An investigation into syntactic and semantic features of english collocations with the verb make with reference to the vietnamese equivalents

i CERTIFICATE OF ORIGINALITY I, the undersigned, hereby certify my authority of the study project report entitled An Investigation into Syntactic and Semantic Features of English Collo

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING

HANOI OPEN UNVERSITY

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING

HANOI OPEN UNVERSITY

i

CERTIFICATE OF ORIGINALITY

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

entitled An Investigation into Syntactic and Semantic Features of English

Collocations with the verb MAKE with reference to the Vietnamese Equivalentssubmitted 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, 2016

Hồ Quang Trung

Approved by SUPERVISOR

Đặng Ngọc Hướng, Ph D

Last but not least, I am greatly indebted to my family, my lover for the sacrifice they have devoted to the fulfillment of this academic work

ABSTRACT

Among the most popular English words being used currently worldwide, the verb MAKE has been without a doubt given great attention by linguists so far Therefore, an initial investigation intosyntactic and semantic features of English collocations with the verb MAKE with reference to the Vietnamese equivalents would provide valuable experience to further studies of linguistics

in general and teaching them for studentsat the University of Labor and Social Affairs in particular Numerous examples have been analyzed cautiously by applying qualitative approach and some other ones so as to achieve the set objectives

LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES

Table 2.1 Examples of Lexical Collocations of Hill (2000) 28 Table 2.2 A List of Types of Verbs 29 Table 2.3 Verb Patterns of the Verb MAKE 31 Table 2.4 Other Structures of MAKE + Noun 32

4.1 Syntactic Features of English Collocations with the verb MAKE

with reference to the Vietnamese equivalents

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4.2 Semantic Features of English Collocations with the verb MAKE

with reference to the Vietnamese equivalents

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Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION

1.1 Rationale for the Research

It is obviously accepted that language is an indispensable part in the life

of humanity Being considered as a significant means to acquire interpersonal communication and to perform ordinary feelings, this human being’s ability engages in every single human activity

Through the history of the development of English, various words which are considered most common have been created and given great attention from linguists In English, there has been a list of around 1,000 most popular words

of all parts of speech that can be used on a daily basis for learners of English to comprehend In addition, Oxford Dictionary and some other academic sources have also managed to conduct a study of 100 most usedEnglish words out of a billion words found worldwide

Among the above-mentioned 100 lemmas that make up for more than 50% of the dictionary of Oxford, the verb MAKE is officially ranked 52th The investigation in both syntactic and semantic features of its English collocations

is undoubtedly able to capture special attention of all-time linguists

By studying cautiously into a minor aspect of linguistics with a certain verb as MAKE, the author confidently hopes that this studywould

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effectivelyprovide experience to further studies of linguistics in general as well asEnglish collocations of the verb MAKE and those of other verbs in particular What’s more, analysis of their equivalents in Vietnamese would also

be drawn in order to comprehend and make use of them more effectively

1.2 Aims of the Research

This research is conducted to achieve the targets of finding out syntactic and semantic features of English collocations with the verb MAKE with reference to the Vietnamese equivalents as well as suggesting some possible implications for teaching them to students at the University of Labor and Social Affairs who study English as a foreign language

1.3 Objectives of the research

To achieve the above-mentioned aims, the following objectives can be put forward:

(i) Pointing outsyntacticfeatures of English collocations of the verb MAKE with reference to the Vietnamese equivalents

(ii) Figuring out semantic features of English collocations of the verb MAKE with reference to the Vietnamese equivalents

(iii) Suggesting possible implications for teaching English collocations of the verb MAKE

1.4 Scope of the Research

(i) Academic Scope

The study focuses on studying syntactic and semantic features of English collocations with the verb MAKE and theequivalents in Vietnamese so as to make crucial contributions to the field of linguistics and improve the efficiency

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of teaching English collocations with the verb MAKE for non-English majored students at the University of Labor and Social Affairs The findings hopefully would bring out various suggestions for teachers and researchers to conduct further studies related to English collocations with the verb MAKE itself and those of other verbs as well as advance teaching effectiveness of collocations.Such approach definitely helps students efficiently expand their lexical items as students are exposed to a new look at how words are frequently used in reality, not purely words’ definitions without notes for practical ways

of using them It is better if English collocations with more verbs are analyzed and totalized, contributing considerably to English learning and teaching in Vietnam

(ii) Social Scope

The applications of this work will, hopefully, contribute greatly to find out appropriate methodsto teaching English collocations in Vietnam and make changes to how Vietnamese learners of English view English collocations not only in their study at school as a compulsory subject but also in their daily use

of English as a foreign language As mentioned previously, regarding English lexical terms, students often learn English words’ definitions separately with their actual uses In fact, teachers and students often make their own examples without collecting and analyzing examples of collocations indicating how native speakers combine some words with each other while others are not used frequently Consequently, they might find English expressions rather difficult and complicated in some cases This study, therefore, suggests them to learn about English collocations with different types of parts of speech and discover the rules to make use of them The effects will be vital to students and should

be encouraged to be applied at school as well as for self-learners of English

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1.5 Significance of the Research

(i) Theoretical Significance

It is true that lexical aspect has been given little attention so far and teachers instead only pay attention to grammar or other aspects Thus, students are often not provided with full understandings towards English collocations of some certain words and only learn their definitions A frequent difficulty is that students might find some common expressions complicated because they have

no idea while a combination of the word with another one is not approved In order to overcome such a trouble, the research is carried out in order to offer neededknowledgeas to syntactic and semantic features of English collocations with the verb MAKE By providing an innovative approach to learning English lexical terms, the author expects to change how students learn English words as well as how teachers change their traditional methods of teaching vocabulary

If words are separated from their specific contexts and are exposed to students only through their meanings in dictionaries, it is not easy for these 2nd language users to obtain the real meanings of the words in different cases

(ii) Practical Significance

The author hopes that this study’s findings and conclusions would make great contributions to raise the importance of studying English collocations with the verb MAKE with reference to the Vietnamese equivalents.First of all, when students study about collocations, they might learn them by heart easily, however, the main problem will lie in applications of these collocations in appropriate contexts Therefore, learning about collocations is the beginning of the whole process The main step is to understand comprehensively how they are applied in diverse situations and students can only do this by analyzing

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examples made by natives speakers, not their own This research offers them a method to do this Secondly, regarding translation, students will have problems with understand the meanings if they learn the words’ definitions separately with its collocations and meanings This study’s implications are to deal with these issues in hope that will help students overcome their troubles

1.6 Structural Organization of the Thesis

The study consists of the 5 following parts

Chapter I – Introduction: gives a brief overview of the research with the rationale for choosing the topic of the research, aims, objectives, scope of the research, and the structural organization of the thesis

Chapter II – Literature Review: reviews the previous studies related to the research topic, a variety of pragmatic concepts most relevant to the research topic such as speech acts, cultural communication, politeness, etc and the framework, base on which the research is conducted

Chapter III – Methodology: presents the research-governing orientations and the research methods used in implementing and developing the study This chapter focuses on research questions, research setting, approaches to investigate the research problem, the principles, techniques to collect and analyze data, etc

Chapter IV – Findings and Discussion: shows the findings which address the research questions through the data gathered and analyzed This section also discusses the results obtained in relation to the research questions and

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some previous studies The research implications for teaching and learning English as a foreign language can be found as the last part of this chapter Chapter V – Conclusion: summarizes major findings of the study, points out the limitations and proposes some suggestions for further research

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Chapter 2 LITERATURE REVIEW

This chapter provides an overview of the theoretical background as well

as relevant knowledge and summaries of previous research’s findings and conclusionsassociated with the theme ofthe investigation In other words, the review is to explain several related terms and definitions as to semantics, syntax, collocation, lexical unit and approach, verb and structures with the verb MAKE These later would further highlight the features conducted of the study

as well as suggest an array of possible implications forteaching English collocations with the verb MAKEin general and teaching them to Vietnamese students at the University of Labor and Social Affairs in particular

2.1 Review of Previous Studies

Some studies of Vietnamese researchers that the author has found so far tend to make comparisons between ways of using some popular structures with the verbs they chose They also listed grammatical structures and provided a wide range of examples and Vietnamese translated versions in order to help other linguists to obtainthe examples’ meanings more broadly Thanks to this, when these authors presented their conclusions, their findings can be viewed on

a more comprehensive scale

First of all, in terms of collocations, Lan (2010) investigated deeply into the lexical verb DO as she still saw greater opportunities to open more pages

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about the analyses of collocations despite various studies came previously One more good reason is that by studying an individual but fashionable verb as DO, she at the same time did research about how actual the needs to understand collocations of one specific verb, in this case it is DO, are as well as how well Vietnamese learners of English understand these words To accomplish such targets, the author collected a group of theoretical preliminaries that obviously involved the complete notions of collocations, together with classifications and characteristics Plus, one more interesting point among her conclusions is that while conducting the study, Lan also pointed out how Vietnamese learners of English and examiners paid their attention to the differences between syntactic and grammatical errors while acquiring English collocations, figuring out they almost consider these two notions one type of error Thus, she made a decision

to choose DO because of its popularity and the fact that there had been by far little research on comparisons between English collocation of the lexical DO and their Vietnamese equivalents

Secondly, while uncovering the dissimilarities between the usages of

four verbs Say, Tell, Speak and Talk, the researcher Yen (2010) basedherself

on the componential analysis, pointing out clearly the senses which contributed

to the governance of these verbs in the related contexts In order to help other researchers reach a profound understanding of her conclusions, the author examined cautiously and presented the Vietnamese translational equivalents for each quotation used Regarding componential analysis, the author described this method’s function as breaking down into pieces their meanings of terms and then making several comparisons between the semantic components so as

to discriminate the above-mentioned meanings In addition, Yen highly evaluated this approach since it contributes greatly to the description of a word

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in a foreign language regarding its components of meanings in a contrastive way In other words, the method that she used is to pay attention to the work of drawing apparent distinctions of all four verbs

In terms of the proper methods used to carry out associated studies, three

authors of the study Automatic Classification of English Verbs Using Rich

Syntactic Features (2008) proved the informative characteristic of syntactic features in verb classification Thestudy used both qualitative and quantitative methods with the purpose of obtaining speech and data analyses to draw conclusions with regards to the instructive significance of syntactic features in automatic verb classification.What’s more, while classifying 13 semantic-syntactic subsets of English verb types, White (2002) figured out the ways children who are hard for heading or deaf define vocabulary and semantic-syntactic features of verbs in their process of learning English

Additionally, by collecting and analyzing abundant examples of MAKE

in English collocations, as well as their Vietnamese equivalents, Minh (2010) had successfully compared the two verbs, one in English and one in the other language, regarding their semantic features In more details, she divided the meanings of MAKE into several sub-groups and provided translations for these different meanings of MAKE; however, she chose only one meaning for the Vietnamese word, LÀM For the second part, pure explanations of meanings were given, whilst for the former one, every single meaning was accompaniedby theircorresponding Vietnamese translations Then, she stated her final conclusions, both about similarities and differences in the finding section, but in my opinion there are still some unclear points in her work and there is still a necessity to solve them more cautiously in this study

as a result, makes an attempt to investigate both syntactic and semantic features

of English collocations with the verb MAKE and their Vietnamese equivalents with regards tomethods, implications and findings in comparison with other earlier studies as cited previously

2.2 Review of Theoretical Background

2.2.1 Theoretical Framework

2.2.1.1 Syntax

Regarding how syntax is defined, it is clear that syntax is the study of structure of language In other words, its main targetsare said to be the set of rules, principles, and processes that govern the structure of sentences in a given language For this reason, the goal of many syntacticians is to discover the syntactic rules common to all languages.They are to dictate how words from different parts of speech are put together to convey a complete thought

It is also said that Syntax is a form of grammar and it is concerned primarily with word order in a sentence and with the agreement of words when they are used simultaneously It is also true that every language has developed

a sepecific mechanismthat is similar to syntax to make a boundless number of sentences.This is a common feature that can be witnessed in all languages

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2.2.1.2 Semantics

To begin with, it is widely known that language is obviously used to express meanings that can be understood among speakers However, meanings exist in humans’ minds and what people express is, therefore, already in their minds through spoken and written forms of languages Consequently, there should be a sub-field studies how speakers convey meaningful messages or receive and understand these meanings The sub-field is Semantics which is the study of meanings in language In other words, linguists are to find an answer for the question of how language is organized to be meaningful Since humans cannot see meanings, it is the most abstract level of linguistic analysis

Additionally, thereis one idea that can be regarded as the most important subject in contemporary semantics, pointing out that meaningful units could combine with each other systematically to form larger meaningful unitsand that understanding sentences is an appropriate method to work out these combinations Researchers, therefore, are to look for general rules to indicate the relationships between forms or arrangements of words in sentences and meaning It is not an easy job as these relationships are often very complex

can be found easily in daily English conversations is observed by pointing out

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the differences in the use of DO and MAKE as these two words are often used

in different contexts and phrases For example, people often say, do housework instead of make housework There are even more cases when it comes to other

couples of verbs that are often mistaken by foreign learners of English

Farrokh (2012) mentioned some interesting questions as to collocations,

for example, why people say by train or by car, but on foot? His research is to

raise the awareness of students and teachers about the importance of learning collocation in ESL/EFL classes, therefore, he used various examples that can

be found in English textbooks and are considered familiar to normal learners of English One of his conclusions is that to acquire the meaning of a word, English users not only need to know its dictionary definition but also the types

of words which it is often combined with Thus, learning collocations requires years of proficient use of the language

However, defining collocation has been always a difficult task to solve Researchers have their own ways of recognizing collocation based on where and how they look at it Generally, it can be said that most of them seem to strongly agree to the sense of co-occurrence of words in which each individual unit will contribute to the overall semantic meaning of the combination

To begin with, Halliday and Hasan (1976) defined collocations as words which are used in lexical cohesion of texts and contained a cohesive force upon

pairs of words such as boyand girl Later, collocation was identified by Palmer

(1981) as a succession of two or more words in which they must be considered

as an integral whole The linguist said that piecing words together should not

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be a proper method as each component part had its individual meaning that should not be taken slightly

Another case is that of Beson et al (1986) who dividedcollocation into

two categories namely lexical collocation and grammatical collocation While the former consists of nouns, adjective, verbs and adverbs, the later consists of

a dominant word, which is the same as a verb, a noun, or an adjective as a whole, and a preposition or grammatical structure.After that, Kuo (2009) later

suggested 7 types of collocations based on the theory of Beson et al In his

work, the author named a couple of collocations which students of English whose level of English is around Intermediate find it difficult to acknowledge

comprehensively, for example, verb and noun or adjective and noun

While defining the terms, Lewis (1997) claimed that there are four groups of collocation which are based on how strong and frequent these

combinations are:strong, weak, frequent, and infrequent The dissimilarity in

the two first groups is based on their tightness, whereas the distinction of the other one is based on their frequency of co-occurrence To illustrate the theory

of Lewis, Farrokh (2012) used drink beer and drug addict for strong collocations while a nice day or a good chance for weak collocations These

examples evidently prove the tight or loose links between units, whilst also figure out how strong they are linked together

Secondly, to obtain a more comprehensive and detailed understanding as

to collocation, comparisons between collocation and other terms should be made clearly Among the most related terms mentioned, there are three outstanding terms namely Free Compounds, Phrasal Verbs, and Idioms With

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the intention of distinguishing their differences, form and meaning have come

into focus These two features will be closely analyzed later

To begin with, Free Compounds are units of meaning and they are all

nouns, formed with two or more words For example, post officeis a compound

in which postand officecontribute their individual meaningsso as to create a

combined meaning over the compound It is clearly obvious that the meaning

of the compound is, for that reason, created by the joining of two components

Sharing the same point of view, Farrokh (2012) used the compound drink tea

to explain this feature Contrary to Free Compounds, collocations are words that go together and they are just some combinations of words, including nouns

or verbs Firstly, their parts of speech are no doubt larger than simply one, noun Secondly, some combinations will sound unnatural to English native speakers and, therefore, are not considered proper collocations even they are

grammatically correct Take strong wind and heavy rainas examples,

strong cannot go with rainwhile it can go with wind Lan (2010) analyzed the case of workshopand stated that this work cannot be separated into two words

or that its order can be turned She also pointed out that compounds as a whole functioned as a single unit while collocations remained a combination of words Stating the difference, the researcher mentioned the frequency of words

used in the combination and referred to collocational relationship, which is far

broader than the scope of this part

A similarity found in drawing a distinction with Phrasal Verbs is that it only refers to Verb and Participle (they are Preposition or Adverb), ignoring other parts of speech However, one more outstanding feature is that each

phrasal verb has its particular meaning, for example, keep away Furthermore,

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the subject (somebody) or object (something) of one phrasal verb might stand between or in other positions of the phrasal verb, and sometimes forms up different meanings Collocations, conversely, often follow an order like a noun will go after an adjective when the two words combine and the appearance of a subject or object is unnecessary

Last but not least, idioms somehow share a number of similarities with collocations and free compounds in their order of words and it is also true that idioms have their specific meanings, both literal and figurative ones First of all, Farrokh (2012) defined idioms as relatively frozen expressions whose

meanings do not reflect themeanings of their component parts, using to kill two

birds with one stone to prove his statement.More specifically speaking, unlike collocations and free compounds, the meaning of a normal idiom cannot be guessed by combining the meanings of each element Secondly, idioms can appear as words, combinations of words, phrases, or even entire clauses and sentences.As a result, translating idioms from a language to another one is always the hardest job since much of their meaningswill not be obtained clearly and precisely if they are perceived literally or separately

Thirdly, in terms of characteristics of Collocation, there are two main features that should be taken into consideraition cautiously These sections below present each characteristic clearly

The first feature isArbitrary

Regarding how collocations are formed, most foreign learners of English often raise a questions as to why there are some words are selected to form a

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matched combination of words whilst some are not appropriate for the same purpose of combining words To solve the problem, Lewis (1997) figured out that collocation is determined by arbitrary, instead of logic or frequency In general,the termrefers to the absence of any necessary connection between a word’s meaning and form

Valli and his fellow, Lucas, (2000) took traffic lights as an example to

illustrate that there has been an important connection between a red light and a meaning of stop, which at the same time proves that the red light is red or not is insignificant Thus, what is significant? That is, the relationship between the establised form and meaning However, they both agreed that not all words are entirely arbitrary in their forms

Using a similar instance with colors, Wierzbicka (2013) was interested

in the link between English words and their meanings, for example, what

riverstands for? There is no actual link for this, the author recognized

Regarding color classification, she compared greenand bluein English with only one of them in another language, such as xanh in Vietnamese For red and

orange, they are clearly two different words, but the linguist stated that in some other languages, there is only one term for both colors Similarly, another

example comes from the way Hungarians define their red, with two kinds

instead of one as in English

Lan (2010) in her study used this term as an explanation for a question about words that are not combined with each other randomly, claiming that collocations cannot be invented by a second language user A simple example

is English native speakers often say, to tell the truth, while learners of English

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find to say the truth grammatically correct This problem is not easy to solve

since there is no general rule at all to explain these combinations

The second feature is Language Specificity

While defining collocation as co-occurrence of words, Trinh (2001) suggested that the term wascoined as a languagespecific phenomenon in which words, both grammatical and lexical, co-occur adjacently or separately in a pleasant manner The definition of language-specificity, as shown above, was described by Larson (1984) as a general rule applied differently from language

to language in governing the combinations of words, for example, a projector

will be translated into a thing that shows pictures on walls while in its source language, the meaning might be totally different

Likewise, Minh (2010) mentioned a mistake in translating make money

in English to earn moneyin Vietnamese, pointing out the fact that one way of

combining word might be regarded as unacceptable way in another language

Another problem can be seen between make and do, for example, do

homework will be different from làm bài tập (make) Likewise, it is true that

make some coffee in English is acceptable but pha cà phê will be translated into mixor blend, which is considered not appropriate in the target language

Furthermore, if we go deeply into the case, when the parts of speech are changed, more issues occur Like someone use a verb in the first language but a

translator prefers a noun or an adjective to describe the content Take blue as

an example, is it better to describe an eye with the color of blue to portray it as

a whole in which there is great attention placed on its form of adjective, a blue

it is an umbrella term which includes all the other terms; it can be any pair or group of words which are commonly found together, or in close relations

Having a closer look, it is evident that collocation, defined similarly in the same way as in other sections, is a pair of lexical content words that are

commonly found together For example, swimming pool is a collocation, but

point at is not because it is a combination of a lexical content word with a grammar function one Therefore, in some cases, researchers study these two terms separately, not as one The author, however, prefers the way to combine the two terms as it might help greatly to reach a united content

Here are some examples

1 Lexical Chunks (that are not collocations)

as a result, so far, in the first place

2 Lexical Chunks (that are collocations)

strongly believe

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For some linguists, a lexical term is also called a lexical unit or entry and they define it as a single word or a part of a pair, word or a chain of words that function as a basic element of a language’s vocabulary Nouns to call animals are all lexical items They have their own individual meaning, as a lexeme but their meanings can be combined in a combination with other words and, therefore, not limited to single words alone When they combine with more than one word, they will be called lexical chunks

2.2.2.3 Lexical Approach

Lexical approach is a method of teaching foreign languages that was first

described by Lewis in the 1990s (Implementing the Lexical Approach in 1997 and The Lexical Approach in 1993) He developed the approach based on the

idea that to learn a language proficiently, learners of English should understand and produce lexical phrases as chunks In other words, students are required to recognize patterns of language (grammar) and remember meaningful set usages

of words to use them competently

In 2011, while comparing this definition of Lewis’ with communicative approaches to language teaching, Thomas and his fellows and co-authors of The Phraseological View of Language: A Tribute to John Sinclair pointed out both similarities and differences of this approach They claimed that Lewis’ method mainly aimed to make a clear departure from structural grammar-based syllabuses and moved this focus to lexis instead In other words, it is said that Lewis somehow paid his attention to word grammar, rather than sentence one

Coming back to the early 1980s when linguists tended to follow an increasingly popular thought of this era that native speakers used only chunks

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or units rather than utterances formulated by structural rules Hill (2000) even claimed that 70% of every an average English person spoke was to be found in some form of fixed expression As a result, some linguists later gave less emphasis to grammar, instead they were likely to study chunks of language As introduced before, lexical collocations, therefore, do not contain grammatical words but consist of nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs instead

Accordingly, Hill (2000) mentioned the following examples as lexical collocations:

adjective + noun a huge profit noun + noun a pocket calculator verb + adjective + noun learn a foreign language verb + adverb live dangerously

adverb + verb half understood adverb + adjective completely soaked Table 2.1 Examples of Lexical Collocations of Hill (2000)

Sharing the same idea, Lewis (2000) highlighted that in order for input

to be converted to intake, students must be taught to consciously notice the context in which words occur In fact, many linguists and English teachers who agreed with lexical approaches put their great emphasis on authentic language, which means that they would select the vocabulary items and collocations to be taught from samples used in real-life situations by native speakers For that reason, Lewis opposed the idea of English teacherstrying to inventlinguistic examples to illustrate rules, claiming that these examples should be considered

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as unnatural and unlikely ones to promote language acquisition Vocabulary items and collocations, as a matter of fact, are often taught as formulas rather than it is used in reality

2.2.2.4 Verbs in English

First of all, it is without a doubt that verb is the most vital part of a sentence in English since without this type of word, no complete sentences will

be made Secondly, verb is a part of speech that in syntax convey the meanings

of an action, an occurrence, or a state of being and there are various kinds of verbs Last but not least, a verb has to agree with sentence components such as subject or object, gender or number Therefore, verbs must have tenses, but it is too far upon the scale of this section

Regarding types of verbs, there are four different types in total:

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verb phrase The three most common auxiliary verbs in English are namely be,

do and have For example:

Do you eat dog meat?

English Modal Verb is the third type of verb in the English language that expresses modality and often occupies only the initial position in a verb phrase

Some common modal verbs are can, may or must For example:

You must wear a helmet

English Main Verbs is the fourth type to mention in this part Main verbs are dynamic or stative verbs that function as the head of the verb phrase All other verbs that are not auxiliary or modal verbs are main verbs in English For example:

He broke my arm

I killed the man yesterday

In summary, there are four types of verbs as listed in the table below:

Types

Copular Verb Modal Verb Auxiliary Verb Main Verb Table 2.2 A List of Types of Verbs

2.2.2.5.The Verb MAKE and Its Structure

Syntactically, the authorhas found out 6 grammatical structures with the verb MAKE that are listed in the following table Their analyses, together with meanings and examples, will be discussed in separated sections

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2 Make + Pronoun + Bare Infinitive

3 Make + Pronoun + Adjective

4 Make + Noun + of + Noun

Cherokee women learned to make clothes using looms

Những phụ nữ bản địa bắt đầu học cách may quần áo bằng khung vải

[48]

Secondly, there are at least 4 minor structures that can be put into the same category with this above-mentioned one All of them have similar

meaning which is producing something Plus, because these four structures are

too minor, their passive form will not be presented

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Patterns

make something (out) of something make something from something make something into something make something for somebody Table 2.4 Other Patternsof MAKE + Noun

B.Make + Pronoun + Bare Infinitive

The pronoun here are Object Pronouns Here come some clear examples concerning this pattern For example:

To be honest, I think that she only says it to make me laugh

Thành thật mà nói, tôi nghĩ cô ấy chỉ nói thế để khiến tôi bật cười

[54]

Obviously, after Bare Verbs, there might be some other components

such as a noun This is because some verbs, for example, calloften goes with

the pattern SVOC in which it will require two more other ingredients to fulfill

its pattern like make me call him the captain Secondly, there might be an

adverb that modifies the bare verb For example:

The director makes her smile broadly and repeat the sentence over and over

again, until she thinks her head will burst from the strain of stress and gesture

Ông giám đốc bắt cô phải nở nụ cười thật to và lặp đi lặp cái câu đó cả trăm

lần, cho đến khi cô nghĩ đầu mình sắp nổ tung vì căng thẳng và vì những điệu

bộ kéo dài vô tận đó

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[28]

On the other hand, if the Bare Verb that comes after MAKE goes with

To Infinitive or Gerund, or even with either of them, the case seems to be quite complicated For example:

Her fear makes him seek to protect her

Nỗi sợ đó đã khiến anh ta phải cố bảo vệ cô cho bằng được

[29]

It makes him want to be honorable and do the right thing

Điều đó khiến anh ta muốn được vinh danh và làm điều gì đó đúng đắn

[31]

Through the two examples above, it is clear that when the (bare) verb

goes with to Infinitive, such as want to, need to, the structure will come to use

What will happen when a gerund comes in? For example:

Manfred, in other words, is held by a fate that makes him continue living but

does not determine the nature of his being, which is his own proud creation

Theo cách nói khác thì, số phận đã khiến Manfred phải tiếp tục sống nhưng

không quyết định bản chất của hắn, thứ hắn vốn lấy làm niềm tự hào

[30]

It is also true that some verbs can go with both Infinitives and Gerunds

such as continue, without changes in their meaning

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In some cases, the Verb (Bare Infinitive) going with MAKE might appear in a combination that requires one more component, which later might

be reduced and can be just an Adjective, make him sad For example:

That makes Sam feel good, and then it makes him feel sad

Ban đầu điều đó khiến Sam cảm thấy tốt hơn, nhưng rồi nó lại khiến anh

thấy buồn lòng

[26]

The component here can also be a Noun or a Pronoun, instead of an Adjective as shown above For example:

We had one prisoner, as I have said, and it was a long time before we could

make him understand anything

Chúng tôi có một tù nhân, như tôi đã nói, và cũng đã lâu rồi trước khi chúng

tôi khiến hắn ta hiểu ra mọi thứ

[35]

C Make + Pronoun + Adjective

If Bare Verbs are placed by Adjectives, a new pattern will be witnessed

It is the case the author has just mentioned above For example:

But it remains true that in general trusting a man makes him good, distrusting him makes him bad

Nhưng, một điều nói chung vẫn luôn đúng là tin tưởng một người đàn ông

khiến anh ta tốt lên, và ngược lại

[27]

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D Make + Noun + of + Noun:

This pattern is quite rare in the usage of MAKE and can be used in some

cases like make an issue of it, make a player of him, etc For example:

Make a mess of things , ignore his advice, then come to him for help

Hãy làm rối tung mọi thứ lên trong khi mặc kệ lời khuyên của hắn ta, rồi đến

nhờ hắn giúp đỡ

[57]

E Be + Made + Infinitive:

This pattern is a Passive Voice one For example:

Just as a car was made to be driven, we were made to be loved

Giống như chiếc xe được làm ra để được lái, chúng ta sinh ra để được yêu

[58]

F Be + Made + Preposition + Noun:

This structure is also in the form of Passive Voice The Prepositions can

be diverse For example:

The bread was made of fine flour without leaven

Chiếc bánh mỳ này được làm bởi loại bột mỳ mịn và không có bột nở

[59]

The paper used in this volume was made from a mixture of grass, lime-tree

bark, and other plant fibres

28

Giấy sử dụng cho quyển sách này được làm từ một hỗn hợp gồm cỏ, vỏ cây bụi

và vài loại sợi thực vật khác

29

Chapter 3 METHODOLOGY

This chapter presents the research questions and the method of study to tackle the proposed issues In other words, the section provides a description of the subjects of the study and the procedure to carry out the research with details

of the action plan

In view of that, there are 3 questions prepared guardedly for this study They are listed as follows:

1 What are the syntacticfeatures of English collocations with the verb MAKE with reference to their Vietnamese equivalents?

3.1.3 Research Approaches

This study is conducted by combining the two research approaches of both quantitative and qualitative In the first place, data was collectedfrom a wide range of sources from printed publications and e-books on the Internet (certified by Google Books) After the collecting stage was finished, examples then were qualitatively described, analyzed and illustrated in terms ofsyntactic

31

and semantic features At the same time, they were alsocompared with their Vietnamese equivalents under a process of statistical analysis to fully answer to the two first research question individually For the third question, pedagogical implications were withdrawn after the two questions about syntactic and semantic features were brought out entirely

3.1.4 Criteria for Intended Data Collection and Data Analysis

This study aims at investigating syntactic and semantic features of English collocations of the verb MAKE with reference to the Vietnamese equivalents For such reason, the author has presented theoretical background related to both fields of linguistics as well as notions and related-terms of collocations Then, details of English collocations with the verb MAKE and the Vietnamese equivalents are also presented clearly

Regarding material selecting, various dictionaries are of great use to list

a great number of English collocations with the verb MAKE and then reliable examples are collected from Google Books such as literature e-books and some other academic sources To achieve these aims and the stated objectives, the process of data collection and analysis have been carried out through two major steps The first stage is gathering needed examples from diverse sources while the second one, following closely, is analyzing the selected data so as to withdraw some findings and conclusions

With regards to reliability, the data for this research wasonly collected from trustworthy sources Quotations and information used in the study is precise as they were presented in the original materials with clear references of

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the author(s), the name of publishers, the time and place of publication as well

as the page number where the data is cited

3.2 Research Methods

3.2.1 Major Methods andSupporting Methods

This study is intended to investigate English collocations of the verb MAKE with reference to the Vietnamese equivalents, therefore, the descriptive and comparative and contrastive methods have been chosen First of all, the descriptive method is used in order to give completeand evident descriptions of both syntactic and semantic features of English collocations of the verb MAKE Secondly, the comparative and contrastive methods are applied to identify similarities and differences with the Vietnamese equivalents Some other methods such as analytical and synthetic methodshave also been used as supporting methods While analyses are vital to analyzing collected data, grouping results into divisions is crucial to give a comprehensive view of what has been concluded Last but not least, devoted commentaries and guidance from the author’s supervisor are very useful to the author Without these valuable and major contributions, the author could not have done this research successfully and effectively

3.2.2 Data Collection Techniques

With the purpose of collecting data for the study, Google search engine has been placed in use and it has been the most popular and effective tool so far

to discover reliable and diverse sources of materials The vital tip the author used here is putting some key words between two quotation marks and, consequently, examples gathered so far have been the most precise ones from printed books that are also typed by Google Books’ hard-working employees to