MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING LOAN THI HUYEN DIEP PHENIKAA UNIVERSITY GRADUATION PAPER A STUDY ON WISHES EXPRESSIONS IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE Student: Loan Thi Huyen Diep Student ID No: 19010269 Course: 2019 – 2023 Field: English Language Mode of study: Full-time Supervisor: Assoc. Nguyen Thi Thanh Huong ENGLISH LANGUAGE Ha Noi – 2023 MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING PHENIKAA UNIVERSITY GRADUATION PAPER A STUDY ON WISHES EXPRESSIONS IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE (CÁC CÁCH THỂ HIỆN LỜI CHÚC TRONG TIẾNG ANH VÀ TIẾNG VIỆT) Student: Loan Thi Huyen Diep Student ID No: 19010269 Course: 2019 -2023 Field: English Language Mode of study: Full-time Supervisor: Assoc. Nguyen Thi Thanh Huong Hanoi – 2023 i i ABSTRACT Being a way for people to communicate with each other, wishes may serve the purposes of expressing senders’ desire and attitude toward other people of different relations. There are many important, special occasions in a person’s life, and of the whole society, when wishes can be given or exchanged.
Wishes can be expressed in numerous ways. People’s wishes change over time accompanying the change of society. Syntactically, devices noticeable in English and Vietnamese wishes are inversion, parallel structure, repetition, enumeration, elipsis, antithesis and quotation. Lexically, the desire of wishes senders in both languages can be expressed through devices like metaphor, metonymy, epithet, hyperbole, and idioms.
Sharing the same purpose, the ideas in certain English and Vietnamese wishes may not always be expressed by different means, that can be recognized in the frequency of the above-mentioned devices. ii DECLARATION I, Loan Thi Huyen Diep - 19010269, certificate that no part of the above report has been copied or reproduced by me from any other person’s work without acknowledgements and that the report is originally written by me under strict guidance of my supervisor. Hanoi, 15th June 2023 Supervisor Student Assoc. Nguyen Thi Thanh Huong Loan Thi Huyen Diep iii ACKNOWLEGEMENT It would not have been possible for me to complete this graduation paper without the help and support of the wonderful people in my life, only a few of whom deserve special mention here.
First and foremost, I am grateful to my supervisor, Assoc. Nguyen Thi Thanh Huong, for her unwavering support of my study, as well as her patience, motivation, enthusiasm, and vast knowledge. Throughout the course of my writing, she provided encouragement, sound advice, good teaching, good company, and a plethora of good ideas. Without her, I would have been lost.
It is difficult to overstate my gratitude to teachers at the Faculty of English Language. They built the initial foundation of my knowledge and offer me the opportunity to complete my graduation thesis. In my work, I have been blessed with a stimulating and fun environment in which to learn and grow provided by my many friends. My sincere thanks go to them for helping me get through the difficult times, and for all the emotional support, entertainment, and caring they provided.
Last but not least, to my family. I bid them hearty thanks. They have been a solid anchor on which I rely again and again. Words cannot express how grateful I am to be in their support and how much this work was enhanced and made easier by them being in mine.
iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page PART 1. INTRODUCTION 1 1 Rationale for the study 1 2 Aims and objectives of the study 2 3 Research questions 2 4 Scope of the study 2 5 Methodology of the study 2 6 Significance of the study 3 7 Design of the study 3 PART 2. DEVELOPMENT 5 Chapter 1 THEORETICAL BACKGROUND 5 1. Review of previous studies 5 1.
Previous Vietnamese studies 5 1. Previous Studies oversea 5 1. Review of Theoretical Background 6 1. Definition of wishes 6 1.
Definition of wishes in English 6 1. Definition of wishes in Vietnamese 6 1. Functions of wishes in human life 7 1. Typial structure of sentence in English and Vietnamese 7 1.
An overview of linguistic devices 7 1. Phonetic Stylistic Devices 7 1. Lexical Stylistic Devices 7 1. Syntactical Stylistic Devices 8 Chapter 2 LINGUISTIC FEATURES OF WISHES IN ENGLISH 10 AND VIETNAMESE 2.
A brief description of wishes in English and Vietnamese 10 2. Syntactical features of wishes in English and Vietnamese 20 2. Typical structure of wishes in English and Vietnamese 20 2. Length of wishes 20 v 2.
Structural classification of wishes 22 2. Syntactical Devices in wishes in English and Vietnamese 23 2.3 Lexical features of wishes in English and Vietnamese 29 2. Lexical classification of wishes 29 2. Lexical devices in wishes in English and Vietnamese 34 2.
Phonetic features of wishes in English and Vietnamese 40 2. Similarities and differences between English and 42 Vietnamese wishes Chapter 3 IMPLICATION 45 3. English - Vietnamese translation 45 3. Identifying wish sender and recipient 45 3.
Dealing with the change of structure 47 3. Vietnamese - English translation 49 PART 3. CONCLUSION 50 REFERENCES 52 vi LIST OF DIAGRAMS Number of Title of diagrams Page diagrams Wishes classification basing on the time of Diagram 2.1 17 sending and receiving Diagram 2.2 Wishes classification basing on occasions 17 Frequency of wishes with ‘wish’ and ‘chúc’ and Diagram 2.3 29 ‘chúc mừng’ Frequency of wishes without ‘wish’ and ‘chúc’ Diagram 2.4 34 and ‘chúc mừng’ Diagram 2.5 Frequency of most popular adjectives in wishes 38 Frequency of syntactical devices in English and Diagram 2.6 43 Vietnamese wishes Frequency of lexical devices in English and Diagram 2.7 44 Vietnamese wishes Frequency of phonetic device (rhyme) in English Diagram 2.8 44 and Vietnamese wishes Subject pronoun in English wishes and their equivalents in Vietnamese depending on Diagram 3.1 48 relationship between the wishes senders and recipients vii LIST OF PHOTOS Number of photos Title of photos Page Photo 2.1 Cards with wishes for different occasions 18 Mau Than New Year poem of President Photo 2.2 42 Hochiminh Birthday card with wishes from daughter Photo 3.1 49 to mother LIST OF TABLES Number of tables Title of tables Page Table 2.1 Wishes classification basing on occasions 16 viii LIST OF ABBREVIATION 1) Adj Adjective 2) N Noun 3) NP Noun phrase 4) S Subject 5) Sb Somebody 6) St Something 7) V Verb 8) VP Verb phrase 1 PART 1: INTRODUCTION 1 Rationale for the study Nowadays, under the continuous development of globalization, there are many countries where English is regarded as an official language in 44 countries as well as the language in business, commerce, politics, science, etc. Since then, people from different countries have exchanged and interacted not only in language but also in culture, and communication behaviors that help them get closer and closer to each other.
People of any regions or any languages need social communication. Each person’s life is full of plenty of events, several of which are special and can be celebrated together with many others. When being in good mood or witnessing others’ happiness and achievements, people always want to share these kinds of feeling with each other by sending or exchanging wishes. There are many occasions, special event, both national - New Year, Christmas, Women's Day – or individual – wedding, new-born baby, housewarming, promotion, when wishes are sent or exchanged.
It is clear that wishes are ones of the nicest words that can be uttered by people of any nationalities, including English speaking and Vietnamese people. Even being accompanied with precious gifts or not, wishes have become very important things that ordinary people need in their spiritual lives. In the modern time, things have been changing so fast and that kind of changes also has a great impact on both material and spiritual life, so the way gifts and wishes are delivered has changed too. Technological achievements make many impossible things in the past become common ones at present, including wishes that can be overcome long distance and time.
Besides traditional wishes that used to be written on postcards, wishes nowadays can be made, created to catch up with the rapid change of the various types of communication in modern world. Today, smartphones are no longer strange to everyone, so greetings and wishes can be sent and received through regular messages, Facebook, Zalo, or other chat applications. The reason why "wish is considered a spiritual element" is because each wish is a time people show their affection to someone, good and meaningful wishes can sometimes touch people's hearts, and warm their souls. 2 Being a way for people to communicate with each other, wishes may serve the same purposes, but ways to express senders’ aims are different in each language.
The same things can be noticed in English and Vietnamese, and this is the reason for the topic "A study on wishes expressions in English and Vietnamese” was chosen for this study. Hopefully, through analyzing and interpreting wishes in English and Vietnamese, not only linguistic features, but their cultural aspects will also be discovered. 2 Aims and objectives of the study This study is carried out with the hope to reach some aims at: - Describing linguistic features of wishes expressions in English and Vietnamese. - Identifying the similarities and differences between English and Vietnamese wishes.
3 Research questions (in form of questions) The study aims at answering the following research questions: (1) What are linguistic features of wishes in English and Vietnamese? (2) What are the similarities and differences between English and Vietnamese wishes? 4 Scope of the study Among more than 2159 wishes collected, among them 1135 are wishes in English and 1024 in Vietnamese. These wishes will be selected as analytical materials for this topic. 5 Significance of the study The findings of this study were expected to provide significant contributions at both theoretical and practical levels. Theoretically, the proposed study will benefit and partly help English future researchers specializing in English with meaningful insights from the findings.
3 Moreover, the research will contribute to the comparative and contrastive analysis method as an effective way of learning languages. Practically, the study is detailed investigation of wishes in both English and Vietnamese. The proposed study provides the overview of wishes in both languages from linguistic and cultural aspects. In addition, the proposed study may help English learners in daily communication as well as in certain global contexts.
6 Research method This study was comparative research. To answer the research questions, both qualitative and quantitative methods were exploited in this case study. The data was collected on the internet as well as several other sources. Qualitative research method is used to analyze the linguistics features of wishes in both languages.
Quantitative research method is used to discover the typical features of wishes in both languages from linguistic and cultural points of view. Comparative and contrastive research method is used to find out the similarities and differences in wishes expressions in English and Vietnamese equivalents. 7 Design of the study To achieve the aims mentioned above, this study is divided into 5 parts: - Part 1 is entitled in Introduction where rationale for the study, Aims and objectives of the study, research questions, scope of the study, significance of the study, research method, design of the study of the thesis are presented. - Part 2 - Development - consists of three chapters: Chapter 1: Literature Review, indicates theoretical framework of color expressions including: Review of the previous studies related to the topic, definitions, and syntactical, semantic and functional classifications of color expressions in literature.
Chapter 2: Linguistic features of wishes in English and Vietnamese, analyze syntactical features, semantic features and functional features of color expressions in selected stories and their Vietnamese equivalents. 4 Chapter 3: Implication, point out and suggest suitable methods to translate color expressions in English into Vietnamese and vice versa. - Part 3 - Conclusion - summarizes what have been discussed in Part 2 and makes some suggestions for future studies. Besides 3 main parts, References can be found at the end of the study.