Reduplicatives in english and in vietnamese = từ láy trong tiếng anh và tiếng việt

Speaker’s linguistics knowledge permits him to combine phonemes intomorphemes, morphemes into words, or rather word compounds that carrymeaning of some kind from lexical meanings of indi

Part I: Introduction

1 Reason for choosing the topic

2 Aims and objectives of the Study

3 Methods of the Study

4 Scope of the Study

5 Format of the Study

Part II: contents

Chapter 1: Back ground

1.1 Definition of a word

1.2 Characteristics of a word

1.3 Classification of words

1.3.1 According to the semantic aspect

1.3.2 According to the morphological structure

1.3.3 According to parts of speech (grammatical category)1.3.4 According to the stylistic aspect of the language1.4 Word-formation

1.4.1 Derivation and inflection

Chapter 2: Reduplicatives in English and in Vietnamese2.1 Definitions

2.1.1 Defintion of English reduplication

2.1.2 Defintion of Vietnamese reduplication

3.2 Usage of reduplicatives

Part III: Conclusion

References

Part I: Introduction

1 Reasons for choosing the topic

There are many aspects of language that one might be interested

in learning During the course of learning English we have chance to dealwith many aspects of English language, in that we are interested in itssemantic field Especially, we found it interesting when learning the greed– upon meaning of certain strings of sound and learning how to combinethese meaningful units into larger units that also convey meaning

Speaker’s linguistics knowledge permits him to combine phonemes intomorphemes, morphemes into words, or rather word compounds that carrymeaning of some kind from lexical meanings of individuals or from theirstructural meanings In fact, compounding or word – composition is one ofthe productive types of word – formation in modern English language Compound words are words consisting of at least two stems,which occur, in the language as free forms In a compound word, theimmediate constituents obtain the integrity and structural cohesion thatmake them function in a sentence as a separate lexical unit.

In compound words, reduplication is a special way to create new wordsboth in English and in Vietnamese Reduplicative compounds are used invariety ways That is the reason why we decide to choose the subject entitle

“ Reduplicatives in English and in Vietnamese” with a hope that this

study will make a small contribution to teaching and learningreduplications

2 Aims of the Study

The first aim of this Study is to help the learners improve theirknowledge of English and Vietnamese reduplications

The second aim of the study is to enrich English and Vietnameselanguage

Lastly, this Study aims at giving a comparison of similarities anddifferences between English and Vietnamese reduplicatives

3 Methods of the Study

To do this Study we use these methods:

Because of time limit, we cannot come up with all the aspects ofreduplicatives in English and in Vietnamese; we only focus on some mainpoints of the topic The main points include an overview of reduplicativesand the usage of them in literature The focus here should be restricted to adiscussion of compounds base on reduplication in English and inVietnamese.

5 Format of the Study

The study is designed into three main parts:

Part I: Introduction

Part II: Contents

Chapter 1: Background

Chapter 2: Reduplication in English and in Vietnamese

Chapter 3: Meaning and usage of reduplication

Part III: Conclusion

Besides these three main parts, the thesis also consists of theacknowledgement, the table of contents, the table, abbreviation and thereferences

Part II: CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1: BACKGROUND

1.1 Definition of a word

In Arnold (1986: 28), a word has a sound form because it is a

certain arrangement of morphemes; it has its morphological structure, when used in actual speech it may occur in different word forms, different

syntactic functions and signal various meanings

a word is considered as the central element of any language system;therefore, the word is a sort of focus for the problems of phonology,lexicology, syntax and morphology and so on Thus, what is the word? Inthis study, we would like to propose some following definitions.

Firstly, in lexicology, Anstrushina, G B., et.al (1986: 6) state that:

- The word is a unit of speech, which severs the purposes of human

communication.

- The word can be perceived as the total of the sounds, which comprise it.

- The word view structurally, possesses several characteristics.

To support their concepts, they based on distinguishing between theinternal and the external structures of the word The external structure ofthe word means the morphological structure For example, in the word

“impression”, the following morphemes can be: the prefix “im-“, the root

“press” and the noun-forming suffix “-ion” The internal structure of theword or its meaning is commonly referred to as the word’s semanticstructure In addition, this is the word’s main aspect Another structuralaspect of the word is its unity The word possesses both external andinternal unity All that Anstrushina, G B., et.al said about the word can besummed up as follows: The word is a speech unit used for the purposes ofhuman communication, materially representing a group of sounds,possessing a meaning susceptible to grammatical employment andcharacterized by formal and semantic unity

In Longman Dictionary of Applied Linguistics, Richards, et.al.,

(p 27) word is the smallest of the linguistic unit which can occur on its

own in speech and writing.

In speech, word boundaries may be recognized by slight pauses Inwriting, word boundaries are usually recognized by spaces between thewords

Besides two above word studies, Arnold, I.V (1986) also gave hisdefinition of the word

“The word may be defined as the basic unit of language, uniting

meaning and form; it is composed of one or more morphemes, each consisting of one or more spoken sounds or their written representation”.

Within the scope of linguistics, the word has been definedsyntactically, semantically, phonologically, and by combining variousapproaches It has been syntactically defined for instance as “the minimumsentences” by Sweet, H and much later by Bloomfield, L as “a minimumfree form”

To Sapir, E he took into consideration the syntactic and semanticaspects when he called the word “one of the smallest completely satisfyingbits of isolated meaning into which sentence involves itself”

A purely semantic treatment will be found in Stephen Ullmann’sexplanation” will fall into a certain number of meaningful segments, whichare ultimately composed of meaningful units These meaningful units arecalled words” The semantic-phonological approach may be illustrated byGardiner’s definition: “a word articulate sound symbol in its aspect ofdenoting something which is spoken out” The eminent French linguistMeillet, A (1866-1936) combined the semantic, phonological and

grammatical criteria give this definition: a word is defined by the

association of a particular meaning with the particular grammatical employment

In Vietnamese, there are also some definitions of a word given by

some authors In Hoang Tat Truong (1993), Palmer noted that a word is

marked if not by “spaces” or “pauses”, at least by some features of the sound system of language The definition seems to be the most satisfactory

is that the word is the fundamental unit of language It is a dialectical unity

of form and content The content or meaning of the word is not identical tonotion, but it may reflect human notion and in this sense many beconsidered as the form of their existence Semantically, Nguyen Hoa

(2004)defined word as follows: words are regarded as the smallest

indivisible meaningful unit of a language, which can operate immediately.

Thus so far have there been many definition about word fromdifferent aspects Among them, the most common one is that word is thesmallest independent and meaningful unit of a language

1.2 Characteristics of a word

We can consider some following characteristics of a word

(i) The word is an indivisible unit.

Sapir point out the very important characteristics of the word isits indivisibility It cannot be cut into without a disturbance of meaning,one or two other or both of the several parts remaining as a helpless waif acomparison of the article “a” and the prefix “a-“ in “a lion” and “alive” Alion is a word group because we can separate its elements and insert otherwords between them such as: “a living lion” or “a dead lion”, etc but alive

is a word, it is uninterruptible, i.e structurally impermeable: nothing can beinserted between its elements

(ii ) The word may consist of one or more morphemes

When it consists of one morpheme only, then it cannot be broken downinto smaller meaningful units, for example, dog, hand, work, etc These arecalled simple words, which are typically minimum free forms, in the sensethat they may stand by themselves and yet act as minimally completeutterances, for example, in answer to a question When words consist ofmore than one morpheme, they may be either complex or compound.Complex words may be broken down into one free form and one or morebound forms such as: dog-s, happi-ly, quick-er, whereas compound wordsconsist of more than one free form such as: black + bird, green + house,swimming + pool, etc

(iii) The word occurs typically in the structure of phrases.

According to the hierarchy adopted by Jackson, H & Amvella, E.,

morphemes are used to build words, words to build phrases, phrases tobuild clauses, clauses to build sentences This is the typical mapping oflower level into higher-level units However, in a typical mapping, ahigher-level unit may be used in a lower level unit.

For example: a clause “who came late” may be used like an adjective(word) to modify the head noun “man” in a sentence such as “the man whocame late was my brother” Thus, we shall still regard such unit as asequence of words, it has merely shifted levels

(iv) Another important characteristic of each word is that it should belong to a specific word class or part of speech where the same

form appears in more than one class, as frequently happens in English, weregard the various occurrences as separate words, for example, smoke(verb) as distinct from smoke (noun) It may even be suggested that a word

is defined by two factors: its semantic “nucleus” and the class to which itbelongs

(v) The last characteristic of the word is the word can be positionally mobile It means that a word may have different positions in

the structure of a sentence

For example:

The boy walked slowly up the hill.

Slowly, the boy walked up the hill.

1.3 Classification of words

1.3.1 According to the semantic aspect

There are two catergories of words They are content and functionwords

- Content words (lexical or notion words) are words whose lexicalmeaning is clear (noun, verb, adjective, adverb)

- Function words (grammatical words) are words whose meaningsmainly denote the grammatical function of the word in the sentence(article, preposition, interjection, etc.)

1.3.2 According to the morphological structure

- Simple words are words which consist of a free morpheme with orwithout an inflectional morpheme

For example: sing, smoke, work, etc

- Derived words or complex words are words which consist of either

a free root or bound root with derivational morpheme

For example: multiply, production, manager, etc

- Compound words are words which consist of at least two free rootmorphemes with or without derivational morpheme

For example: black board, green house, etc

1.3.3 According to parts of speech (grammatical category)

In this part we have noun, verb, adjective, adverb, ect

1.3.4 According to the stylistic aspect of the language

There are three main types: informal, formal, and neutral words

- Type 1: informal words

In this type, we have four main sub-groups: colloquial words, dialectwords, vulgarism and slang words (general and special slang words)

+ Colloquial words are used in everyday speech conversationalspeech by ordinary people of all age groups Colloquial words are oftenshortened form

For example: mum = mother

From Scotland: lock = lake

Boning = fine

+ slang words are metaphors, jocular, often used with a coarsemocking, cynical coloring Slang words are often used by young people + Vulgarisms are coarse and rough words used by some uneducatedpeople and are not generally used in public

For example: damn it

- Type 2: formal words

In this type, there are four sub-groups: learned words (bookishwords), archaic or poetic words, technical term or professional termilogy,and non-assimilated foreign words

+ Learned words: mainly associated with printed pages Most of themare Latin, Greek, and French

+ Archaic or poetic words: used in historical novels or in poetry whenthe authors want to create a particular period atmosphere They are oldEnglish

For example: morn = morning

Thee = you

Eve = evening

+ Technical term or professional terminology

Every field of modern activity has its specialized vocabulary There is aspecial medical vocabulary and similarly special terminologies forpsychology, botany, music linguistics, teaching methods and many others + Non-assimilated foreign words: borrowed from otherlanguages which still remain their spelling and pronunciation

-Type 3: Neutral words

Neutral words are used in all kinds of situations neither formal norinformal, in both written and spoken communication Neutral words aremostly native words

1.4 Word-formation

Word-formation is the process of building new words from thematerial already existing in language according to certain structural andsemantic patterns and formulates (Hoang Tat Truong, 1993:15) Orword-formation can be understood as the process of producing newwords from the resources of this particular language

1.4.1 Derivation and inflection

Derivation is a lexical process, which actually forms a new word out

of existing one by the addition of a derivational affix

Inflection is a general grammatical process, which combines wordsand inflectional affixes to build alternative grammatical forms of words From two definitions, we can see there are two types of affixes(derivational and inflectional affixes) used to build the new words

Derivational affixes can change the word class of the item they areadded to and establish words as members of the various word classes

Table 1: Some English derivational affixes.

Affix word

classchange

Semantic effect Examples

Suffixes

-able V → A Able to be X’ed Fixable

-ation V → N The result of X’ing Realization

-er V → N One who X’s Worker

-ing V → N

V → A

The act of X’ing

In the process of X’ing

The shootingThe sleepingchild

-ion V → N The result of act of X’ing Protection

-ive V → A Having the property of X Assertive

-ment V → N The act or result of X’ing Adjournment

-al N → A Pertaining to X National

-ial N → A Pertaining to X Presidential

-ian N → A Pertaining to X Canadian

-ic N → A Having the property of X Organic

-ize N → V Put in X Hospitalize

-less N → A Without X Penniless

-ous N → A The property of having or

being X

Poisonous

-ate A → V Make X Activate

-ly A→ Adv In an X manner Quietly

Prefixes

Ex- N → N Former X Ex-president

In- A → A Not X Incompetent

Un- A → A

V → V

Not XReserve X

UnhappyUntieRe- V →V X again Replay

Inflectional affixes may be described as “relational markers” that fitwords for use in syntax To form a new word we use both inflection andderivational affixes If derivational and inflectional affixes occur,derivations are inner, closer to the stem, and inflection are outer, furthestfrom the stem

For example:

Base form + derivation + inflection

Frightened fright -en -ed

Activating active -ate -ing

Payments pay -ment -s

Resignations resign -ation -s

1.4.2 Compounding

Compounding is the process of joining two or more words together

A compound word is a combination of two or more words joined togetherwith or without a hyphen From the way to combine words into compoundwords we can consider these types of compounds

The first way is base on the parts of speech

Table 2: Ways of combining a compound word

compound + noun +verb +adjective +adverbNoun N + N N + V N + A N + Adv

Moon-light Drop-kick Sea-sick No caseVerb V + N

Pick-pocket

V + VDive-bomb

V + A

No case

V + AdvLift-offAdjective A + N

Black dog

A + VDry-clean

A + ABlue-green

A + Adv

No caseAdverb Adv + N

Back-talk

Adv + VOver-do

Adv + AOff-white

Adv +Adv

In-to

Through the table 2, we can classify compounds into: compoundnoun (some special compound noun (V+ Adv = N)), compound verb,compound adjective, compound adverb, compound preposition, compoundpronoun and compound conjunction

The second way is base on the meaning of the compound we havetwo types:

- Motivated compounds (non – idiomatic compound) are thosewhose meaning can be deduced from the meaning of the parts

For example: school leaver, housekeeper, etc

- Non – motivated compounds (idiomatic compound) are thosewhose meaning cannot be deduced from the meaning of the parts, there is

no relation between the meaning of the compound and the meaning of itsparts

For example: teach – in = workshop

Hotdog = a kind of sauces

Another way is base on the structure There are two main types ofthis They are simple compounds and derivational compounds

- Simple compounds are words, which consists of only free bases.For example: headache, armchair, highway, etc

- Derivational compounds are words, which consists of free basesand derivational morphemes

For example: kind – hearted,

The last way is base on the relations between the components Thereare two types: coordinative compounds and subordinate compounds.

- Coordinative compounds are those of which are equal

For example: fifty – fifty, bye – bye, etc

- Subordinate compound are those in which one componentdominated other

For example: beautiful girl, ugly girl, etc

1.4.3 Reduplication

Reduplication is the special way of forming new words bydoubling one stem with or without the change of a vowel or a consonant For example: ping-pong, hoity-toity, ha-ha, etc

This type of word formation greatly facilitated in modern English bythe vast number of monosyllable Stylistically speaking, most words made

by reduplication represent informal groups: colloquialisms and slangs For example:

Walkie-talkie (a portable radio)

Riff-raff (the worthless or disreputable element of society)

In general, there are three main types of reduplication:reduplicative compounds proper (1), ablaut combination (2), and rhymereduplication (3)

For example:

(1) Hush-hush: secret

Pool-pool: to express contempt

(2) Chit-chat: gossip

Ping-pong: table tennis

(3) Mumbo-jumbo: deliberate mystification

Hoity-toity: snobbish

1.4.4 Conversion

Conversion may be defined as a process which a word belonging

to one word class is transferred to another word class without anyconcomitant change of form, either pronunciation or spelling Conversionmost often involves a change from one word class to another The majorkinds of conversion are N → V, V → N, A → N, and A → V

For example:

N → V: to bottle, to network, etc

V → N: a call, a guess, etc

A → N: to better, to wrong, etc

A → V: the poor, the rich, the disable, etc

Adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, interjections and even affixescan all act as bases for conversion as in “ to up price” (preposition → verb),the hereafter (adv → noun)

Moreover, many of these word classes can undergo conversion intomore than one other word class

For example:

To go down (Adv particle)

To down a beer (V)

To have a down on somebody (N)

Finally, it should be noted that even a whole phrase might undergoconversion and act as a noun (1), or as a adjective (2)

For example:

(1) A for get-me-not

A has been

A don’t know

(2) A Monday morning feeling

A not-to - be-missed opportunity

1.4.5 Shortening

Shortening is the way of creating a new word from a word or aphrase by leaving out a part or some parts, without the change of meaning

or word class of the word

There are five main types of shortening

(1) UN: United Nations

EEC: European Economic Community

NATO: North Atlantic Treaty Organization

UNESCO: United Nations Educational, Scientific, and CulturalOrganization

FAO: Food and Agriculture Organization

1.4.5.3 Clippings

Clippings are formed by subtracting one or more syllable from a word

- Initial clipping: (tele)phone

- Final clipping: exam(ination)

- Initio-final clipping: (in)flu(enza), (re)fridge(erator)

- Elliptico-conventional clipping: pub(lic house), pop(ular music)

A particular type of clipping, favor in Australia and British English isthat a long word is reduced to single syllable, then “y” or “ie” is added tothe end

Motel = motor + hotel

Telecast = television + broadcast

Blends are common in commercial and politic language

For example:

Transito = transfer + resistor

Interpol = international + police

Heliport = helicoper + airport

1.4.6 Sound-imitation

Words coined by this interesting type of word building are made

by imitating different kinds of sounds that may be produced by animals,birds, insects, human beings and inanimate objects

There are four types of words formed by this way:

- Words showing animals

For example: mew – mew, etc

- Words showing movement of water

For example:

- Words showing actions made by men

For example: ha – ha, etc

- Words showing sounds made by animals

For example: gee – gee, etc

1.4.7 Words from manners

This kind of word comes from words, which is considered as humanbeings’ characters

For example:

Hitle (denotes a person who follows Nazism)

Hoạn Thư (denotes a person who is jealous)

Tiger (denoted a person who is strong or powerful)

1.5 Word meaning

Every word combines lexical and grammatical meanings Thegrammatical meaning reflects the ways in which the lexical meaningoperate The same grammatical meaning may be shared by different words.For instance, words such as development, progress are the abstract nouns The lexical meaning is the realizations of concept or motion.Similarly, the same lexical meaning is shared by different grammatical

forms of a word: warm, warmer, warmest Lexical meaning is classifiedinto denotative and connotative meaning.

- Denotative meaning is the explicit, literal meaning It involves abroader consensus That is, the denotative meaning of a sign would bebroadly agreed upon by members of the same culture and by differentcultures

For example: “dogs” denotes a common animal with four legs,often kept by human beings as pets or trained for hunting, working,guarding, etc

- Connotative meaning conveys value, judgments, and evaluativeimplications behind the literal meaning It is determined by the culturalcodes to which the interpreter has access and the connotative meaning of aword can have strong emotional content

For example: the word “dog” has different connotative meanings

in different cultures

In Arabic culture: it has negative connotation, dirty and inferiority but inBritish culture, it has positive one: friendship and loyalty gay

There are four types of connotation simplified in Arnold (1986):

- Stylistic connotation is related to the situation in which the word isused: the social circumstance (formal, familiar), the social relationshipsbetween the listeners and the speakers (polite, rough), the type and purpose

of communication (learned, poetic, and official)

- Evaluative connotation express attitudes and approval ordisapproval

- Emotional or affective connotation means the referent denoted indenotative meaning is associated with emotions

- Intensitive connotation has expressive and emphatic values

These four types of connotation are also mentioned in Hoang TatTruong

Denotation and connotation are both important dimensions ofdetermining the word meaning in a given content Different from thedenotation, the connotation is optional and it has some “additional property

of lexemes, e.g., poetic, slang, casual, colloquial, formal, literary,humorous rhetorical, etc.” (Jackson & Amvella, 2000: 58) Thusconnotation can be regarded as an additional meaning to denotation

Chapter 2: Reduplicatives in English and in

Vietnamese

2.1 Definition

2.1.1 Definition of English reduplications

Reduplications are also called reduplicative compounds or words, echo-phrase Reduplicative compounds are used in a variety ofways These words are found abundantly in English Many linguists doresearch on this subject The first problem is how can we give thedefinition about reduplication? Different authors have different ideas Let'sconsider these follows

Reduplication, in linguistics, is a morphological process by whichthe root or stem of a word, or part of a it, is repeated

In lexicology, reduplication is the special way of forming the new

word by doubling one stem with or without the change of a vowel or a consonant In other words, in reduplication new words are made by

doubling a stem, either without any phonetic change as in bye-bye, or with

a variation of the root-vowel or consonant as in ping-pong, chit-chat, etc

According to Richards, J & et.al (1985: 241) Reduplication is the

repetition of a syllable, a morpheme or a word.

Another definition by crystal, D may be easier: reduplication is aword or lexeme that contains two identical or very similar parts

In addition to phonological description, reduplication often needs

to be described morphologically as a reduplication of linguistic constituents(words, stems, and roots) As a result, reduplication is interestingtheoretically, as it involves the interface between phonology andmorphology The base is the word (or part of a word) that is to be repeated.The reduplicated element is called the reduplicant In reduplication,reduplicant is most often repeated only once However, in some languages,reduplication can occur more then one, resulting in a tripled form

Although these above definitions are expressed in different ways

they have the same meaning: reduplication is a way of forming new words

by doubling the stem with or without phonetic change This process is

called reduplicative process

2.1.2 Definition of Vietnamese reduplication

The word "reduplication" means "từ láy", “từ lấp láy" or "từ láyâm" appears in everyday speech and it is used by people of all age groups