Part A: IntroductionI. RationaleIn order to become competent in a foreign language, it is important for language learners not only to acquire new vocabularies and a new set of phonological and syntactic rules but also to learn what Wilson (1986) calls the rules of speaking: the patterns of sociolinguistic behavior of the target language. The rules of speaking involve us in knowing when and how it is suitable to open a conversation, what topics are appropriate to particular speech events, how speech acts are to be given and interpreted. In many cases, this interpretation goes beyond what the language learners might intend to convey and includes assessments such as “polite” and “impolite”. In Vietnam, as the economy grows and international business develops, English proficiency becomes a master tool for young people to get a job. They encounter foreigners in everyday settings where communication is necessary. In the modern society, the need for communication is increasing, especially in the process of globalization, when communication spreads beyond the boundary of a country. During the last decades, linguistic researchers have broadened their focus of their interests from the development of grammatical competence to other areas of target language development, such as discourse and pragmatic competence, common speech routines, for example, requests, apologies, complaints, compliments, refusals, and the like have been most frequently studied in cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics. According to Tsui (1994), there seems to be little empirical research that has been conducted in responses to questions. For a long time, question-response has been considered one of the most basic structures of conversation (Schegloff, 1974) but as Tsui (1994; p. 160) points out: “responses have been given little attention in the speech acts literature. Most of the acts characterized and listed in the various taxonomies are illocutionary acts which are often done by making the function of utterance in discourse, and as many responding acts do not have a corresponding responding performative verb, this kind of analysis inevitably neglects responses”A characterization of utterances (based on observation of real-life discourse) is not likely to neglect the importance of responses. Let’s consider an example illustrated by Tsui (1994)A: What’s the time?B: (a) Eleven (b) Time for coffee(c) I haven t got a watch, sorry’1 (d) How hold I know(e) Ask Jack(f) You know bloody well what time it is(g) Why do you ask?(h) What did you say?(i) What do you mean?Various possible responses from (a) to (i) shows us the complicated relationship between question and a proper answer. For the same question, the speaker A may be replied in different ways with different intentions by the addressee. Obviously, a response can be a proper answer, an indirect or implicit reply, an evasive answer, a refusal or denial, an outright lie or even a challenge to the speaker’s questioning act. Moreover, the question-answer exchange cannot always be a simple relationship in the actual communicative process. It is the addressee’s response that may establish, deepen and maintain the conversation, develop the intimacy among interlocutors, or interrupt the interactional process and even badly change the participants’ role, for example, from friends to enemies. There is no doubt that VNU Journal of Science, Foreign Languages 27 (2011) 30-36 Some issues in using third person singular pronouns He/She in English and Vietnamese languages Le Thi Hong Duyen* Department of Foreign Languages, Haiphong Medical University, No.72A Nguyen Binh Khiem Street, Ngo Quyen District, Haiphong, Vietnam Received 28 February 2010 Abstract Personal pronouns play an important role in any act of communication Each language possesses a system of personal pronouns with its own rules and cultural aspects, which sometimes causes difficulties for learners of different cultures This article will attempt to look at some issues in using third person singular pronouns He/She in English and Vietnamese through some certain situations so as to help learners and translators understand and use them correctly Introduction* Third person personal pronouns in English and its usage problems From the very first lessons of any language, learners are taught how to use personal pronouns It is simply because in any act of communication, addressing is unavoidable However, that kind of pronoun is not always clear for learners of English and Vietnamese to use and understand properly In fact, personal pronouns can be a lot more confusing than they seem For example, in English, it is sometimes difficult for learners to identify what noun the pronoun refers to In Vietnamese, different personal pronouns can be used to denote the same person in different contexts Such problems are not unique and anyone of us may sometimes encounter Previously, time has seen so many ideas and researches about personal pronouns and their usage problems that were carried out by many linguists This article with the analysis at some usual situations in which third person personal pronouns “He/She” are used will reveal some problems faced by learners of both cultures We use third person personal pronouns to substitute people or things being spoken about In English, it can be characterized by case, gender, and number (Quirk,1987) [1] The following table will illustrate the point: 2.1 Case Grammatically, case is the form of the noun or pronoun built up by means of inflexion, which indicates the relations of the noun or pronoun to the other words in the sentence In other words, case is a characteristic of a noun or pronoun determined by the function it performs in a sentence Personal pronouns have two sets of caseforms: nominative (or subjective) case and accusative (or objective) case For the third person (as mentioned on Table 1): He, she, it, they are used as nominative case * Tel.: 84-912489409 E-mail: duyenshinec@yahoo.com 30 L.T.H Duyen / VNU Journal of Science, Foreign Languages 27 (2011) 30-36 31 Table Third person personal pronouns in English (Source: www.WeblearnEng.com)(1) Number Gender Singular Masculine Feminine Neuter For both sexes Plural Case p: Nominative/ Subjective He She It They Accusative/ Objective Him Her It Them weblearneng.com/the-personal-pronouns 3//www Him, her, it, them stand for accussative case The nominative case is needed when a personal pronoun is used as subject of finite verb and as a predicative nominative (subject complement) Meanwhile, the objective case is used when the personal pronoun is direct or indirect object of the verb and object of preposition.(1) We should be careful not to confuse personal pronouns in the nominative and accusative case + subject of finite verb = nominative case Incorrect: Him and her went to the party Correct: He and she went to the party + object of verb= accusative Incorrect: Tom wants to meet you and they Correct: Tom wants to meet you and them + object of preposition= objective case: Incorrect: Is there any relationship between you and she? Correct: Is there any relationship between you and her? In standard written English, the personal pronouns in the predicative nominative are the same as they would be in the subject Most native speakers not speak in this way, but it is grammatically correct This nonimative case follows a linking verb to rename the subject: e.g The winner was her (socially accepted) The winner was she (grammatically accepted) Sometimes, we also use nominative case for pronouns that follow forms of the verb be and describe the same person or thing as the subject e.g It’s her, not him (socially accepted) It’s she, not he (grammatically accepted) 2.2 Gender The third plural pronoun they/them not set apart by gender However, the third person singular pronouns distinguish in gender between masculine (he/him), feminine (she/her) and neuter (it) In some special use, he/she refers to the gender of animals when the animal’s sex is known and is of interest such as she-bear, shegoat, she-ass he-cat, he-dog (2) e.g What a little sweet dog! It is a he or a she? He/she is sometimes used to emphasise gender of people in some cases: e.g He-man: a particulary strong, masterful, or virile man She-male: male homosexual or transvestite Is the child a he or a she? (unknown gender of newborn ... Part A: Introduction I. Rationale In order to become competent in a foreign language, it is important for language learners not only to acquire new vocabularies and a new set of phonological and syntactic rules but also to learn what Wilson (1986) calls the rules of speaking: the patterns of sociolinguistic behavior of the target language. The rules of speaking involve us in knowing when and how it is suitable to open a conversation, what topics are appropriate to particular speech events, how speech acts are to be given and interpreted. In many cases, this interpretation goes beyond what the language learners might intend to convey and includes assessments such as “polite” and “impolite”. In Vietnam, as the economy grows and international business develops, English proficiency becomes a master tool for young people to get a job. They encounter foreigners in everyday settings where communication is necessary. In the modern society, the need for communication is increasing, especially in the process of globalization, when communication spreads beyond the boundary of a country. During the last decades, linguistic researchers have broadened their focus of their interests from the development of grammatical competence to other areas of target language development, such as discourse and pragmatic competence, common speech routines, for example, requests, apologies, complaints, compliments, refusals, and the like have been most frequently studied in cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics. According to Tsui (1994), there seems to be little empirical research that has been conducted in responses to questions. For a long time, question- response has been considered one of the most basic structures of conversation (Schegloff, 1974) but as Tsui (1994; p. 160) points out: “responses have been given little attention in the speech acts literature. Most of the acts characterized and listed in the various taxonomies are illocutionary acts which are often done by making the function of utterance in discourse, and as many responding acts do not have a corresponding responding performative verb, this kind of analysis inevitably neglects responses” A characterization of utterances (based on observation of real-life discourse) is not likely to neglect the importance of responses. Let’s consider an example illustrated by Tsui (1994) A: What’s the time? B: (a) Eleven (b) Time for coffee (c) I haven t got a watch, sorry’ 1 (d) How hold I know (e) Ask Jack (f) You know bloody well what time it is (g) Why do you ask? (h) What did you say? (i) What do you mean? Various possible responses from (a) to (i) shows us the complicated relationship between question and a proper answer. For the same question, the speaker A may be replied in different ways with different intentions by the addressee. Obviously, a response can be a proper answer, an indirect or implicit reply, an evasive answer, a refusal or denial, an outright lie or even a challenge to the speaker’s questioning act. Moreover, the question-answer exchange cannot always be a simple relationship in the actual communicative process. It is the addressee’s response that may establish, deepen and maintain the conversation, develop the intimacy among interlocutors, or interrupt the interactional process and even badly change the participants’ role, for example, from friends to enemies. There is no doubt that the addressee’s responses depend on so many social factors: the speaker’s Vinh university Foreign languages department ********** LÊ THỊ HƯƠNG A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF SEMANTIC FEATURES OF COMPARATIVE ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE IDIOMS USING NAMES OF ANIMALS (PHÂN TÍCH ĐỐI CHIẾU ĐẶC ĐIỂM NGỮ NGHĨA CỦA THÀNH NGỮ TIẾNG ANH VÀ TIẾNG VIỆT CÓ SỬ DỤNG TÊN CỦA ĐỘNG VẬT) GRADUATION THESIS FIELD: LINGUISTICS VINH, MAY 2011 Vinh university Foreign languages department ********** A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF SEMANTIC FEATURES OF COMPARATIVE ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE IDIOMS USING NAMES OF ANIMALS (PHÂN TÍCH ĐỐI CHIẾU ĐẶC ĐIỂM NGỮ NGHĨA CỦA THÀNH NGỮ TIẾNG ANH VÀ TIẾNG VIỆT CÓ SỬ DỤNG TÊN CỦA ĐỘNG VẬT) GRADUATION THESIS FIELD: LINGUISTICS Student: Lª ThÞ H¬ng Class: K48B1 English Supervisor: Trần Bá Tiến, M.A VINH, MAY 2011 Acknowlegements For the completion of this work, I have been fortunate to receive invaluable contributions from many people. First of all, I would like to thank Management Board of the English Department at Vinh University for giving me a great opportunity to do a study on the subject: A contrastive analysis of semantic features of comparative English and Vietnamese idioms using names of animals. My thanks also go to my supervisor, Mr Tran Ba Tien for his invaluable guidance, great sympathy and enormous patience. I am deepy greateful to his inspiration which has motivated me throught the implementation of the project. My warmest thanks are due to my loving parents, my older brother and my closest friends for their unconditional love, support and forbearance. Finally, I am all too aware that despite all the advices and assistances, I feel that the study is far from perfect; it is, therefore, my sole responsibility for any inadequacies that the study may be considered to have. Vinh, May, 2011 Le Thi Huong i Abstract Nowaday, when communication has become more important to people all over the world and English is one of the international languages, it is urgent and common that there are more people who use and speak English fluently. However, it is not easy to be a good and skillful English learner because English includes many aspects that need a lot of skills and much hard working. For Vietnamese learners of English, particularly advanced learners, knowing and understanding idiomatic expressions is a significant step to mastering this language. It can be noticed that such short expressions contain numerous linguistic features. Among these, idioms are of great interest to the author. Although idioms have been studied and viewed at different angles by numerous scholars, no one has ever reached totally persuasive answers to the questions of them. Thus, it is still a controversial topic which attracts people’s interest. The aims of this graduation paper are to investigate the ways in which metaphor and simile are used in English and Vietnamese idioms and to make some comparisons between English idioms and Vietnamese ones. In order to obtain these aims, data and sources are collected and gathered through reading and selecting numerous English and Vietnamese idiomatic expressions. Then, the author categorizes and analyzes data of similes and metaphors in idioms. The contrastive analysis method is also employed to make up the study on metaphor in English and Vietnamese idioms with an attempt to provide a clearer understanding of the aspect. The results show that there vinh university foreign languages department === === nguyễn phan quỳnh trang A STUDY ON DIFFERENCES OF USING PASSIVE A STUDY ON DIFFERENCES OF USING PASSIVE VOICE IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE VOICE IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE (nghiên cứu về sự khác nhau trong cách dùng (nghiên cứu về sự khác nhau trong cách dùng câu bị động của tiếng anh và tiếng việt) câu bị động của tiếng anh và tiếng việt) GRADUATION THESIS GRADUATION THESIS Field: Linguistics Vinh - 2011 Bùi Yến Nhi - 48A English 2 Foreign Languages Department vinh university foreign Languages department === === A STUDY ON DIFFERENCES OF USING PASSIVE A STUDY ON DIFFERENCES OF USING PASSIVE VOICE IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE VOICE IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE (nghiên cứu về sự khác nhau trong cách dùng (nghiên cứu về sự khác nhau trong cách dùng câu bị động của tiếng anh và tiếng việt) câu bị động của tiếng anh và tiếng việt) graduation thesis graduation thesis Field: Linguistics Supervisor: Nguyễn thị kim anh, m.a Student: Nguyễn phan quỳnh trang, 48B - English Vinh - 2011 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In completion of this thesis, first of all I would like to express my sincere thanks and deep gratitude to my supervisor, Nguyen Thi Kim Anh for all her experienced guidance, valuable suggestions and advice throughout this thesis. My gratitude is also sent to all the staff at the Department of Foreign Languages of Vinh University, who always create favorable conditions for me to complete my study. I am grateful to my friends, who provided me with inspiration for the research topic and who helped me with the research data. Finally, I am thankful to my family who constantly gave me support and encouragement during the time my study was carried out. Vinh, May 20 th , 2011 Nguyen Phan Quynh Trang i ABSTRACT Unnaturalness is one of the most common mistakes that the majority of English learners, and even some advanced ones, make as translating passive- meaning sentences from English into Vietnamese. In order to help learners overcome those problematic translations, the author has done a research on the passive voice in the two languages, English and Vietnamese. The research has three main parts. In the first part, some general descriptions of passive voice in each of the language will be made to give readers certain background information about this interesting language phenomenon. In the second part, several contrastive points will be performed to explore the causes of mistakes often made. In the last one, some implications for teaching as well as suggestions for translating passive- meaning sentences from English to Vietnamese will be done so as for learners to achieve good language transference. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS SOME I33UE3 IH P&RSING AHD NATURAL LINGUAGE UNDERSTANDING Robert J. Bobrow Bolt Beranek and ~ewman Inc. Bonnie L. Webber Department of Computer & Information Science University of Pennsylvania Lan&ua~e is a system for ancodln~ and trans~tttlnK ideas. A theory that seeks to explain llnKulstlc phenomena in terme of this fact is a fun~t~1 theory. One that does not • £sses the point. [10] PREAMBLE Our response to the questions posed to this panel is influenced by a number of beliefs (or biasesl) which we have developed in the course of building and analyzin~ the operation of several natural language understanding (NLU) systems. [I, 2, 3, 12] While the emphasis of the panel i~ on parslnK, we feel that the recovery of the syntactic structure of a natural lan~unKe utterance must be viewed as part of a larger process of reeoverlnK the meaning, intentions and goals underlying its generation. Hence it is inappropriate to consider designing or evaluatln~ natural language parsers or Erem,~ra without taking into account the architecture of the whole ~LU system of which they're a part. I This is the premise from which Our beliefs arise, beliefs which concern two thinks: o the distribution of various types of knowledge, in particular syntactic knowledge, amonK the modules of an NLU system o the information and control Flow emonK those modules. As to the first belief, in the HLU systems we have worked on, most syntactic information is localized in a "syntactic module", although that module does not produce a rallied data structure representing the syntactlo description of an utterance. Thus, if "parslnK" is taken as requlrln~ the production of such a rallied structure, then we do not believe in its necessity. However we do believe in the existence of a module which provides syntactic information to those other parts of the system whose decisions ride on it. As to the second belief, we feel that syntax, semantics and prattles effectively constitute parallel but interacting processors, and that information such as local syntactic relations is determined by Joint decisions -monk them. Our experience shows that with mlnir"al loss of efficiency, one can design these processors to interface cleanly with one another, so as to allow independent design, implementatlon and modification. We spell out these beliefs in slightly more detail below, and at greater length in [~]. 1We are not claiming that the only factors shaping a parser or a gr~-mar, beyond syntaotlo conslderatlofls, are thlrLKs llke meanlng, intention, etc. There are clearly mechanical and memory factors, aa well an laziness - a speoXer's penchant for trylnK to get away with the mdniEal level of effort needed to accomplish the taskf 97 The Comoutatiom~l Persneetive The first set of question~ to this panel concern the computational perspective, and the useful purposes served by distinguishing parsing from interpretation. We believe that syntactic knowledge plays an important role in NLU. In particular, we believe that there is a significant type of utterance description that can be determined on purely syntactic grounds 2, albeit not necessarily uniquely. This description can be used to guide semantic and discourse level structure recovery processes such as interpretation, anaphoric resolution, focus tracking, given/new distinctions, ellipsis resolution, etc. in a manner that is independent of the lexical and conceptual content of the utterance. There are several advantages to factoring out such knowledge from the re,~-~nder of the NLU system and prowlding a • syntactic module" whose interactions with the rest of the system provide ... the third person singular pronouns distinguish in gender between masculine (he/ him), feminine (she/ her) and neuter (it) In some special use, he/ she refers to the gender of animals when the animal’s... known and is of interest such as she- bear, shegoat, she- ass he- cat, he- dog (2) e.g What a little sweet dog! It is a he or a she? He/ she is sometimes used to emphasise gender of people in some. .. case: Incorrect: Is there any relationship between you and she? Correct: Is there any relationship between you and her? In standard written English, the personal pronouns in the predicative nominative