Syntactic and semantic features of run in english and chạy in vietnamese

THESIS SYNTACTIC AND SEMANTIC FEATURES OF “RUN” IN ENGLISH AND “CHẠY” IN VIETNAMESE Đặc điểm cú pháp và ngữ nghĩa của từ “run” trong tiếng Anh và “chạy” trong tiếng Việt DAO THI H

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING

HANOI OPEN UNIVERSITY

M.A THESIS

SYNTACTIC AND SEMANTIC FEATURES

OF “RUN” IN ENGLISH AND “CHẠY”

IN VIETNAMESE

(Đặc điểm cú pháp và ngữ nghĩa của từ “run” trong

tiếng Anh và “chạy” trong tiếng Việt)

DAO THI HUONG

Field: English Language Code: 8.22.02.01

Supervisor: Đặng Nguyên Giang, Ph.D

Hanoi, 2020

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CERTIFICATE OF ORIGINALITY

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

entitled Syntactic and Semantic Features of "Run" in English and "Chạy" in Vietnamese submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree

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

Hanoi, 2020

Đào Thị Hương

Approved by SUPERVISOR

Đặng Nguyên Giang, Ph.D

Date: ………

I would like to give my sincere thanks to all the lectures at Hanoi Open University for their knowledge, experience and enthusiasm in their lectures, from which I have acquired valuable knowledge and inspiration to fulfill this minor thesis

My deep thanks also go to the headmaster of Kien Thuy high school and many of my friends and colleagues, whose support and encouragement help me

to have this thesis accomplished

Last but not least, I must express my gratitude to my family It is their endless love and expectations that have motivated me to complete this thesis I

am immensely thankful for all the assistance they have given me

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

Certificate of originality ……….……… i

Acknowledgements …… ……… ii

Table of contents ……… iii

Abstract ……… ………

List of tables ………

vi viii Chapter 1: INTRODUCTION……… 1

1.1 Rationale……… 1

1.2 Aims and objectives of the study……… 2

1.3 Research questions……… 3

1.4 Methodology … ……… 3

1.4.1 Data collection ……….……… 3

1.4.2 Research methods ……… 4

1.5 Scope of the study ……….………….………… 4

1.6 Significance of the study ……… ……… 5

1.7 Structure of the study……….……… 5

Chapter 2: LITERATURE REVIEW……… 7

2.1 Previous study 2.2 Words and word classes……….………

7 2.2.1 Polysemy of words……… 7

2.2.2 Word classes……… 9

2.3 Underlying theoretical frameworks ….……… ………

2.3.1 Theory of contrastive analysis ………

2.3.2 Theory of syntax and semantics ………

2.4 Chapter summary………

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14

16

18

iv

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Chapter 3: SYNTACTIC FEATURES OF “RUN” IN ENGLISH

AND “CHẠY” IN VIETNAMESE………… ……… 21

3.1 Syntactic features of “run” in English……… 21

3.1.1 “Run” as a verb……… 21

3.1.2 “Run” as a noun ……… …………

3.1.3 “Run” as a component in a compound word ………

29 29 3.2 Syntactic features of “chạy” in Vietnamese……… 30

3.2.1 “Chạy” as a verb……… 30

3.2.2 “Chạy” as an adjective ………

3.2.3 “Chạy” as a component in a compound word ………

32 32 3.3 A comparison between “run” in English and “chạy” in Vietnamese in terms of syntactic features……… 32

3.3.1 Syntactic features found in both languages……… 32

3.3.2 Syntactic features unique to English……… 33

3.3.3 Syntactic features unique to Vietnamese……… 34

3.4 Chapter summary……… 36

Chapter 4: SEMANTIC FEATURES OF “RUN” IN ENGLISH AND “CHẠY” IN VIETNAMESE……… ……… 38

4.1 Semantic features of “run” in English………… ……… 38

4.1.1 “Run” as a verb……… ……… 38

4.1.2 “Run” as a noun……… … 42

4.2 Semantic features of “chạy” in Vietnamese……… 45

4.2.1 “Chạy” as a verb……….………… 45

4.2.2 “Chạy” as an adjective ……… 47

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4.3 A comparison between “run” in English and “chạy” in Vietnamese in

terms of semantic features ……… 47

4.3.1 Semantic features found in both languages……… 47

4.3.2 Semantic features unique to English……… 50

4.3.3 Semantic features unique to Vietnamese……… 54

4.4 Chapter summary……… 55

Chapter 5: CONCLUSION……… 56

5.1 Recapitulation……… 57

5.2 Concluding remarks……… 60

5.3 Limitations of the study ………

5.4 Recommendations and suggestions for further studies ………

60 62 5.4.1 For English teaching and learning……….…… 62

5.4.2 For translation from English to Vietnamese and vice versa.……… 63

5.4 3 Suggestions for further research ……… 63

REFERENCES……… 65

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ABSTRACT

An investigation of run in English and chạy in Vietnamese is carried out

in the present study in order to clarify the features of those words and find out the similarities and differences between them Description and contrastive analysis are regarded as the main methods used in the present thesis Data used for analysis were mainly collected from dictionaries and the internet Our

investigation reveals that run in English and chạy in Vietnamese may function

as verbs The biggest difference between run in English and chạy in Vietnamese

in terms of syntactic features lies in the verbal forms and the co-ordinate possibility of each in the clauses In terms of semantic features, the findings of the study reveals that there are nineteen meanings in common conveyed by the

two verbs, run in English and chạy in Vietnamese When working as a verb, run in English has more meanings than chạy in Vietnamese There are thirty meanings conveyed by run, unique to English whereas chạy has four meanings which are unique to Vietnamese Run in English may be a noun which has fourteen main meanings, and chạy in Vietnamese can function as an adjective

and has only one meaning.The thesis also presents the implications for English teaching and learning as well as translation

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LIST OF TABLES

Page Table 3.1 Forms and functions of the verb “run” in English (adapted

from Quirk & Green Baum (1987) ……… 20

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Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION

1.1 Rationale

It is a fact that 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 Words help 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

“Run” is one of the words that possess the biggest quantity of meanings and highest used frequency in English In the book “Word Frequencies in Written and Spoken English”: based on the British National Corpus by Leech, Rayson & Wilson (2001), “run” is one of the motion verbs considered

as the most common one with high frequency However, this word is a kind of fairly complicated words For Vietnamese students, the differences in two languages cause a lot of difficulties in using this word They may feel confused when encountering such a word or may not understand and use it effectively

For example, in English we say “Would you run (= go quickly or in a hurry)

to the post office and get me some stamps?” or “The film runs (= lasts) for two hours.” or “We've run (= operated) the computer program, but nothing

happens.” In these sentences, “run” is used as a verb with different meanings

On the other hand, this word is also used as a noun like in the following

sentence: “Growing nervousness among investors led to a run on some banks.”

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In Vietnamese, the word “chạy” is not only a verb which indicates a physical activity only but also other kinds of word implying different meanings

in real life communication To some extent, it is not too difficult to find such

circumstances in which people use the word “chạy”: tàu chạy nhanh [the train runs fast], chạy thầy chạy thuốc [to run about for a doctor and for medicines],

chạy chức chạy quyền [bribe to be promoted], or công việc rất chạy [the work

is running very smoothly], etc

As a teacher of English, I find that 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 The difficulties that Vietnamese learners may meet are not only in semantic features but also in syntactic forms

1.2 Aims and objectives

The aim of the study is clarifying the features of “run” in English and

“chạy” in Vietnamese to help the Vietnamese learners of English to study and use these words correctly and effectively

In order to achieve the aim, the study is expected to reach the following objectives:

- To investigate syntactic features of “run” in English and “chạy” in

Vietnamese;

- To investigate semantic features of “run” in English and “chạy” in

Vietnamese;

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- To uncover the similarities and differences between “run” in English

and “chạy” in Vietnamese in terms of syntactic and semantic features

& Svartvik, 1985)

Accordingly, the recent development of linguistics has witnessed the rise

of corpus-linguistics, which bases linguistic analyses on large computer-aided corpora of both spoken and written language (Kemmer & Barlow, 2000) Cross-linguistic corpus studies require comparable corpora While there is a wide range of corpora, such as the Bank of English (owned by Collins

COBUILD) or the British National Corpus for English (BNC), for the analysis

of English, no such corpora are readily available for Vietnamese We

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deliberately use standard reference works; granted, this choice limits the scope

of this study, the dictionaries are a significant part of public discourse and dictionary entries are, by their nature, extracted from their natural context (Deignan, 2005) They are thus representative of the way in which a speech community constructs its cultural models through language – in this case the way in which the English and Vietnamese cultures conceptualize or encode the emotions in question

The data for the present study comes from standard current dictionaries in both English and Vietnamese, which are valuable tools for the scientific study of languages (Anshen & Aronoff, 1999) due to their “objective and readily verifiable reference” (Neumann, 2001, p 126)

1.4.2 Research methods

Due to the main aims and objectives of the study, description and contrastive exploitation would be mainly carried out throughout the process Also, the thesis makes use of the English language as the target and the Vietnamese one as the source language (the base language)

Descriptive method is used to describe in details the syntactic and semantic features of “run” in English and “chạy” in Vietnamese

Contrastive analysis will be used to identify the similarities and differences between “run” in English and “chạy” in Vietnamese in terms of syntactic and semantic features

1.5 Scope of the study

The present study investigates the syntactic and semantic features of

“run” in English and “chạy” in Vietnamese The description and the analysis of the features of the two words are from recently published dictionaries All the authors of these works affirm that all the forms and meanings of these words are current and used, or understood by most native speakers Most of the examples of the word “run” given in this study are taken from Cambridge Dictionary or Oxford Dictionary Besides, the examples of “chạy” in

1.6 Significance of the study

Theoretically, the findings of the study, to some extent, prove that the theoretical frameworks (the theory of contrastive analysis and the theory of syntax and semantics) are effective in studying languages in general and words

in particular The two words are quite popular; therefore, the investigation is highly reliable in terms of theoretical frameworks suggested

Practically, for language teaching (both English and Vietnamese), the study facilitates learners’ communication because language is for communication, and words are an indispensable part of expressions The work will provide assistance to English-speaking learners of Vietnamese and Vietnamese learners of English to distinguish the uses of “run” in English and

“chạy” in Vietnamese The work will also enable learners to tell when the two words are similar and different, which is likely to be useful for their study Language teachers will be aided to help their learners reach this communicative goal For translation, knowledge of words from this work will help translators find closest equivalents to the expressions in the source language

1.7 Structure of the study

In addition to the references, the thesis is composed of five chapters: Chapter 1, INTRODUCTION, gives the reason why this topic has been chosen for the research as well as its aims and objectives, scope, significance and organizational structure

Chapter 2, LITERATURE REVIEW, presents the previous studies relating to the research area and theoretical background employed for conducting the thesis

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Chapter 3, SYNTACTIC FEATURES OF “RUN” IN ENGLISH AND

“CHẠY” IN VIETNAMESE, shows syntactic features of run in English and chạy in Vietnamese and make a comparison between them

Chapter 4, SEMANTIC FEATURES OF “RUN” IN ENGLISH AND

“CHẠY” IN VIETNAMESE, shows semantic features of run in English and

chạy in Vietnamese and make a comparison between them

Chapter 5, CONCLUSION, makes a brief summary of the whole thesis, points out some limitations and give recommendation as well as suggestions for a further study

References come at the end of the study

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Chapter 2 LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1 Previous study

Linguistics is the scientific discipline dedicated to the study of human languages, and it comprises three main subfields The first focuses on the forms

of languages, and it includes syntax, morphology and phonology The second deals with meaning in languages and includes the studies

of semantics and pragmatics In the third branch of linguistics, researchers deal with languages in different contexts, including history, human evolution and neuroscience

Since presenting particularly interesting syntactic and semantic characteristics, the word “run” has been the subject of different studies by linguists both in English and in Vietnamese Many linguists have done research into this linguistic field The description and analyses are based on the starting points from Chomsky (1957) The descriptions of syntactic and semantic views are through different ages in the history of linguistic as Bullokar, William (1785) Chomsky (1957) focuses on a "formalized theory of linguistic structure" According to Dixon (1991), the word “run” is mentioned as a verb, which refers to a mode of motion In Vietnamese, there have been several authors who mentions the issue in their Vietnamese grammar books such as Nguyễn Hữu Quỳnh, Nguyễn Thu Minh (2001) and Diệp Quang Ban (2005), etc Besides, words have been recognized and explained systematically in the studies of Vietnamese vocabulary by Nguyễn Thiện Giáp (1975/1985) Moreover, a series of research works on Vietnamese syntax from different theoretical perspectives have been carried out It should be noticed the works

by Đỗ Hữu Châu (1986), highlighting the relationship between words and functions, words and semantics, words and structure In another direction, Võ

Đại Quang (2005) focuses on syntax, semantics and pragmatics

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Relating to the words “run” and “chạy”, a study entitled “A Contrastive Analysis between the Verb ‘Run’ in English and the Verb ‘Chạy’ in

Vietnamese” (Nguyễn Hùng Tiến, 2010) was also designed However, this

study only mentioned “run” and “chạy” as the verbs only

In this thesis, the words “run” and “chạy” are researched in different aspects and with different methods Not only their syntactic features but also their semantic features are respectively investigated in details, which have never been studied before Basing on the features found, the similarities and differences between English and Vietnamese are given in terms of the subjects studied

2.2 Words and word classes

We think of words as the basic units of language When a baby begins to speak, the way the excited mother reports what has happened is: ‘Tommy has said his first word!’ We would be surprised at a mother who described little Tommy’s first utterance as a sentence Sentences come later, we are inclined to feel, when words are strung together meaningfully That is not to say that a sentence must always consist of more than one word One-word commands such as ‘Go!’ or ‘Sit!’, although they crop up relatively seldom in everyday conversation or reading, are not in any way odd or un-English Nevertheless, learning to talk in early childhood seems to be a matter of putting words together, not of taking sentences apart The following sections will discuss the polysemy of words and their classes

2.2.1 Polysemy of words

Semantics is traditionally described as the study of meaning communicated through language (Saeed, 2009), in simpler terms, it is the branch of linguistics that deals with the meaning of words and sentences It is true that meaning can be studied through different linguistic views, but it is undeniable that semantics is an indispensable linguistic branch which deals with this matter “To understand a sentence we must know much more than the

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analysis of this sentence on each linguistic level We must also know the reference and meaning of the morphemes and words of which it is composed, naturally, grammar cannot be expected to be of much help here These notions form the subject matter for semantics” (Chomsky, 2002)

According to Cruse (2000), within the study of meaning there are many areas of interest, the main ones are the following:

(1) Grammatical semantics: studies aspects of meaning closely related to syntax;

(2) Logical semantics: studies the “relations between natural language and formal logical systems such as the propositional and predicate calculi”;

(3) Linguistic pragmatics: which (for present purposes) can be simply defined as the branch of linguistics that studies the way that context influences meaning;

(4) Lexical semantics: studies the meaning of ‘content’ words

The idea of a word containing multiple meanings dates back to the stoics, who observed that “a single concept can be expressed by several different words (synonymy) and that conversely, one word can carry different meanings (polysemy)” (Ravin and Leacock, 2000) But the first time the term “polysemy” appeared was in Michel Bréal’s Essai de Sémantique (1897), later translated into English under the name of Semantics: Studies in the Science of Meaning (1900), from which the following excerpt, containing the newly coined term, is taken:

“The new meaning of a word, whatever it may be, does not make an end

of the old They exist alongside of one another The same term can be employed alternately in the strict or in the metaphorical sense, in the restricted or in the expanded sense, in the abstract or in the concrete sense In proportion as a new signification is given to a word, it appears

to multiply and produce fresh examples, similar in form, but differing in value We shall call this phenomenon of multiplication Polysemia1”

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This definition could nowadays be thought of as obsolete, but it was of

a vital importance in order to set the principles that govern the study of polysemy in present days From 1900 onwards, many studies have been carried out concerning lexical ambiguity, but it seems that decades of psycholinguistic research have focused on homonymy comprehension rather than polysemy comprehension (Klepousniotou et al., 2008) This fact is curious as polysemy

is much more frequent in language than homonymy, in fact, according to Lee (1990), 93 of the 100 most frequent words in English text are polysemous This little attention towards polysemy, in terms of research, could have been due to

“the predominance of generative grammar with its focus on the sentence as the central unit of meaning However, with the emergence of the cognitive grammar during the 1980s polysemy emerged on the research agenda as a key topic in lexical semantics” (Falkum & Vicente, 2015)

According to Cruse (2000) polysemy can be divided into two different types: linear and non-linear Linear polysemy accounts for a specialization-generalization relation between senses and, in turn, is divided into four types: autohyponymy, automeronymy, autosuperordination and autoholonymy Metaphorical and metonymous polysemy are thought to belong to the non-linear category In order to obtain a more in-depth description of these terms, a full description will be given below

Even though Cruse’s theory on Polysemy types is the most accepted one, there are many other linguists who have made their own hypothesis Among these linguists we find Andreas Blank, who gives an alternative to Cruse’s classification, in his article Polysemy in the Lexicon, providing seven different polysemy types based on the origins of polysemous words Blank agrees with Cruse in that he also considers metonymic and metaphorical polysemy but, in his theory, there are five more types: co-hyponymous, taxonomic, auto-converse, antiphrastic and auto-antonymic

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2.2.2 Word classes

Word classes are among the very few grammatical concepts that have continuously played a central role in grammatical theory and grammar writing throughout the two and a half millennia of documented linguistic enquiry in the Western world Their critical position is due to the fact that they provide central building blocks for the architecture of grammars and of lexical entries in dictionaries Grammatical rules are stated in terms of word classes and there is

a mutual dependency between the grammatical rule system and the word class system Word classes are thus a typical interface phenomenon and their pivotal role is reflected in the fact that there are a number of different terms used to

refer to them These include, in particular, syntactic or grammatical categories, lexical categories, and the traditional term parts of speech These terms

highlight different aspects of grammatical word classification (morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics/discourse) Some authors hold that they refer to substantially different classifications, while others consider them largely synonymous It is common to distinguish between major word classes (comprising nouns, verbs, adjectives, and sometimes also adverbs and appositions) and minor word classes The latter include, on the one hand, some smallish, closed word classes which are internally tightly structured such as pronouns, demonstratives and articles, and conjunctions On the other hand, they include interjections and idiophones, which are often seen to be at the boundaries of the language system Items that do not fit any of the other

categories are often lumped together under the term particles Other large-scale

classifications are open versus closed classes and content versus function words (lexical versus functional categories in some contemporary frameworks) These roughly match the major/minor divide, but they draw the boundary somewhat differently Major controversies pertain to the ways word classes can and should be identified and to their universality and variability

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Classifications can be based on syntactic (distributional), morphological, semantic, or pragmatic criteria The resulting classifications often fail to correlate, with authors being divided as to how to deal with the incongruities Some opt for a single (type of) criterion, others make use of a combination of criteria, and a third group argues that classifications on each level (or at least the morphological and syntactic levels) have to be considered separately and that the question of how the classifications fit across levels is subject to cross-linguistic variation A further issue pertains to the further sub-classification of major word classes, an issue not covered in this entry, as there is practically no literature that discusses it specifically from the point of view of word classification Nouns, for example, may belong to different declension classes, may obey different number-marking regularities in accordance with their semantics (mass, count, collections, etc.), and so on

Traditionally, words can be classified as follows:

(1) The verb

A group of words cannot be described as a sentence or a clause unless at least one of the words is a verb In some ways, we can describe it as the most important part of speech because it is the 'action' word that tells the listener or reader what is happening in the sentence Verbs can be “action” words

like run, initiate, judge, throw, but they can also denote less active notions and

have more to do with mental processes and perceptions,

like see, know, think and so on

(2) The noun

A noun is a word which is used to denote a person (traffic warden, woman, Prime Minister, pianist etc.), a concrete or abstract entity (binoculars, fork, field, truth, incoherence etc.) or a place (office, garden, railway station)

These are all common nouns; there are also proper nouns which are the

names of a specific person, place, event etc., usually starting with a capital

letter, for example, York, John, Christmas, Saturday

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A noun can be extended to a noun phrase In the example phrases given below, the noun (in the first example) and the noun phrase (in the remaining examples) is in bold Note how much the noun phrase can be extended by adding extra information each time

Dogs can be vicious

Some dogs can be vicious

Some of the dogs can be vicious

Some of the bigger dogs can be vicious

Some of the bigger dogs in the dog pound can be vicious

(3) The adverb

The traditional approach to adverbs has been to assign mainly those

words which are made from adjectives by the addition of the ending –

ly (quickly, hopelessly), plus certain other words which are difficult to classify, like not, just and soon Their main function is to qualify the action of the verb

in the clause in some way, but they can also be used to add more information

to an adjective or other adverb e.g awfully good, incredibly slowly The class

of adverbs is very wide-ranging in form and is used to add comments to many

of the other word classes

(4) The preposition

Prepositions allow us to talk about the way in which two parts of a

sentence are related to each other They include words like in, on, under, beside, through, inside, before, opposite More often than not, these

relationships are to do with either time or space, but other types of relationship, such as possession, cause and effect and method can be expressed by using prepositions The words themselves are generally short and simple but some

prepositions are multi-word units; for example, out of, by means of, in spite of,

instead of, up to etc Unless they are part of a verb (get in, pick up, switch off),

prepositions are always followed by a phrase containing a noun – at school, in the summer, over the moon and so on

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(5) The adjective

An adjective gives the reader or speaker extra information about a noun

or delimits it in some way It can occur in two positions in a phrase:

- before the noun as in clear water, beautiful beaches, a terrible

decision The adjectives in these examples are said to be attributive,

- following any form of the verb be (e.g am, is, was, been) and similar verbs (seem, appear, become) as in the water became clear, the

beaches are beautiful These adjectives are in predicative position

(6) The pronoun

Pronouns are usually treated as a special sub-class of nouns This is because they stand in for a noun or group of nouns They are limited in number

and belong to what is called a closed set, that is, a group of words to which new

members are, for practical purposes, not allowed Some examples of pronouns

are: I, you, he, she, our, its, something, anyone and so on Thus, instead of

saying, Bill’s arrived Bill’s in the lounge, we prefer Bill’s arrived He’s in the lounge Or a person called for you; better would be someone called for you

There are several other words which fall into this class; for example, (the)

one(s), when used to replace dishes in the example: pass me the dishes - the

ones on the top shelf

(7) The conjunction

It would be very unusual for anyone to either speak or write completely

in simple sentences; instead we tend to use a mixture of simple, compound and complex sentences One way to create longer, more complicated sentences is

to use conjunctions As we have already noted in the section on types of clause, conjunctions serve to connect two or more clauses, phrases or words together

to make longer constructions In the following examples, the conjunction is in bold:

The coffee was strong, but sweet

We can go to the match or watch it on TV

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She has a dog and two cats

When I arrived home, they had already eaten

I had to stop driving because the rain was so bad

Can I have a word with you, if you’ve got the time?

Although he can’t swim, he goes sailing

There are two types of conjunction The first is the coordinating

conjunction This type is always used to connect elements that share the same grammatical status, that is, main clause to main clause, verb to verb, noun to noun, adjective to adjective and so on The second type is

the subordinating conjunction, which most often joins two or more unequal

clauses to one another Typically, a main clause will be connected to a subordinate clause as we saw in the section on clause types the subordinate clause (which you will remember cannot stand on its own, but needs another more important clause to complete the meaning) begins with a conjunction,

here when, because, if and although

2.3 Theoretical frameworks

We will apply a select range of theories to the investigation of the syntactic and semantic features of “run” in English and “chạy” in Vietnamese:

the theory of contrastive analysis and the theory of syntax and semantics

2.3.1 Theory of contrastive analysis

According to Krzeszowski (1990 p 35), ‘No exact or reliable exploration of facts can be conducted without a theoretical background, providing concepts, hypotheses, and theories which enable the investigator to describe the relevant facts and to account for them in terms of significant generalizations’ (cited in Nguyễn Văn Trào, 2009, p 12)

In the present inquiry, the theories of contrastive linguistics of König and Gast (2008) and Chaturvedi (1973) are applied to the investigation of the syntactic and semantic features of “run” in English and “chạy” in Vietnamese

König and Gast (2008) suppose that contrastive linguistics is a branch of

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comparative linguistics that is concerned with pairs of languages which are

‘socio-culturally linked’ According to these authors, two languages can be said

to be socio-culturally linked when (i) they are used by a considerable number

of bi- or multilingual speakers, and/or (ii) a substantial amount of ‘linguistic output’ (text, discourse) is translated from one language into the other English and Vietnamese are socio-cultural linked because they satisfy both criteria given above

Contrastive linguistics invariably requires a socio-cultural link between the languages investigated, but that it is not restricted to pair wise language comparison Contrastive linguistics thus aims to arrive at results that carry the potential of being used for practical purposes, e.g in foreign language teaching and translation As it provides the descriptive basis for such applications, its research programme can also be summarized as ‘comparison with a purpose’

‘Comparison’ in the present study is understood as the identification of similarities and differences between two or more categories along a specific (set of) dimension(s) (König and Gast 2008) We mean that the categories compared must be of the same type, i.e there has to be a set of properties that they have in common in both languages

In order to carry out a contrastive study, Chaturvedi (1973) suggests some guiding principles as follows:

(i) to analyse the mother tongue and the target language independently and completely; (ii) to compare the two languages item-wise-item at all levels of their structure; (iii) to arrive at the categories of a) similar features, b) partially similar features, c) dissimilar features - for the target language; and (iv) to arrive at principles of text preparation, test framing and target language teaching in general

The contrastive analysis emphasises the influence of the mother tongue

in learning a second language and translation This type of study will provide

an objective and scientific base for second language teaching as well as

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translation For knowing the significantly similar structural and semantic properties in both languages, the first step to be adopted is that both languages should be analysed independently After the independent analysis, to sort out the different features of the two languages, comparison of the two languages is necessary From this analysis it is easy to make out that at different levels of structural and semantic properties of these two languages there are some features quite similar and some quite dissimilar

2.3.2 Theory of syntax and semantics

Theory of syntax

Syntax is a set of rules in language It dictates how words from different parts of speech are put together in order to convey a complete thought According to Dixon (1991), syntax deals with the way in which words are combined together Syntax is understood to be the 7 theory of the structure of sentences in a language This view has its direct antecedents in the theory of immediate constituents, in which the function of syntax is to mediate between the observed forms of a sentence and its meaning Bloomfield (1933), he states

“we could not understand the form of a language if we merely reduced all the complex forms to their ultimate constituents” He argued that in order to account for the meaning of a sentence, it is necessary to recognize how individual constituents such words and morphemes constitute more complex forms

Syntax is now the study of the principles and rules that govern the ways

in which words are combined to form phrases, clauses and sentences in a language Syntax, which is a subfield of grammar, focuses on the word order

of a language and the relationships between words In other words, morphology deals with word formation out of morphemes whereas syntax deals with phrase and sentence formation out of words Syntax structures are analyzable into sequences of syntactic categories or syntactic classes, these being established

on the basic of the syntactic relationships and linguistic items have with other

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items in a construction Every language has a limited number of syntactic relations Subject and object are probably universal of syntactic relations, which apply to every language However, just as the criteria for the major words class noun and verb differ from language to language, so do the ways in which syntactic relations are marked

Theory of semantics

Semantics is a branch of linguistics which relates with meaning Semantics is considered as a study of meaning in language It deals with the expression of linguistic objects such as word, phrases and sentences It does not pay attention to the syntactical arrangement or pronunciation of linguistic object As states by Katz (1972, p 1), “Semantics is the study of linguistic meaning It is concerned with what sentence and other linguistics object express, not with the arrangement with their syntactic parts or with their pronunciation.”

Semantics has long been an object of study within the philosophy It issaid that the term semantics itself was introduced into English at the end of the19th century There are some term semantics in various defenition by some expert, they are: Palmer (1976, p 1) states “Semantics is the technical term used to refer to study of meaning.” Hornby (1972, p 789) has defined

“Semantics is branch of linguistics concerned with studying the meaning of words and sentences.”

Lyons (1977, p 1) defines “Semantics is generally defined as the study

of meaning.” Siregar (1992, p 2) states “Semantics is the study of the meaning

of words, phrases, or sentences in the language or semantics is the study of meaning in language.” Semantics has developed and become worthy study There are two factors that make semantics become important and worthy study First, meaning is strictly connected with communication A certain meaning can be delivered through communication plays an important role in human life Second, the process of human attempts to comprehend the nature of meaning

phrase and it can be divided into different types by different linguistics Basing

on syntactic (distributional), morphological, semantic, or pragmatic criteria, words can be classified as the verb, the noun, the adverb, the preposition, the adjective, the pronoun and the conjunction Each word class has its own usage and can be divided into minor classes In order to investigate the previous research works, the studies by oversea and Vietnamese authors are given to briefly review what has been found and discussed to find out the gap of the

study

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Chapter 3 SYNTACTIC FEATURES OF “RUN” IN ENGLISH

AND “CHẠY” IN VIETNAMESE 3.1 Syntactic features of “run” in English

3.1.1 “Run” as a verb

i) Verbal forms of “run”

“Run” is a lexical verb which has five forms: the BASE, the S-FORM,

the PAST, the -ING PARTICIPLE, and the past PARTICIPLE Examples of

these forms and an indication of their functions are given in the table below In addition, “run”, a irregular lexical verb, has “ran” for the past tense and “run” for the past participle

(1) base V run (a) all the present tense

except 3rd person singular:

I/you/we/they run down this

road every day

(b) imperative: Run away at

once!

(c) subjunctive: He

demanded that he run to

help her

(d) the bare infinitive: He

may run to meet her; and the to-infinitive: He wants her to

run to help the children

(2) -s form (3rd

person singular

present)

V-s runs 3rd person singular present

tense: He/she/it runs down

this road every day

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(3) past Irregular V ran past tense: He ran away 20

minutes ago

(4) -ing participle V-ing running (a) progressive aspect (be +

V-ing): The river is running (b) in -ing participle clauses:

Opening the door, I found

her at home

(5) past participle Irregular V run (a) perfective aspect (have +

past participle): He has just

run away

(b) passive voice (be + past

participle): The shop is run

by her sister

(c) in past participle clauses:

Run by a good manager, the

company has made a lot of success

Table 1: Forms and functions of the verb “run” (adapted from Quirk & Green Baum (1987))

ii) Syntactic functions of verb phrases containing “run”

A verb phrase containing “run” can occur as:

predicate: He runs down the road every day

subject: Running a big company gives him a good chance of

determining himself

object: She wants to run that shop

subject complement: My duty is running to help the children

object complement: I found him running away

adjectival complement: She is busy running an English class

prepositional complement: She is interested in running that company

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appositive: His duty, running to help the children, is very important adverbial: He went there to run a new company

iii) Co-ordinate possibility of “run” in the clauses

Before the verb run, there can be a modal verb, a primary auxiliary verb:

He can run 20 kilometers a day

He is running to help her

There are some lexical verbs followed by run with the -ing or

to-infinitive forms:

We want to run that company

I tried running an English class

In some cases, to run can be used after a clause functioning as an

adverbial of purpose:

I went there to run a new shop

When run is used after a preposition, it stays in the -ing form:

After running away from home, I realized that there was no place like

home

After the verb run, there can be a noun, a noun phrase, an adverb, or a prepositional phrase: run a company, run 20 kilometers, run away from home, run in the park…

You couldn’t run 20 kilometers a day if you are not strong enough

That run followed by a preposition or an adverb makes fixed expressions

with special meanings:

Public opinion is currently running against the banking industry

We've run across a slight problem with the instruction manual

"Do you have any milk?" "Sorry, I've run out."

The game/speech/discussion ran on for hours

iv) “Run” in nominal clauses

That-clauses

That-clause containing “run” can occur as:

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object: I told him that I could run 20 kilometers a day

subject complement: The assumption is that they will run a shopping

“zero” that-clause:

I told him I could run 20 kilometers a day

When the clause is subject and not extra posed, that cannot be omitted

and is usually expanded to the fact that, except in very formal English:

(The fact) they will run a shopping center soon makes me excited Wh-interrogative clauses

The dependent wh-interrogative clause occurs in the whole range of

functions available to the that-clause, and in addition can act as prepositional

complement:

subject: How he ran the company is still a big question

direct object: I can’t imagine how he ran the company

subject complement: My question is how he ran the company

appositive: My question, why he ran away from home, has not been

answered

adjectival complement: I wasn’t certain how he ran the company prepositional complement: It depends on when he will run to meet her

As regards meaning, these clauses resemble wh-questions in which they

leave a gap of unknown information, represented by the wh-element There is

also a grammatical similarity to wh-questions in that the wh-element is placed

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first; indeed, apart from the absence of subject-operator inversion in the dependent clause, the structures of the two types of clause are in all respect parallel We have, in the wh-interrogative clause, the same choice between

initial and final preposition where the prepositional complement is the

wh-element

Yes-no interrogative clauses

The dependent yes-no interrogative clause is formed with if or whether:

Do you know if/whether he will run to meet her

The dependent alternative question has if/whether…or:

I don’t know whether he will run to meet her

Only whether can be directly followed by or not:

I don’t care whether or not he will run to meet her

A clause beginning with whether cannot be made negative, except as the

second part of an alternative question:

I don’t care if she won’t run to meet her /whether she will run to meet

her or not

On the other hand, if cannot introduce a subject clause:

Whether she will run to meet her or not doesn’t concern me

Nominal relative clauses

The nominal relative clause, also introduced by a wh-element, can be:

subject: Whoever ran away from home will be punished

direct object: I want to see whoever ran away from home

indirect object: She gave whoever ran to help the children a friendly

smile

subject complement: The problem is when she will run that company appositive: Let me know the time when he will run that company prepositional complement: I am not interested in whoever will run away

from home

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The nominal relative clause is much closer to noun phrase status than other nominal clauses are It can normally be paraphrased by a noun phrase containing a post-modifying relative clause:

I am not interested in whoever will run that company (‘…the person

who will run that company’)

There is a difference between UNIVERSAL and DEFINITE meaning as expressed by the wh-form of a relative clause

The form who is rarely used in present-day English in this nominal relative function, being replaced in many contexts, for both universal and

definite meanings, by whoever:

Whoever ran away from home will be punished (‘The person/Anyone

who…’)

To-infinitive nominal clauses

The to-infinitive nominal clause can occur as:

subject: To run to help her is impossible

direct object: He wants to run to help her

subject complement: My wish is to run a big company

appositive: My wish, to run a big company, will come true

adjectival complement: I am happy to run to help her

The subject of a to-infinitive clause is nominally preceded by for (which

is perhaps acting here more as a conjunction than as a preposition) The subject, when a pronoun, is in the objective case:

The idea is that we should run away from that company/for us to run

away from that company

When the clause is a direct object, however, the for is omitted:

He wants me to run away from that company (rather than: He wants for

me to run away from that company)

Nominal -ing clauses

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The nominal -ing clause, a PARTICIPLE CLAUSE, occurs in the following positions:

subject: Running to help her is impossible

direct object: The boy enjoys running that shop

subject complement: My wish is running a big company

appositive: My wish, running a big company, will come true

prepositional complement: I am tired of running that company

adjectival complement: I am busy running the shop

It is the commonest type of participle clause which has no subject that is illustrated above When a subject is required, there is sometimes a choice as follows:

GENITIVE case in formal style:

I am not interested in his/John’s running a new shop

OBJECTIVE or COMMON case (for personal pronouns or nouns,

respectively) in informal style:

I am not interested in him/John running a new shop

Bare infinitive and verbless clauses

The to of the infinitive is optionally omitted in a clause which supplies a predication corresponding to a use of the pro-verb do:

All I did was (to) run 20 kilometers

When the infinitive clause is initial, to has to be omitted: Running 20

kilometers was all I did

v) “Run” in adverbial clauses

Adverbial clauses, like adverbials in general, are capable of occurring in

a final, initial, or medial position within the main clause (generally in that order

of frequency, medial position being rather rare)

Clauses of time

Finite adverbial clauses of time are introduced by such subordinators as

after, before, since, until, when:

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When I ran to help her, I saw a strange man

The -ing clause maybe introduced by after, before, since, until when(ever), and while; past participle clauses by once, until, when(ever), and while; and verbless clauses by as soon as, once, when(ever), and while:

When running out of the house, I heard a strange voice

Clauses of place

Adverbial clauses of place are introduced by where or wherever:

Where he usually runs in the mornings, there are a lot of flowers

Clauses of condition and concession

Whereas conditional clauses state the dependence of one circumstance

or set of circumstances on another:

If you run a new shop, I’ll give you some advice

Although he ran a big shop, he had no assistants

Clauses of reason or cause

Clauses of reason or cause are most commonly introduced by the conjunctions because, as, or since:

He is very busy because he has to run a new shop

Clauses of circumstance

Clauses of circumstance express a fulfilled condition or (to put it differently) a relation between a premise (in the subordinate clause) and the

conclusion drawn from it (in the main clause) Because, since, and as can

convey this meaning, but in addition there is a special circumstantial compound

conjunction, seeing (that):

Seeing that she is running a big shop, she is very busy

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Finite clauses of purpose may be introduced by so that, so (informal), or

in order that (formal):

He went there in order that/so that he could run a new company

Clauses of result

Result clauses (disjuncts, placed finally in superordinate clauses) are factual rather than ‘putative’; hence they may contain an ordinary verb form

without a modal auxiliary They are introduced by so that, informally so:

We moved the table, so (that) he could run out of the room easily

3.1.2 “Run” as a noun

Run is a noun which combines the characteristics of count and non-count nouns (a run, the run, some runs, a long run…) When working as a regular count noun, run has two forms, singular and plural The singular form stays the same as run The plural form has -s suffix (some runs, the runs…)

The noun run can function as:

His final trip is a run up to town

and (d) complement in prepositional phrases:

Rory set off at a run

In the noun phrases, run usually works as a head The elements found in

the noun phrases consist of pronouns and numerals, and of nouns with articles

or other closed-system items that can occur before the noun head, such as determiners

pre-3.1.3 “Run” as a component in a compound word

Run can be a component in a compound noun:

The run-time will be five hours

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We've got time for one more run-through before the concert

In addition, the word run in English can also produce several derivatives:

The runner collapsed just a few paces from the finish

For the second day running, play was impossible because of the rain

3.2 Syntactic features of “chạy” in Vietnamese

3.2.1 “Chạy” as a verb

i) Verbal forms of “chạy”

While the verb run in English has five forms, this isn't a feature of chạy

in Vietnamese That is to say that chạy has the same verb form in any case: Tôi

chạy quanh công viên vào mọi buổi sáng [I run around the park every

morning]; Tôi đang chạy một mình quanh hồ [I am running around the lake]; Tôi (sẽ) chạy đến chỗ cậu trong vòng 15 phút nữa [I will run to your place in

15 minutes]; Tôi có thể chạy được 20 km một ngày [I can run 20 kilometers a

day]…

In Vietnamese, the notions of the past and the future are encoded implicitly in dialogues' settings and not in verbs It's no surprise that the present tense is the one that would be encountered most frequently In order to express

the present continuous, đang is added before the verb The past simple and future tenses are expressed by prefixing verbs with đã and sẽ, respectively Rồi,

được…can be used for the present perfect or past perfect tenses: Tôi (đã) chạy

rồi [I have already run]; Tôi chạy được hai km [I had already run two

kilometer]… The use of đã and sẽ are optional with regards to expressing time

They are needed, however, if we want to put an emphasis on the time

ii) Syntactic functions of verb phrases containing “chạy”

A verb phrase containing chạy can fuction as:

predicate: Anh ta chạy rất nhanh [He runs very fast]

subject: Chạy được 20 km một ngày là ao ước của nó

[She wishes to run 20 kilometer a day.]