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I certify my authority of the Study Project Report submitted entitled
in total fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts.
If vocabulary is one of the most essential parts of a language, enriching vocabulary plays a
very important role in learning and using that language. Among many issues related to
vocabulary, transference of meaning is now being paid a lot of attention because being
aware of this will be helpful to any language learners. While studying about the
transference of meaning we have found that metonymy, a means of transference of
meaning basing on contiguity between objects, is a powerful way to use language
effectively and creatively. However, not many people are aware of it and not many studies
have chosen metonymy as their main subject. For that reason we choose the metonymy as
the subject to study and make a contrastive analysis between that in English and
Vietnamese. The study is aimed at giving readers a general view on the metonymy as the
transference of meaning in English and pointing out the features that English and
Vietnamese share with, and differ from, each other in the ways of forming and using
metonymy. Besides, we suggest some activities for teachers of English to help their
students and learners of English to enrich their vocabulary as well as avoid and self-correct
mistakes in communication and translation.
This research consists of three main parts. The first part, Introduction, gives general
information about the rationale, the aim, the scope, the methods and certainly the design of
the study. The second part, Development, includes four chapters. Chapter 1 discusses some
related matter to the study as language, word, meaning of word and the changes of those.
The last part in this chapter presents the term transference of meaning, its causes and its
means. Chapter 2 and chapter 3 are the focus of the study which give an overview of
metonymy in English and Vietnamese, then contrast them to find out any similarities and
differences. The final chapter is the implication in language teaching and translation. The
last part, Conclusion, summarizes what have been discussed in the study and gives some
general comments on the use of metonymy in English and Vietnamese as well as supplies
some suggestions for further study.
Abstract
Table of contents
Chapter 1:
1.1. Language and the change of language
1.1.1. What is language?
1.1.2. Reasons for the change of language
1.1.3. How language changes
1.2. Word and its meaning
1.2.1. What is the word?
1.2.2. Word meaning
1.2.3 The change and development of meaning
1.3. Transference of meaning
1.3.1. What is transference of meaning?
1.3.2. Means of meaning transference
Chapter 2:
2.1. What is Metonymy?
2.2. Metonymy vs. Metaphor
2.3. Types of metonymy
2.3.1. Direct, or primary, metonymy
2.3.2. Indirect, or secondary, metonymy
2.3.3. Partial metonymy
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2.4. Cases of metonymy
2.4.1. Name of container to refer to the thing contained
2.4.2. Name of parts of human body used as symbols
2.4.3. The concrete to refer to the abstract.
2.4.4. Materials to refer to the things made of the materials.
2.4.5. Name of the author to refer to his work
2.4.6. Part to refer to a whole and vice versa.
2.4.7. Symbol to refer to representative
2.4.8. Others.
Chapter 3:
3.1. Metonymy in Vietnamese
3.1.1. Container – contained
3.1.2. Concrete – abstract
3.1.3. Name of author – his work
3.1.4. Part - whole and whole – part
3.1.5 Owner (people) and things owned (clothes, properties)
3.1.6. Specific quantities – general quantities; singular – plurals.
3.1.7 Others.
3.2. The similarities between metonymy in English and that in Vietnamese
3.3. The differences between metonymy in English and that in Vietnamese
Chapter 4:
4.1. Implications in English language teaching to Vietnamese learners.
4.2. Implications in English – Vietnamese translation and vice versa.
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1
As is well-known, a language is the cultural environment of its native speakers. No
language can be analysed or learned without entering into the cultural traditions of its
speakers. For a linguist, it is very important to produce a complete description of these
cultural traditions to underpin his ideas. Thus any phenomenon appearing in a language
should be studied and described in close connection with its cultural usage and its cultural
environment.
Metonymy is an important way of expressing ideas, a cognitive process, consisting in the
transference of meaning based on associations. A metonymic description of a subject is an
essential part of any language therefore metonymic thinking can be considered as an
element of the cultural identity of a person.
However, in everyday life we use language without any awareness of the term metonymy
in mind. Even in linguistics, it seems that metonymy has been paid little concern in
comparison with another means of meaning transference called metaphor.
Besides, while teaching English for Vietnamese students, most of them are at pre-
intermediate level of English, we find that they are sometimes shocked when encountering
some cases like:
The ham sandwich has asked for the bill.
English is our mother tongue.
Also they tend to spend a lot of time to find the English equivalents for the expressions of
Vietnamese such as:
Ngay khi công vic c giao mi ngi u phi xn tay áo lên làm ngay.
Chân i mà d chng ri – Du xa chín núi không nguôi mt lòng.
These problems deeply rooted from people’s unawareness of the term metonymy as well as
the similarities and differences between metonymy in English and Vietnamese.
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Therefore, we choose the metonymy as the subject to study and make a contrastive
analysis between which in English and Vietnamese.
This study has both theoretical and practical aims.
Theoretically, it is intended to provide a thorough and systematic study on the metonymy
as the transference of meaning in English. Besides, it is aimed at finding the features that
English and Vietnamese share with, and differ from, each other in the ways of forming and
using metonymy.
Practically, this study is intended to help Vietnamese learners of English to have an insight
into metonymy as the transference of meaning in English as well as in their mother tongue
so that they can enrich their vocabulary, avoid and self-correct mistakes in communication
and translation. Teachers of English can also benefit from this study when we are going to
describe some activities helping students enrich their vocabulary through learning
metonymy.
The study will touch to the different cases of metonymy as the transference of meaning in
English and Vietnamese and find the similarities and differences in the way each language
employs metonymy. However, for the limitation of personal knowledge and ability, this
study only analyses things basing on some most common metonymy of the words that can
be found and traditionally used in communication in both languages.
In this study the two languages namely English and Vietnamese are compared and
contrasted. Here, English is treated as the instrumental language and Vietnamese is the
target language. Therefore, any cases of metonymy in English will be mentioned and
analysed first, then they will be compared and contrasted with Vietnamese to find out the
similarities and differences between the two languages.
We have read some books and researches discussing the metonymy in both English and
Vietnamese and extracted some general cases of metonymy in English and Vietnamese
which is the means of meaning transference. Basing ourselves on that we supplement more
3
data from our real situations and analyse them separately in each language. At last, we
formulate the contrasts which have been identified by the before analyses.
Part I is Introduction providing with the rationale, the aims, the scope, the methodology
and the overall structure of the study. This introductory part functions as the leading
direction for the whole study about why it comes into being, for what purposes it is used,
what exactly it studies, how it is carried out and how it is organised.
Part II is Development, the body of the thesis, including four chapters. Chapter 1
Theoritical bacground discusses some related matter to the study. In the first part we will
look at language in general and its changes which can partly explain the reasons of
meaning transference later. We also spend time to study about words and word meaning
including approaches to word meaning and the changes of word meaning. The last part in
this chapter presents the term transference of meaning, its causes and its means.
Chapter 2 and chapter 3 are the focus of the study. Chapter 2 Metonymy as the
transference of meaning in English. In this chapter we will attempt to define the term
“metonymy”, compare it with another means of transference of meaning named
“metaphor”, classify it into two types, and then go into details in the cases of metonymy.
This chapter provides an overall view about metonymy, therefore all necessary information
for analysing and contrasting in the next chapter is mentioned.
Chapter 3 is called A contrastive analysis of Metonymy in English and in Vietnamese.
In order to make a contrastive analysis, we will take a look at the metonymy in
Vietnamese. Then, the similarities and differences between metonymy in English and in
Vietnamese will be discussed.
The last chapter, Implications for language teaching and translation, will give some ideas
that will be helpful to teachers of language in their language teaching career and to
translators in the process of translation relating to this subject.
Part III is Conclusion providing the summary of what has been analysed and found as well
as some concluding remarks made to these findings. Lastly, it supplies some suggestions
for further study.
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!
!!"
1.1.1. What is language?
Being the centre concept of linguistics, “language” is treated differently from different
angles.
Language firstly is considered to be a system of communicating with other people using
sounds, symbols and words in expressing a meaning, idea or thought. This language can be
used in many forms, primarily through oral and written communications as well as using
expressions through body language. Sapir (1921:8) defined it as ‘a purely human non-
instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions and desires by means of voluntarily
produced symbols’. According to this definition only humans possesses language and it is
unlike any other system of communication of animals. Therefore people can develop and
characterize language. However, it is not the truth that people can just use it to convey
“ideas, emotions and desires”. More than that, it is undeniable that people possesses many
systems of voluntarily produced symbols like gestures, postures, eye-gaze, etc. that
metaphorically called ‘body language’.
Saussure (1960:8) defined language as ‘both a social product of the faculty of speech and a
collection of necessary conventions that have been adopted a social body to permit
individuals to exercise that faculty’. This definition suggests that language is distinguished
from speech and that it is a social product and its unity is a collection of necessary
conventions which is accepted and exercised by members in the society or community.
It is obvious that language does not stay the same as a set of constant things but changes
over time in both its forms and contents (meanings).
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1.1.2. Reasons for the change of language
Language change, according to the Wikipedia, is the manner in which the phonetic,
morphological, semantic, syntactic, and other features of a language are modified over
time. All languages are continually changing. At any given moment the English language,
for example, has a huge variety within itself, and this variety is known as synchronic
variation. From these different forms comes the effect on language over time known as
diachronic change. Two linguistic disciplines concern themselves with studying language
change: historical linguistics and sociolinguistics. Historical linguists examine how a
language was spoken in the past and seek to determine how present languages derive from
it and are related to one another. Sociolinguists are interested in the origins of language
changes and want to explain how society and changes in society influence language.
Languages change for a variety of reasons. In his report “Language change”, available at
National Science Foundation website, Mahoney has pointed out some causes of language
change as follow.
Large-scale shifts often occur in response to social, economic and political pressures.
History records many examples of language change fueled by invasions, colonization and
migration. Even without these kinds of influences, a language can change dramatically if
enough users alter the way they speak it.
Frequently, the needs of speakers drive language change. New technologies, industries,
products and experiences simply require new words. Plastic, cell phones and the Internet
didn’t exist in Shakespeare’s time, for example. By using new and emerging terms, we all
drive language change. But the unique way that individuals speak also fuels language
change. That’s because no two individuals use a language in exactly the same way. The
vocabulary and phrases people use depend on where they live, their age, education level,
social status and other factors. Through our interactions, we pick up new words and
sayings and integrate them into our speech. Teens and young adults for example, often use
different words and phrases from their parents. Some of them spread through the
population and slowly change the language.
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1.1.3. How language changes
According to Mahoney, there are three main aspects of language change over time:
vocabulary, sentence structure and pronunciations. Vocabulary can change quickly as new
words are borrowed from other languages, or as words get combined or shortened. Some
words are even created by mistake. As noted in the Linguistic Society of America's
publication Is English Changing?, pea is one such example. Up until about 400 years ago,
pease referred to either a single pea or many peas. At some point, people mistakenly
assumed that the word pease was the plural form of pea, and a new word was born. While
vocabulary can change quickly, sentence structure—the order of words in a sentence—
changes more slowly. Yet it is clear that today’s English speakers construct sentences very
differently from Chaucer and Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Changes in sound are
somewhat harder to document, but at least as interesting. For example, during the so-called
“Great Vowel Shift” 500 years ago, English speakers modified their vowel pronunciation
dramatically. This shift represents the biggest difference between the pronunciations of so
called Middle and Modern English.
!#$
1.2.1. What is the word?
Like other terms in linguistics, ‘words’ is defined in many different ways basing on
different angels from which the researchers or linguists view the language or depending on
the purposes of each study.
Jack C. Richards in “Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied linguistics” defined a
word as “the smallest of the linguistic units which can occur on its own in speech or
writing”. However, it is not easy to apply this criterion consistently in the cases of function
words (like ‘the’, etc.) and contraction (like ‘can’ and ‘can’t’, etc.) (p.406)
According to A. Meillet, ‘the word is defined by a combinating between a certain meaning
and sound structure which shows a grammatical feature.’ This definition relates to three
aspects of the word: semantics (meaning), phonology (sound structure) and grammatical
function (grammatical feature).
Also concerning to both the form and the content of the word, Hoang Tat Truong in “Basic
English Lexicology” (1993:2) defines the word as “dialectical unity of form and content,
[...]... existences of it Diep Quang Ban (1998:203) gives an example of addressing someone where metonymy is employed through different means: - appearance: anh lùn (a short man), ch béo (a fat woman), con bé c n (a short-sighted girl) - clothes or properties: anh áo (the man in red), bác xích-lô (the man who ride a cyclo) - career: bà giáo (a teacher), bác lái xe (a driver) - post: ông hi u tr ng (the headmaster),... 3.1.4 Part – whole and whole – part Any object has its parts which can be taken to substitute to the whole if necessary or in an attempt to convey extra meaning For example: u xanh ã t i tình gì Má h ng !n quá n a thì ch a thôi ‘ u xanh’ (green head) is a part of human body used to refer to a young person ‘Má h ng’ (pink cheek) is also a part of body which refers to a girl or a young woman When employing... can be easily found such as: Original use Metonymic sense Examples Mái nhà roof house Nh ng mái nhà l p x p ng chen l n nhau trong cái ngõ nh t i tàn Bánh xe wheel car Hàn ngàn v n bánh xe l n qua con ng nh m i ngày eyes person ôi m t ó c th u t t c m i suy ngh ang ng n ngang trong u óc tôi ôi m t Sometimes the opposite direction can be taken to create Metonymic senses for words, i.e people use the... words However, of all various relations, below we will attempt to list some common ones which are mostly used and easily to be recognized The cases come from the theories of Diep Quang Ban (1999) and Dinh Trong Lac (1997) 3.1.1 Container – contained The relation between container and things contained is used with almost of containers such as “ n ba bát” (eat up three bowls), u ng vài chén (drink some cups),... or good resutls Other working tools like “cu c (hoe), x ng (showel), g y g c (sticks and canes), etc.” can be used metonymically as in the following example: Ch t này thì ch c n vài cu c là xong thôi, anh c tôi làm The result of an action which is normally visible is sometimes used to refer to that long lasting action like: 27 M hôi mà xu ng ng Lúa m c trùng trùng sáng c in ng With the use of the word... case of metonymy in Vietnamese: Original use Kính c n Glasses for shortsighted person Túp l u A small house / lâu ài Metonymic sense A castle Examples C u th y kính c n kia th! nào? Person M" th y hai anh y c y Con gái l n r i, ph i l y ch ng thôi Nào, mày ch n túp l u hay lâu ài ây? 3.1.6 Specific quantities – general quantities; singulars – plurals The relation between singulars and plurals, specific... refer to the things contained in that container Eat that bowl up, please = n h!t bát ó i The collection of an author’s works is also normally called by the author’s name: Have you read Hemingway yet? = Anh ã c Hemingway ch a? There are many other examples to make this point convincing to all of us but for the limitation of the time of and the space in this thesis we can not mention many here 3.2.3 Even