MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING HANOI OPEN UNIVERSITY NGUYEN THI HONG PHUONG WORD ORDER IN ENGLISH NOUN PHRASES IN COMPARISON WITH VIETNAMESE (TRẬT TỰ TỪ TRONG CỤM DANH TỪ TIẾNG ANH SO SÁNH VỚI TIẾNG VIỆT) M.A. THESIS Field: English Language Code: 60220201 Supervisor: Dr. Le Van Thanh HANOI – 2013 i DECLARATION I hereby declare that no part of the enclosed Master Thesis has been copied or reproduced by me from any other’s work without acknowledgement and that the thesis is originally written by me under strict guidance of my supervisor. Hanoi, 21 st November, 2013 Supervisor Student Le Van Thanh Nguyen Thi Hong Phuong ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I would like to express my great gratitude to my supervisor, Dr. Le Van Thanh of Hanoi Open University for his enormously invaluable advice, enlightening guidance and encouragement which are indispensable for the accomplishment of this study. I am grateful for the precious support of the teachers at Postgraduate Faculty who producing me with knowledge and basic skills to finish this study. I also would like to send my thanks to all my friends who have helped me to develop ideas for the study. Finally, my thanks must go to my family members whose continual encouragement has been indispensable for the fulfillment of this challenging work. Hanoi, 21 st November, 2013 Nguyen Thi Hong Phuong iii ABBREVIATIONS H : Head (0) M : Modiffier (1a) PrM : Pre-modifier ( ) D : Determiner ( ) PoM : Post-modifier ( ) iv TABLE OF CONTENTS DECLARATION i ACKNOWLEDGEMENT ii ABBREVIATIONS iii INTRODUCTION 1 1. Rationale of the study 1 2. Aims of the study 2 3. Research questions 3 4. Scopes of the study 3 5. Methods of the study 3 6. Design of the study 4 DEVELOPMENT 5 Chapter 1. THEORETICAL PRELIMINARIES 5 1.1. Contrastive analysis 5 1.1.1.A short history of contrastive studies 5 1.1.2. What is Contrastive Analysis? 6 1.2. Word and word order 9 1.2.1. Word 9 1.2.2. Word order and Linearity 12 1.2.3. Word order, patterns and structure 13 1.3. Phrases 15 Chapter 2. WORD ORDER IN ENGLISH NOUN PHRASES 18 2.1. Word order in general structures of English noun phrases 18 2.2. Word order in noun phrase variants 23 2.3. The head 27 2.4. Word order or pre-modification 27 2.4.1. Position 1a: 27 2.4.2. Position 2a 30 2.4.3. Position 3a 32 2.4.4. Position 4a 33 2.5. Post-modification 1b 35 v 2.5.1. Relative clause 35 2.5.2. Phrases with a preposition as head 36 2.5.3. Participles (the ING-participle and the ED-participle) 36 2.5.4. Adjectives 36 2.6. Grammatical categories of noun and their reflection through word order 37 2.7. Articles as determiners 39 Chapter 3. WORD ORDER IN VIETNAMESE NOUN PHRASES 45 3.1. General word order 45 3.2. Variants 47 3.2.1. Noun phrases with one modifying item and the head 48 3.2.2. Noun phrases with two modifying items and the head 48 3.2.3. Noun phrases with three modifying item and the head 48 3.2.4. Noun phrases with four modifying items and head 48 3.3. The head 49 3.3.1.Determination of the head 49 3.3.2. Noun phrases with two heads (head one and head two) 54 3.3.3. Relationship between head one and head two in the noun phrases 54 3.4. Pre-modification 58 3.4.1. Position 1 58 3.4.2. Position 2 60 3.4.3. Position 3 61 3.5. Post-modification 64 3.5.1. Position 1’ 64 3.5.2. Position 2’ 68 Chapter 4. NOUN PHRASES IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS 72 4.1. The heads of noun phrases 72 4.2. Pre-modification 75 4.2.1. Position1a: 75 vi 4.2.2. Position 2a 76 4.2.3. Position 3a 77 4.2.4. Position 4a 78 4.3. Post-modification 79 4.3.1. Relative clause as post-modification 79 4.3.2. Participles as postmodifiers 80 4.3.3. Prepositional phrases as post-modification 81 4.4. Some predictions of Vietnamese students’ errors or mistakes in learning English noun phrases 81 CONCLUSION 88 REFERENCES 89 1 INTRODUCTION 1. Rationale of the study In the process of learning English, Vietnamese learners are likely to produce such incorrect phrases “hat red” or “one night summer hot”. This can be elucidated by the interference of the mother tongue. The former error is probably due to the transfer of the Vietnamese pattern “chiếc mũ đỏ” and the latter “một đêm hè oi ả”. Now it can be seen that these errors and many more that can be found happening very often in learning English are concerned with the word order of noun phrases. This is why many linguistics as well as methodologists is unanimous in the claim that language 1 (native language) influence is manifested in the learner’s use of language 2. In other words, many errors by language 2 learners are attributable to language 1 interference. It is also the main idea which laid the foundation for contrastive analysis (CA) in history of linguistic inquiry. This study is itself a contrastive analysis which attempts to exploit the power of contrastive in predicting the difficulties Vietnamese learners may encounter when learning English noun phrases. There are a number of reasons that lead for this study to be carried out. Some of which can be listed as follows: 1.1. Theoretically, the word order is an important issue of grammatical structures, a general presentation of linearity of linguistic signifiers that has been paid much attention to by both English and Vietnamese linguistics. However, there has been almost no detailed systematic research on this issue, or to mention the study of the word order of noun phrases, and especially contrastive analysis of word order in English and Vietnamese noun phrases has not yet been done. It is, therefore, necessary not only to study but also 2 make a contrastive analysis of the word order of noun phrases in the two languages. 1.2. In practice, foreign language teaching especially English language teaching has become more and more popular as well as Vietnamese language teaching for foreigners which has been developing rapidly recently based on the linguistic, of which contrastive analysis of grammatical structures is one of the best ways for teachers to improve their teaching quality and for learners to smoothly gain and practice the transferred knowledge. This study intends to present some discussions and add comments to one of the most important issues of theoretical grammar between the two languages, English and Vietnamese, which have both different and similar grammatical structures. As well this study has its significance practically as it would make its consideration to the effective foreign language teaching/learning, especially English language teaching/learning. 2. Aims of the study The study aims at analyzing word order in English and Vietnamese noun phrases. The study findings show: - A systemic description of basic word order in English and Vietnamese noun phrases. - Basic word orders and the changes of word order in English and Vietnamese noun phrases. - Some similarities and differences between word order in English and Vietnamese noun phrases. - Common mistakes when using word order in English and Vietnamese noun phrases and solutions. 3 - Some suggestions in translating word order in English and Vietnamese noun phrases. 3. Research questions - What are types of word order in English and Vietnamese noun phrases? - What are similarities and differences of word order in noun phrases between the two languages? - What are main functions of word order in English and Vietnamese noun phrases? - What are suggestions for learners and teachers of the two languages in learning and teaching word order in English and Vietnamese noun phrases? 4. Scopes of the study This paper attempts to focus on the contrastive analysis of the word order of noun phrases in English and Vietnamese. In this study the most important principles of the word order shall be described, the potential forces to the operation of these principles are also sought. At the same time the contrastive analysis is conducted on both the formal and operating rules of the word order in noun phrases. In a word, it is an attempt to draw a picture on the word order of noun phrases in the two languages – English and Vietnamese. 5. Methods of the study This paper, with the said aims, is of a descriptive and contrastive analysis study with English taken as the basic language. Thus the methods for this study are: 5.1. To describe the word order of noun phrases of both languages by the method of induction, i.e. a list of each type shall be made, after all the component descriptions are made, a general picture is then drawn for each language for the issue to be studied. [...]... is a saying that noun phrase may be easily identified because they can function as ‘subject’ or ‘object’ in a sentence and only noun phrase may do so 17 Chapter 2 WORD ORDER IN ENGLISH NOUN PHRASES Many noun phrases in English are simple forms consisting perhaps just of a noun like cabbages in “The truck was loaded with cabbages” or a pronoun like they in “They flew down to Aiken, South Carolina” [39,... noun phrase has a noun as a head” or “nouns function as the head word in noun phrases R Quirk defines [32, 17] “it (nouns phrase) may be an indeterminately long structure having a noun as head…” It is true even there are 2 nouns in a noun phrase, such as those structures having the ‘s and of genitives, or having partitives, where the mainsubordinate relationship is obviously seen E.g.: Gentlemen in. .. the word order in English noun phrases 2.1 Word order in general structures of English noun phrases In English there is an argument that the structure of noun phrases consists of only Determiner(s), Pre-modifier(s), the Head, and Post- 18 modifier(s) According to this point of view the structure of noun phrases (NP) can be illustrated in the following formula: © NP Determiner(s) Pre-modifier(s) Head... elements According to D Crystal (16) the term word order refers both to the order of words in a phrase and to the order of multi -word units within a sentence The words in a phrase or a sentence are arranged in a certain order, 10 which is fixed for every type of the phrase and a sentence, and is therefore meaningful The main function of word order is to express grammatical relations and determine the grammatical... bred or kept to run in races); or in “a flower garden” (a garden with flowers planted) and “a garden flower” (a flower cultivated in gardens” [48, 25] This paper concerns with the order of words in noun phrases then such issues will be further studied with more details in the following chapters In conclusion English and Vietnamese, although of different type of languages, employ word order as a grammatical... word order and function words E.g.: Bao giờ chị đi chợ? [38, 241] Chị đi chợ bao giờ? [38, 241] In this example the order of word closely refers to the meaning of time The word “bao giờ” as in Chị đi chợ bao giờ? refers to the past and the word “bao giờ” as in Bao giờ chị đi chợ? refers to the future In addition, word order in different structures in Vietnamese expresses different grammatical meaning... the introduction which outlines the background, aim and methods of the study The second part consists of five chapters Chapters 1 provides the theoretical preliminaries and reviews the word order in the literature Chapter 2 presents and describes the word order of English noun phrases Chapter 3 deals with that of Vietnamese noun phrases Chapter 4 presents concrete contrastive analysis of word order. .. of an infinite set of possible sentences which may be never produced or heard before It is syntactic rules that determine the correct order of words in a sentence; accordingly sentences are more than words placed one after another like beads on a string In the Vietnamese language, word order is one of the two grammatical devices because Vietnamese is an uninflectional and isolating language in which... shoulders with all the wild grace of natural curls 4a 3a 1a O 1b …mà phất phơ trên vai với tất cả vẻ duyên dáng hoang dã của những búp tóc quăn tự nhiên [8, 412] 2.2 Word order in noun phrase variants As matter of fact various structure of noun phrases are used with the presence of individual positions of modifying items which depends on their combination with the others in noun phrases In English perhaps... icatio n 1 Noun phrases with one modifying position 4a 3a 2a 1a 1b 1 - - - - + - book, ink 2 - - - + + - good books, good ink 3 - - + - + - two books, little ink 4 - + - - + - some books, some ink 23 5 + - - - + - all books, all ink 6 - - - - + + books on sale, ink in pot 2 7 Noun phrases with two modifying positions - - + + + - two good books, little bad ink 8 - + + - + - the two books, the little ink 9 . basic word order in English and Vietnamese noun phrases. - Basic word orders and the changes of word order in English and Vietnamese noun phrases. - Some similarities and differences between word. word order in English and Vietnamese noun phrases. - Common mistakes when using word order in English and Vietnamese noun phrases and solutions. 3 - Some suggestions in translating word. and Linearity 12 1.2.3. Word order, patterns and structure 13 1.3. Phrases 15 Chapter 2. WORD ORDER IN ENGLISH NOUN PHRASES 18 2.1. Word order in general structures of English noun phrases