semantic features) of “ANNOYING” verb group in English and their equivalents in Vietnamese on the basis that English is the source language, Vietnamese equivalent

is the target language (one-way comparison) This thesis has no ambition to

compare -contrast the English verb group "ANNOYING" with the Vietnamese verb group "QUẤY RẨY" or similar meaning ((two-way comparison)

1.6 Significance of the study

The research findings expectantly provide both theoretical and practical contributions to English learning and teaching Theoretically, although there are some foreign and domestic studies investigating the linguistic features of verb groups in English and their equivalents, the area of focus mainly concerns the semantic aspect This current study expects to provide more consolidated insights into both syntactic and semantic aspects of “ANNOYING” verb group as well as the similarities and differences in English and Vietnamese; therefore, English learners and scholars can use this study as a reliable reference Practically, the research findings will enhance the understanding of English learners regarding the use of “ANNOYING” verb group in English and Vietnamese, facilitating their real-life communication Lastly, the investigation into similarities and differences in linguistic features also draws some implications for English teaching pedagogy for vocabulary teaching

1.7 Structure of the study

There are five chapters in this current study including:

Chapter 1: Introduction

This chapter describes the rationale for the study, aim and objectives governing the study, research questions, scope of the study, a summary of method, the significance and the design of the study

Chapter 2: Literature review

This chapter critically explores the theoretical fundamentals concerning the area of study This chapter starts with the theory of syntax and semantics; then English and Vietnamese verbs are described and classified Furthermore, an overview of “annoying” verb group is provided Lastly, the previous studies concerning linguistic features of verb groups in English and Vietnamese are also presented in this chapter

Chapter 3: Methodology

This chaper describes research approach, methods of the study and data colection and data analysis

Chapter 4: Findings and discussion

This chapter presents and analyses the research findings obtained from the corpus of “ANNOYING” verb group in English and Vietnamese This chapter also discusses the similarities and differences in syntactic and semantic features of

“annoying” in English and their Vietnamese equivalents

Chapter 5: Conclusion

This chaper briefly summarizes the whole research procedures and findings Limitations of the study, pedagogical implications, and suggestions for further studies are also included in this final chapter

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1 Previous studies

There are significant foreign and domestic linguistic studies concerning the linguistic features of verbs as an important component in a sentence

Thepkanjanaa & Uehara (2010) carried a study to find out some syntactic and semantic discrepancies among three seemingly semantically equivalent verbs denoting one of the most basic actions in any language, i.e the verbs meaning ‘kill’

in English, Chinese and Thai Specifically, it examines the possibility of these verbs

to appear in two syntactic patterns in which English is used as the metalanguage: (A) X kill Y dead, and (B) X kill Y but Y not die The different syntactic properties among these verbs suggest that the verbs for ‘kill’ in the three languages are not completely semantically equivalent It is found that the resulting dead event of kill

in English is lexically entailed but that of shā in Chinese is merely implied Thai is a more complicated case The verbs for ‘kill’ in the three languages are thus classified into different categories based on their syntactic and semantic properties

White, Hacquard, and Lidz (2014) also examined semantic information and the syntax of propositional attitude verbs According to White, Hacquard, and Lidz (2014), propositional attitude verbs, such as think and want, have long held interest for both theoretical linguists and language acquisitionists because their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties display complex interactions that have proven difficult to fully capture from either perspective This paper explores the granularity with which these verbs’ semantic and pragmatic properties are recoverable from their syntactic distributions, using three behavioural experiments aimed at explicitly quantifying the relationship between these two sets of properties Experiment 1 gathers a measure of 30 propositional attitude verbs’ syntactic distributions using an acceptability judgment task Experiments 2a and 2b gather measures of semantic similarity between those same verbs using a generalized semantic discrimination (triad or “odd man out”) task and an ordinal (Likert) scale task, respectively Two kinds of analyses are conducted on the data from these experiments The first compares both the acceptability judgments and the semantic similarity judgments to previous classifications derived from the syntax and semantics literature The second kind compares the acceptability judgments to the semantic similarity judgments directly Through these comparisons, we show that there is quite fine-grained information about propositional attitude verbs’ semantics carried in their

syntactic distributions—whether one considers the sorts of discrete qualitative classifications that linguists traditionally work with or the sorts of continuous quantitative classifications that can be derived experimentally

Rajendran (2006) also conducted another significant research in this field which compares and contrasts syntax and semantics of verbs of communication in English and Tamil The study indicates that the verbs grouped under communication show different types of communication that differ in their semantic structure as well as argument structure A number of communicative processes are involved in the act of communication The communicative domain includes speaking, saying, explaining, declaring, asking-1, asking-2, summoning, praising, reproving and discussing Under each communicative domain a good number of verbs are used to express different shades of meaning in the domain The members

of a domain are related to one another as synonyms or stylistic variants or by possessing additional semantic feature of manner, which differentiate one from the other

The contrastive study of verbs of communication in English and Tamil by Rajendran (2006) reveals that in spite of the differences in the make-up of argument structure and their realization in the surface structure, there is a kind of universal tendency in expressing communication English makes use of comparatively more number of verbs by lexicalizing certain shades of meaning to denote a particular type of communication It is possible to think of a grammar of transfer to transfer the argument framework of English into Tamil and vice versa A trans-lex-grammar (i.e transfer grammar) may be attempted after finding the argument structure of each verbs and the generative nature of meaning extension (i.e the rules to generate the polysemy form the core monosemy) The present research is a milestone in such

“listen” in English that is intransitive, the most verbs in the two languages are both transitive and intransitive However, the number of transitive and intransitive in two languages are not the same Furthermore, English has complex-transitive verbs, but Vietnamese does not have this kind of verb Secondly, although in syntactic field all verbs can be followed by different structures, English verbs can be followed by an - ing verb form or a infinitive verb form Vietnamese is an isolating language, therefore, we do not have these structures Thirdly, all idioms in English and Vietnamese are in the structure of verb phrases In other words, they are all verbal idioms Therefore, they have functions as verbs However, English idioms has both lexical verb and be verb function as main verb in the phrases, Vietnamese idioms have only lexical verb English idioms can appear in different tenses Vietnamese is

a tenseless language, therefore, Vietnamese idioms are tenseless too Fourthly, semantically both English and Vietnamese WIRHs can be classified into 4 meanings based on the criteria of different manners of auditory perception, including informing about the perceiving sound with sense of hearing; informing about listening attentively; informing about hearing without the knowledge of the speaker, and informing about hearing unattentively or unclearly Moreover, in each meaning, a lot of words and idioms are used Idioms are verbal idioms in both languages, but English verbs can be simple and derived verbs, Vietnamese can be simple and compound verbs Some words can collocate with different words or phrases so they have different shades of meanings and they can be flexibly used in many different contexts English verbs can collocate with nouns, noun phrase, a -ing form verb, a infinitive form verb, or adverb Vietnamese verbs can collocate with nouns, noun phrase, or adj English is an inflecting language, therefore, its faculty of combination is richer than Vietnamese’s There are verbs that can use to denote different meanings such as “Hear” in English and “Nghe” in Vietnamese thanks to their different collocations

Tran (2014) also carried out a contrastive analysis of English and Vietnamese verb phrases It is revealed by the researcher that both English and Vietnamese verb phrases have three parts: the central element, the pre-additive element, and the post-additive element Among them, the central element must be a verb and it is obligatory while the two parts of additive elements can be optional to go with the head verb However, English has the notion of tense such as present tense, past tense and future tense but Vietnamese doesn’t Similarly, form of the English verb

phrase changes in interrogative and negative sentences while Vietnamese also keeps the same form and adds subordinate words When the verb phrase functions as a subject of the sentence, its form must change to “V-ing” in English but keep the same in Vietnamese Moreover, some English verbs must be followed by a preposition, whereas Vietnamese do not need In addition, there are similarities and differences in form of each part between two languages In both languages, the central part must contain head verbs, some of which must be followed by objects and some of which may not However, in English verb phrases, it contains only one head verb but not a series of verbs like in Vietnamese In other words, unlike English, Vietnamese have form of one verb goes directly after another verb as a range

Bach (2016) attempted to examine syntactic and semantic features of

“THINKING” verb group in English and their equivalents in Vietnamese The researcher briefly described English verbs, particularly “THINKING” verb group, with reference to the definition and classification In this research, thinking verb and its features are presented with clear examples and at the same time they are analyzed and compared with Vietnamese equivalents to find out the similarities and differences between the two languages in the concern area The study attempted to provide readers, particularly students of English, solution to their problem when using thinking verbs and their features and their complementation

2.2 Theoretical background

2.2.1 Theory of syntax

The simplest imaginable syntactic theory would be that a grammar consists of

a list of all the well-formed sentences in the language The most obvious problem with such a proposal is that the list would have to be too long There is no fixed finite bound on the length of English sentences, as can be seen from the following sequence:

(2.1) Some sentences go on and on

Some sentences go on and on and on

Some sentences go on and on and on and on

Some sentences go on and on and on and on and on

Every sentence in this sequence is acceptable English Since there is no bound

on their size, it follows that the number of sentences in the list must be infinite Hence, there are infinitely many sentences of English Since human brains are

finite, they cannot store infinite lists Consequently, there must be some more compact way of encoding the grammatical knowledge that speakers of English possess

Moreover, there are generalizations about the structure of English that an adequate grammar should express For example, suppose the list in (2.1) were replaced by one in which every other sentence reversed the order of the words some and sentences:

(2.2) Some sentences go on and on

*Sentences some go on and on

*Some sentences go on and on and on

Sentences some go on and on and on

Some sentences go on and on and on and on

*Sentences some go on and on and on and on

*Some sentences go on and on and on and on and on

Sentences some go on and on and on and on and on

Of course, the sentences with the word “sentences” before the word “some” are not well-formed English Moreover, no natural language exhibits patterns of that sort { in this case, having word-order depend on whether the length of the sentence

is divisible by that sheds light on human linguistic abilities ought to explain why such patterns do not occur in human languages But a theory that said grammars consisted of lists of sentences could not do that If grammars were just lists, then there would be no patterns that would be excluded – and none that would be expected, either

This form of argument – that a certain type of grammar fails to “capture a linguistically significant generalization” is very common in generative grammar It takes for granted the idea that language is “rule governed”, i.e that language is a combinatoric system whose operations are “out there” to be discovered by empirical investigation If a particular characterization of the way a language works leads to redundancy and complications, it’s assumed to be the wrong characterization of the grammar of that language

A natural first step towards allowing grammars to capture generalizations is to classify words into what are often called “parts of speech” or “grammatical categories” There are large numbers of words that behave very similarly syntactically Moreover, they all have plural forms that can be constructed in similar

ways (orthographically, simply by adding an -s) Traditionally, the vocabulary is sorted into nouns, verbs, etc based on loose semantic characterizations (e.g ‘a noun

is a word that refers to a person, place, or thing’) While there is undoubtedly a grain of insight at the heart of such definitions, language users make use of this division into grammatical categories without committing ourselves to any semantic basis for them For purpose, it is sufficient that there are classes of words which may occur grammatically in the same environments The theory of grammar can capture their common behavior by formulating patterns or rules in terms of categories, not individual words Someone might, then, propose as a grammar of English that we have a list of patterns, stated in terms of grammatical categories, together with a lexicon – that is, a list of words and their categories For example, the patterns could include (among many others):

(2.4) a article noun verb

b article noun verb article noun

And the lexicon could include (likewise, among many others):

(2.5) a Articles: a, the

b Nouns: cat, dog

c Verbs: attacked, scratched This mini-grammar licenses forty well-formed English sentences, and captures a few generalizations However, a grammar that consists of lists of patterns still suffers from the first drawback of the theory of grammars as lists: it can only account for a finite number of sentences, but natural languages are infinite For example, such a grammar will still be incapable of dealing with all of the sentences in the infinite sequence illustrated in (2.1)

We can enhance our theory of grammar to permit infinite numbers of sentences by introducing abbreviatory devices In particular, the problem associated with (2.2) can be handled using what is known as the ‘Kleene star’ (after the logician Stephen Kleene) Notated as a superscripted asterisk, the Kleene star is interpreted to mean that the expression it is attached to can be repeated any finite number of times (including zero) Thus, the examples in (2.2) could be abbreviated

as follows:

(2.6) Some sentences go on and on [and on]∗

A closely related notation is a superscripted plus-sign (called Kleene-plus), meaning one or more occurrences of the expression it is attached to Hence, another way of expressing the same pattern would be:

(2.7) Some sentences go on [and on]+

We shall employ these, as well as two other common abbreviatory devices The first is simply to put parentheses around material that is optional For example, the two sentence patterns in (2.4) could be collapsed into: article noun verb (article noun) The second abbreviatory device is a vertical bar, which is used to separate alternatives1 For example, if we wished to expand the mini-grammar in (2.4) to include sentences like The dog looked angry, we could add the pattern article noun verb adjective and collapse it with the previous patterns as: article noun verb (article noun) adjective Of course, we would also have to add the verb looked and the adjective angry to the lexicon

Patterns making use of the devices just described – Kleene star, Kleene-plus, parentheses for optionality, and the vertical bar for alternatives – are known as

‘regular expressions’ A great deal is known about what sorts of patterns can and cannot be represented with regular expressions (Hopcroft and Ullman, 1979), and a number of scholars have argued that natural languages in fact exhibit patterns that are beyond the descriptive capacity of regular expressions (Bar-Hillel & Shamir, 1960)

The most convincing arguments for employing a grammatical formalism richer than regular expressions, however, have to do with the need to capture generalizations In (2.5), the string article noun occurs twice, once before the verb and once after it Notice that there are other options possible in both of these positions:

(2.8) a Dogs chase cats

b A large dog chased a small cat

c A dog with brown spots chased a cat with no tail

Moreover, these are not the only positions in which the same strings can occur:

(2.9) a Some people yell at (the) (noisy) dogs (in my neighborhood)

b Some people consider (the) (noisy) dogs (in my neighborhood) dangerous Even with the abbreviatory devices available in regular expressions, the same lengthy string of symbols – something like (article) (adjective) noun (preposition article noun) – will have to appear over and over again in the patterns that constitute the grammar Moreover, the recurring patterns are in fact considerably more complicated than those illustrated so far Strings of other forms, such as the noisy

annoying dogs, the dogs that live in my neighborhood, or Rover, Fido, and Lassie can all occur in just the same positions It would clearly simplify the grammar if we could give this apparently infinite set of strings a name and say that any string from the set can appear in certain positions in a sentence

Furthermore, an adequate theory of syntax must somehow come to grips with the fact that a given string of words can sometimes be put together in more than one way If there is no more to grammar than lists of recurring patterns, where these are defined in terms of parts of speech, then there is no apparent way to talk about the ambiguity of sentences like those in (2.10):

(2.10) a We enjoyed the movie with Cher

b The room was filled with noisy children and animals

c People with children who use drugs should be locked up

d I saw the astronomer with a telescope

In the first sentence, it can be us or the movie that is ‘with Cher’; in the second, it can be either just the children or both the children and the animals that are noisy; in the third, it can be the children or their parents who use drugs, and so forth None of these ambiguities can be plausibly attributed to a lexical ambiguity Rather, they seem to result from different ways of grouping the words into phrases

In short, the fundamental defect of regular expressions as a theory of grammar

is that they provide no means for grouping sequences of elements together to form a unit The same holds true of several other formalisms that are provably equivalent

to regular expressions (including what is known as ‘finite state grammar’)

The recurrent strings we have been seeing are usually called ‘phrases’ or

‘(syntactic) constituents’ Phrases, like words, come in different types All of the phrases in (2.8) - (2.9) above obligatorily include a noun, so they are called ‘Noun Phrases’ The next natural enrichment of our theory of grammar is to permit our regular expressions to include not only words and parts of speech, but also phrase types Then we also need to provide (similarly enriched) regular expressions to provide the patterns for each type of phrase The technical name for this theory of grammar is ‘Context-free Phrase Structure Grammar’ or simply ‘Context-free Grammar’, sometimes abbreviated as CFG CFGs, which will also let us begin to talk about structural ambiguity, form the starting point for most serious attempts to develop formal grammars for natural languages

2.2.2 Theory of semantics

Meaning is inextricably bound up with actions – people intentionally using language for all kinds of communicative purposes Some sentences are used to convey questions; others simple assertions; still others conventionally convey commands (or ‘directives’, as they are sometimes called) Even a piece of a sentence, say an NP like the student sitting behind Leslie, can be used in isolation to perform a simple act of referring to an individual The kind of meaning that (a particular use of) a sentence conventionally conveys depends crucially on its syntactic form For example, a simple ‘inverted’ sentence like (2.11), where there is

an auxiliary verb before the subject NP, conventionally conveys a question

(2.11) Is Sandy tall?

And the question posed by (2.11) is closely related to the proposition that is asserted by an utterance of the non-inverted sentence in (2.12)

(2.12) Sandy is tall

In fact, uttering (2.12) is a perfectly good way of answering (2.11)

In order to even get started in dealing with semantic problems such as these,

we are going to have to clarify what the units of meaning are and how particular kinds of sentences or smaller phrases are tied to particular types of meaning by linguistic conventions We will make the standard assumption that communication has two components: linguistic meaning and reasoning about communicative goals)

On this view, when a linguistic expression is uttered, its linguistic meaning makes a significant contribution to, but does not fully determine the communicative function

of the utterance Consider, for example, an utterance of (2.13)

(2.13) Do you have a quarter?

The linguistic meaning of this sentence is a familiar kind of semantic object: a question And a question of this form has a determinate answer: yes or no However, an utterance of (2.13) might serve to communicate much more than such

a simple factual inquiry In particular, in addition to posing a financial question to a given hearer, an utterance of (2.13) is very likely to convey a further message – that the speaker was making the following request of the addressee

(2.14) Please give me a quarter!

The question conveyed by an utterance of (2.13) is generally referred to as its literal or conventional meaning A request like (2.14) is communicated as a further message above and beyond the message coming directly from the literal meaning of

the question in (2.13) We will leave the account of such embellished communication (even the routine ‘reading between the lines’ that occurs more or less effortlessly in cases like this) to a more fully developed theory of language use

- i.e to a theory of linguistic pragmatics The inference from question to request is pragmatic in nature

By contrast, the fact that a sentence like (2.13) must have a question as its literal meaning is semantic in nature Semantics is the study of linguistic meaning, i.e the contribution to communication that derives directly from the conventions of the language The semantic analysis that a grammar provides serves as input for a theory of language use Such a theory sets as its goal to explain what actually gets communicated via pragmatic inference derived from the linguistic meaning of an utterance For example, pragmatic theory might include a principle like (2.15): (2.15) Quantity Principle (simplified):

If X is weaker than Y, then asserting X implies the denial of Y

(2.15) relies on the undefined term ‘weaker’ In some cases (such as the example that follows), it is intuitively obvious what ‘weaker’ means But a full-fledged pragmatic theory that included (2.15) would have to provide a precise definition of this term This principle leads to pragmatic inference via ‘proofs’ of the following kind (justifications for steps of the proof are given in parentheses):

(2.16) • A says to B: Two things bother Pat

• A uttered something whose linguistic meaning is:

‘Two things bother Pat.’ (semantic analysis)

• ‘Two things bother Pat.’ is weaker than ‘Three things bother Pat.’ (a fact in the context; possibly a more general fact)

• B assumes that A also meant to communicate: ‘It’s not the case that three things bother Pat.’ (Quantity Principle)

Note that exactly the same pragmatic inference would arise from an utterance

by A of any semantically equivalent sentence, e.g There are two things that bother Pat or Pat is bothered by two things This is because pragmatic theory works from the linguistic meaning of an utterance (as characterized by our semantic analysis) and hence is indifferent to the form by which such meanings are expressed

There is much more that could be said about the fascinating topic of pragmatic inference Here, the only purpose has been to show that the semantic analysis that

must be included in any adequate grammar in fact plays an essential role, albeit an indirect one, in explaining the communicative function of language in context

2.2.3 Overview of English verbs

2.2.3.1 Definition of the verb

According to Jackendoff (2002), a verb, from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word (part of speech) that in syntax conveys an action (bring, read, walk, run, learn), an occurrence (happen, become), or a state of being (be, exist, stand) In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive In many languages, verbs are inflected (modified in form) to encode tense, aspect, mood, and voice A verb may also agree with the person, gender or number of some of its arguments, such as its subject, or object Verbs have tenses: present, to indicate that an action is being carried out; past, to indicate that an action has been done; future, to indicate that an action will be done

Verbs are so common in language use that they hardly need any introduction Yet we offer a definition, according to which they denote actions, activities, states, events, attitudes, processes, changes or existence Being the second largest class of words (Carter & McCarthy, 2006), their categorization may prove some difficulty detailed in the followings

The starting point of studying English grammar may be the mapping of all verb types, enabling speakers to produce comprehensible utterances Once we present all possible verb types, it may spare us a lot of subsequent explanations, and its real advantage lies in offering a logical view upon their possible combination to create tenses Classifying verbs is important, as they express a multitude of grammatical categories, such as person (first, second, third) and number (singular, plural) Furthermore, in a syntactical approach, they express the predicate (Gălățeanu & Comișel, 1982), offering the following possible characteristics: tense (present, past, future), aspect (simple, continuous or progressive, perfect (simple), perfect continuous or progressive), voice (active, passive), and mood (finite: indicative, imperative, subjunctive; non-finite: infinitive, gerund, participle)

It is natural that verbs are divided into different categories, but the problem is that in the majority of cases it is not specified which part of grammar this is based

on For instance, within lexicology, according to their morphological structure, verbs may be classified as follows:

1) One-word verbs, which may be simple (enjoy), derivative (discover), or compound (broadcast) Detailed verb formation possibilities may be found, for instance in Bădescu (1984, pp 452–456);

2) Multi-word (compound, complex) verbs, which may be phrasal verbs (come back – verb and adverbial particle), prepositional verbs (comment on – verb and preposition) and phrasal-prepositional verbs (put up with)

However, one may clearly see that this type of categorization involves semantics as well, because the combination of verbs with adverbs and prepositions leads to a variety of meanings (give up = abandon), which proves to be very difficult for non-native speakers

Although a verb may be used in different tenses, some of them are semantically restricted For instance, static (also called stative or non-progressive) verbs such as snap, drop, know cannot be used in Continuous tenses, whereas dynamic (progressive) verbs can Other verbs are called inchoative, referring to the start of an action (begin, start, or get, especially in parallel constructions) Bădescu even mentions impersonal (unipersonal) verbs (1984, pp 448–449),

such as drizzle, freeze, hail, lighten, rain, dew, sleet, snow, thunder, meseems,

or methinks Yet, we consider this type of categorization less central to grammar, as meaning(s) of words may be learnt effectively even without a thorough grammar knowledge

2.2.3.2 Verb classification

It must be recalled here that Nida’s (1976) tentative classification of events based on componential analysis consists of twelve semantic domains: Physical, Physiological, Sensory, Emotive, Intellection, Communication, Association, Control, Movement, Impact, Transfer, and Complex activities, involving a series of movements or actions Rajendran (1978) classified verbs into 31 groups out of which ten are major important semantic domains The important semantic domains identified by him based on componential analysis of verbs are: (1) verbs of movement, (2) verbs of transferring, (3) verbs of change of state, (4) verbs of impact, (5) verbs of senses, (6) verbs of emotion, (7) verbs of intellection, (8) verbs

of communication and calling, (9) verbs of association, (10) verbs of cooking Each major domain is divided into subdomains by taking into account distinguishing semantic component Say for example, verbs of movement is sub-classified into

of upward movement, verbs of downward movement, verbs of jumping movement, verbs of circular movement, verbs of movement towards outside, verbs of movement towards inside, verbs of scattering and spreading movement, verbs of shaking movement, verbs of slipping movement, verbs of coming and going, verbs

of leaving, verbs of chasing and following, verbs of nearing and approaching, verbs

of starting and reaching Rajendran (1991) classifies the verbs into twelve more or less in line with Nida (1976) The sub-classification has been made based on the distinguishing semantic components The classification may need a second look to make it more users friendly Even though verbs do not show hierarchical ordering, a quasi-hierarchical ordering is possible by taking into account certain pertinent distinguishing features

This study employs the classification by Huddleston & Pullum (2005) as follows:

1) Formal classification

If form is taken as the basis for the definition of the verb, then the difference in the expression of the present and the past or the inflection -s in the third person singular present and the inflection –ed or a root vowel change in the past might seem applicable criteria in defining the class: consider love vs loved, write vs wrote or love vs he loves However, -ed and -s are not endings characteristic of the verb only;-ed (-d), may also be added to nouns or noun phrases to form adjectives (e.g fair-haired, gifted), while -s may be added to nouns to form the plural (e.g bird vs birds) Also, the use of this criterion would leave out words like cut, cost, put, which have the same form for present and past, or must, ought to, which are not inflected in the third person singular of the present tense and have no form for the past tense

To sum up, the researcher identified the following classification:

1 the Infinitive1 or Present Simple form (I.);

2 the Past Simple form (II.);

3 the Past Participle form (III.);

4 the -ing form

The first type is considered the basic verb form, and there are two types of verbs depending on how the second and third form is constructed, discussed below Although there are grammars presenting the third person singular form of verbs (plays, hires) as a fifth possible form (e.g Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, & Svartvik, 1980; Budai, 1994)

Within formal classification, it should start with regular verbs, which are easy

to remember, as the second and third form heavily relies on the first (basic) form These are obtained by adding an -ed (play, played, played) at the end of the first form, or in case the verb end in e, only a -d (hire, hired, hired) To the great relief on non-native speakers, all English verbs are regular ones, except for a few hundred irregular verbs

Irregular verbs make extensive use of the memory of non-native speakers, as their second and third form cannot be deduced or predicted from the first one Sadly, they need a lot of time to be learnt, which cannot be avoided as many of them belong to the core English vocabulary:

The optimistic approach to irregular verbs is to remember that out of many thousands of English verbs only a few hundred ones are irregular, which can be further reduced based on their frequency Still more than a hundred of them (with three distinctive forms completed with their meaning) remain, with different procedures to memorize them

2) Functional classification

Owing to the various terms circulating about verbs, it may prove difficult to offer a functional classification, but we try to give alternate names as well At syntactical level, verbs can be categorized as ‘full’ verbs having predicative function (they can fully form the predicate alone), whereas others are non-predicative verbs in need of completion from the point of view of predication (e.g Gălățeanu & Comișel, 1982, p 7), having reduced lexical meanings and being referred to as copulas, auxiliaries, semi-auxiliaries, modals and semimodals Now it

is clear that a predicate is identified based on its lexical meaning as well

According to their ‘behaviour’ in a sentence (for instance, how they are conjugated), they can be also classified as ‘ordinary’ or ‘special’ verbs It is considered that in case verbs are discussed within morphology or syntax, their function is primary, resulting in the following categories:

1 strong (full, ordinary, primary) verbs: be (am, are, is, was, were)

2 auxiliary (special) verbs: be (am, are, is, was, were), do (does, did), have (has, had), will;

3 modal (special, defective) verbs: can, could, may, might, must, have to, shall, should, ought to, will, would, need, dare, used to;

4 weak (full, ordinary, primary) verbs: all the other verbs, which are not strong, auxiliary or modal verbs

Although this categorization is somewhat different from other verb classifications (Quirk et al., 1980, pp 63–83, 105, 109; Thomson & Martinet, 1986,

p 105, 109–152, 315–352; Budai, 1994, pp 11–21; Bădescu, 1984, pp 255–260, 383–456; Carter & McCarthy, 2006, p 301, 308; Gălățeanu & Comișel, 1982, pp 5–8; Pawlowska & Kempinski, 1996, p 11, 105– 106, 109–110, 113), we have described it previously (Imre, 2008, pp 8–11) and it proved to be ‘functional’ Yet, this type of classification needs further remarks:

a) A verb in its third or -ing form (cf formal classification) can be neither strong nor auxiliary The proof is simple: once a verb appears in the third or -ing form, it means that it is preceded by another – typically auxiliary verb (be, am, are,

is, was, were, have, has), which takes over its function; hence we can talk about

‘weakened’ forms of been, being, done, doing, etc

b) Whatever categories, a certain fuzziness (cognitive grammar) will be preserved Be may be strong or auxiliary, do and have may be auxiliary, modal and weak, will is the auxiliary for the future tenses, but in fact it is a modal verb

2.2.4 Overview of the ANNOYING verbs

“Annoy” acts as both transitive and intransitive verbs When it acts as a transitive verb, it means “to disturb or irritate especially by repeated acts”:

(2.25) annoyed the neighbors with their loud arguments or to harass especially

by quick brief attacks

When it acts as an intransitive verb, it refers to the action “to cause annoyance”

Some verbs belonging to the “ANNOYING” verb group include, bother, worry, trouble, disturb, aggravate, bug, burn (up), chafe, eat, exasperate, frost, gall, get, grate, gripe, hack (off), irk, irritate, itch, nark [British], nettle, peeve, persecute, pique, put out, rasp, rile, ruffle, spite, vex

For the meaning of “annoy”:

ANNOY, VEX, IRK, BOTHER mean to upset a person's composure ANNOY implies a wearing on the nerves by persistent petty unpleasantness

(2.26) Their constant complaining annoys us

VEX implies greater provocation and stronger disturbance and usually connotes anger but sometimes perplexity or anxiety

(2.27)… vexed by her son's failure to clean his room

IRK stresses difficulty in enduring and the resulting weariness or impatience

of spirit

(2.28) Careless waste irks the boss

BOTHER suggests interference with comfort or peace of mind

(2.29) Don't bother me while I'm reading

For the meaning of “worry”:

ANNOY, PESTER, and TEASE mean to disturb and upset a person ANNOY is used for bothering someone to the point of anger

(2.30) I am annoyed by your bad behavior

PESTER is used for bothering someone over and over

(2.31) Stop pestering me for more money

TEASE often is used for continually tormenting someone until that person is provoked or upset

(2.32) They teased the child to the point of tears

as Hahna sings, have one Actually, a verb can be a sentence by itself, with the

subject, in most case you, implied, such as: Move! and Run!

Verbs in English can be both intransitive and transitive verbs In case of being intransitive verbs, these verbs are elements in the SV, SVC, SVA sentence patterns In case of being intransitive verbs, these verbs can appear as monotransitive verbs, ditransitive verbs, or complex transitive verbs in the SVOO, SVOC, SVOA sentence patterns

 As an object (O):

In the A comprehensive grammar of the English language, Quirk et al (1985:726) state that the object is normally a noun phrase or a nominal clause There are constraints on the types of nominal clauses that can be indirect object: generally, only nominal relative clauses Mentioning about position of objects, the object normally follows the subjects and verb If both objects are present, the indirect object normally comes before the direct object Syntactically, the object function requires the objective form for pronouns that have distinctive case forms

If there is only one object present, it is generally the direct object In some sentences having ditransitive verbs, the indirect object may be retained while the direct object is omitted In that case the only object present is the indirect object

2.3.2 Semantic features of ANNOYING verbs group

This current study focuses on only five verbs in the ANNOYING verb group, including annoy, bother, trouble, disturb, and worry

Annoy

According to Cambridge Dictionary (n.d.), the verb “annoy” refers to the action “to make someone angry” For example:

(2.33) I'm sure he says these things deliberately to annoy you

It really annoys me when people push in front of me like that

They were afraid to complain about the noise in case they annoyed the neighbours

The film portrayed the artist as a complete drunk, which has annoyed a lot of people

After a while her coughing really began to annoy me

The examples of (2.33) reveal that “annoy” acts as a transitive verb which is followed by the object in a sentence The common structure for a sentence with

“annoys” is presented as follows: S + annoy + O

Trouble

“To trouble” maybe refers to the action “to cause someone to be worried or nervous”, for example:

(2.34) I asked her what was troubling her, but she didn't want to talk

Many of us are deeply troubled by the chairman's decision

It troubles me (that) you didn't discuss your problems with me earlier

In this case, the grammar structure of the sentence is as follows: S + worry +

O

or “to cause someone to have a problem or difficulties” In this case, the verb

“trouble” is often in the passive form, for example:

(2.35) He has been troubled by a knee injury for most of the season (S+ to be + Ved/PII + troubled)

or “to cause someone a small amount of effort”, for example:

(2.36) May I trouble you for (= please give me) some more wine, please? Could I trouble you to open that window? I can't reach it (trouble+ obj + to infinitive)

Let's not trouble ourselves (= make the effort to think) about the details at the moment

Bother

“To bother” as a verb in the “ANNOYING” verb group means “to make the effort to do something” with the structure of “bother to do” or “bother Ving”, for example:

(2.37) He hasn't even bothered to write

Don't bother making the bed - I'll do it later

You'd have found it if you'd bothered looking/to look

or “to make someone feel worried or upset” with the structure of “bother + O”, for example:

(2.38) Does it bother you that he's out so much of the time?

Living on my own has never bothered me

I don't care if he doesn't come - it doesn't bother me

It bothers me that he doesn't seem to notice (+ that)

or “to annoy or cause problems for someone”, for example:

I'm sorry to bother you, but could you help me lift this suitcase?

I didn't want to bother her with work matters on her day off

The noise was beginning to bother us, so we left

She threatened to call the police if he didn't stop bothering her

Disturb

“To disturb” refers to the action “to interrupt what someone is doing”, for example:

(2.40) Please don't disturb your sister - she's trying to do her homework

I'm sorry to disturb you so late, but my car's broken down and I don't have my phone with me

or “to cause someone to be worried or upset, for example:

(2.41) Some scenes are violent and may disturb younger viewers

Disturb is used as a transitive verb in almost all sentences

Worry

“To worry” may mean “to think about problems or unpleasant things that might happen in a way that makes you feel unhappy and frightened”, for example: (2.42) Try not to worry - there's nothing you can do to change the situation Don't worry, she'll be all right

It's silly worrying about things which are outside your control

She's worried (that) she might not be able to find another job (+ that)

or “to make someone feel unhappy and frightened because of problems or unpleasant things that might happen”, for example:

(2.43) You worried your mother by not writing

It worries me that he hasn't phoned yet

The continued lack of rain is starting to worry people

To sum up, such verbs in the “ANNOYING” verb group normally refers to the meaning “to cause somebody unhappy or frightened because of problems or unpleasant things” which is presented by the sentence structures as: S + ANNOYING verbs + O or S + ANNOYING verb + that…

2.4 Summary

To sum up, this chapter critically reviews the theoretical foundations related to the area of study Such theories of syntax and semantics are described at the beginning of this chapter with the focus on verbs and classification of verbs in linguistics Then, the concept of “ANNOYING” and verbs belonging to the

“ANNOYING” verb group are provided Although there are many words in the

“ANNOYING” verb group, this study only focuses on five verbs: Annoy, disturb,

bother, worry, trouble

CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY

3.1 Research approach

In order to obtain research aims and objectives, both qualitative and quantitative approaches are recruited in this thesis Quantitative research is,as the term suggests, concerned with the collection and analysis of data in numeric form

It tends to emphasize relatively large-scale and representative sets of data, and is often, falsely in our view, presented or perceived as being about the gathering of facts The researcher used the quantitative approach to collect and analyze numeric information and data about the frequency of “ANNOYING” verb groups in the datasets of English and Vietnamese Qualitative research, on the other hand, is concerned with collecting and analyzing information in as many forms, chiefly non-numeric, as possible The qualitative research is employed to identify similarities and differences “ANNOYING” verb groups in English and their Vietnamese equivalents regarding syntactic and semantic features Qualitative research can be defined as a form of systematic empirical enquiry into meaning According to Amenorvi (63), Fraenkel and Norman point out the major characteristics of qualitative research to include: “qualitative data, flexible design, naturalistic enquiry, personal contact and insight, inductive analysis and holistic perspective”

In the light of this, this study has qualitative data, e.g written texts in both English and Vietnamese It is also naturalistic in its enquiry as it investigates a natural phenomenon –linguistic features of “ANNOYING” verb group in the two languages The combination of both research methods ensures the validity and accountability of research results

3.1.1 Research questions

As defined in Chapter 1, the whole thesis is governed by the following research question:

1 What are linguistic features (syntactic and semantic features) of

“ANNOYING” verb group in English and their equivalents in Vietnamese?

2 What are the similarities and differences in linguistic features (syntactic and semantic features) of “ANNOYING” verb group in English and their equivalents in Vietnamese?

These research questions determined the selection of research methods, sources of data, and instruments to collect data; and data which were gathered and analyzed to respond to the research questions

3.1.2 Research setting

Because the thesis’s aims are to examine and find out the similarities and differences in linguistic features of “ANNOYING” verb group in English and their equivalents in Vietnamese, the major sources of data include:

(1) The bilingual books

(2) The grammar books written by English and Vietnamese linguists

(3) The English - Vietnamese and Vietnamese - English dictionaries

(4) The Internet Webpages

These sources of data would provide the sufficient samples for data analysis of the thesis

3.2 Methods of the study

This thesis is aimed at investigating the syntactic and semantic features of

“ANNOYING” verb group in English and their Vietnamese equivalents In order to achieve the aims and objectives, descriptive and contrastive methods are used for the research English is chosen as the source language and Vietnamese as the target one

According to Saville-Troike (1982), one of the best methods of getting to know one’s own “ways of speaking” is by comparing and contrasting with those of others This process will reveal the shared and unshared features of linguistic patterns and their meanings Thus, contrastive linguistics with its associated research method – Contrastive analysis (CA) - will be used as the primary research framework for this study

Contrastive Analysis (CA) is a linguistic enterprise aimed at producing inverted (that is, contrastive, not comparative) two-valued typologies (a CA is always concerned with a pair of languages) It is not concerned with classification because the term contrastive implies, more interest in differences between languages than in their likenesses CA is founded on the assumption that languages can be compared (James, 1980) According to Filha (1997), Contrastive Analysis (CA) is the comparison of the native language (NL) with the target language (TL), i.e the language being learnt with the purpose of determining similarities and differences between the two Furthermore, Johansson (2008) defines Contrastive

analysis as the systematic comparison of two or more languages, with the aim of describing their similarities and differences, and it has often been done for practical/pedagogical purposes However, there is more to CA than this: when we compare two languages, we often see things more clearly Speaking on the beauty

of CA, Johansson quotes Firbas as saying that “The contrastive method proves to be

a useful heuristic tool capable of throwing valuable light on the characteristic features of the languages compared” (Firbas, 2013, p.13) In other words, when we compare across languages, we can see the characteristics of each language more clearly, and the comparison can contribute to a better description of each individual language Contrastive analysis (CA), over the years, has had various designations such as comparative linguistics, contrastive grammar and differential description According to Hamp (2011), no matter what terminology is used for CA, it is basically the juxtaposing of accounts of two languages and the extraction of certain observation of learning difficulty

Speaking in a similar vein, Politzer and Strauback (2003) said that: By comparing the linguistic analysis of the native language of the learner … with that

of the language to be studied,…we highlight the major difficulty encountered by the learner This comparison enables us to construct teaching and testing materials quite unsystematically and to give due emphasis to the points of real difficulty

The basic practice of contrastive analysis therefore, is first to write a description of a particular aspect of each of the two languages to be compared This could be in phonology, morphology and syntax One then compares any of this with

a view to noting areas of differences and similarities; this, being the technique for identifying and establishing inter-systemic correspondences

The descriptive method is employed in this thesis as the research method Descriptive research does not fit neatly into the definition of either quantitative or qualitative research methodologies, but instead it can utilize elements of both, often within the same study The term descriptive research refers to the type of research question, design, and data analysis that will be applied to a given topic In this case, the selected topic is the linguistic features of “ANNOYING” verb group in English and Vietnamese

Descriptive method is applied in the linguistics research to investigate the form and function of language, applying theoretical approaches to the analysis of descriptive and sociolinguistic data Contemporary theoretical linguistic

investigations often make use of quantitative/computational tools, methods, and models to support and enhance qualitative scholarly interpretations of the language phenomena being studied Three main purposes of research are to describe, explain, and validate findings Description emerges following creative exploration, and serves to organize the findings in order to fit them with explanations, and then test

or validate those explanations (Krathwohl, 1993)

3.3 Data collection and data analysis

The study is conducted by carefully collecting materials from various sources

to have full – blown information of English and Vietnamese negative questions The determination of intended data collection and analysis relies on the supervisor’s obtained suggestions, instructions and encouragement The contrastive analysis is made intra- and interlingually: English “ANNOYING” verb group and their Vietnamese counterparts The contrastive analysis involves two stages: the description of the structures and the use of “ANNOYING” verb group in both languages Besides, the thesis only collects data which are the sentences of the written publications translated into Vietnamese by publishers or reliable sources

3.3.1 Data collection techniques

The data collection is the most important step in any research This procedure consists of two main stages Firstly, a large number of English “ANNOYING” verbs and their Vietnamese translation were collected in order to make the corpus of this thesis The corcus consists of 100 sentences in English and their translated Vietnamese meaning There are 20 examples which are representative for five main

verb in the Annoying verb groups of “Annoy, disturb, bother, worry, trouble”

Due to the description and contrastive analysis, the corpus is recruited for the thesis A corpus consists of texts for linguistic analysis, usually digitized in order to use computer software for analysis Corpora come in many different forms, are constructed for different purposes, and can be used for different analyses To specify, “computer corpora are rarely haphazard collections of textual material: they are generally assembled with particular purposes in mind, and are often assembled

to be (informally speaking) representative of some language or text type” (McEnery

et al., 2006) In this current study, texts are collected from such major sources as the bilingual books, the grammar books written by English and Vietnamese linguists, the English - Vietnamese and Vietnamese - English dictionaries, and the Internet Webpages The software was used to build a corpus of such “ANNOYING” verbs

as “Annoy, disturb, bother, worry, and trouble” The reason behind creating

specialized corpora is to enable us to do a comparative analysis and discussion of similarities and differences in linguistic features of “ANNOYING” verb group in English and Vietnamese Secondly, the collection of grammatical books and related literature were done to hold up the Chapter II Books on grammar, syntax, semantics, and stylistic means are used for the need to set the theoretical basic for this thesis to be carried out

3.3.2 Data analysis techniques

The data collected for this research was analyzed based on the principle of contrastive analysis After a careful select procedure, the chosen texts will be examined, analyzed and summarized thoroughly by the researcher in order to pick

up examples of “ANNOYING” verbs at a sentence level The text of

“ANNOYING” verb group prepared by the researcher that was translated from English into Vietnamese Practically, translation is probably most useful in conveying accurately the intended meaning of the first language into the second language It also gives more detailed looks at broader features, for examples, if the discourse structures of a given text-type are the same in both languages Moreover, although translation is widely practised, there are several theoretical and practical application problems, all of which must affect judgements as to its usefulness to

CA There is some overlap between these issues, yet they can be related to particular difficulties in identifying a common ground for comparison, comparing descriptions of different languages features

To answer the research question 1, the researcher will describe English and Vietnamese “ANNOYING” verb group by elaborating thoroughly the selected texts

in English and Vietnamese To answer the research question 2 and, the researcher will use contrastive analysis procedures to compare and contrast the selection of data from books, database, etc to point out the similarities and differences between English and Vietnamese “ANNOYING” verb group

Example sentences will be elaborated cautiously to give readers a detailed understanding on the similarities and differences in linguistic features of

“ANNOYING” verb group in English and Vietnamese

3.4 Summary

Conclusively, this chapter described the contrastive analysis as the research approach which governs the whole study in response to the three research questions Due to the nature of research, in this current study the researcher employed a descriptive and qualitative design to find out and compare the similarities and