VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUTIES
FACULTY OF POST- GRADUATE STUDIES
  

TRẦN THỊ KHƯƠNG LIÊN A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF NOMINAL
SUBSTITUTION IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE
CONVERSATION

(Phân tích đối chiếu phép thế danh từ trong ngôn bản hội thoại
tiếng Anh và tiếng Việt) MINOR PROGRAM THESIS Field: English Linguistics
Code: 60.22.15 Hanoi, 2011

Hanoi, 2011
iv TABLE OF CONTENTS
DECLARATION……………………………………………….
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………….
ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………
TABLE OFCONTENTS………………………………………………………
ABBREVIATIONS………………………………………………………………
PART A. INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………
1. Rationale of the study…………………………………………………………
2. Aims and objectives of the study…………………………………………………
2.1. Aims……………………………………………………………………
2.2.Objectives…………………………………………………………………
2.3. Research questions………………………………………………………
3. Scope of the study………………………………………………………………
4. Methodology of the study………………………………………………………
5. Organization of the study…………………………………………………………
PART B. DEVELOPMENT……………………………………………………….
Chapter 1. Theoretical Background………………………………………………
1.1. The theories of discourse……………………………………………………….
1.1.1. The concept of discourse……………………………………………….
1.1.2. Discourse and Sentence………………………………………………
1.1.3. Discourse and Text……………………………………………………
1.1.4. Discourse analysis………………………………………………………
1.1.5. Spoken and Written Discourse………………………………………….
1.2. The theories of conversation……………………………………………………
1.2.1. The concept of conversation……………………………………………
1.2.2. Why is Conversation Analysis important………………………………
1.3.2. Coherence and cohesion………………………………………………
1.3.3. Cohesion within the sentence and discourse……………………………
1.4. Types of Cohesion……………………………………………………………
1.5. Substitution……………………………………………………………………
1.5.1.The concept of substitution………………………………………………
1.5.2.Substitution,Cohesionand Discourse…………………………………….
1.6.ContrastiveAnalysis……………………………………………………………
1.6.1. Definition………………………………………………………………
1.6.2. Why using CA in this thesis?
1.7. Summary………………………………………………………………………
Chapter 2. A contrastive analysis of nominal substitution in English and
Vietnamese conversation discourse……………………………………………….
2.1. General features of English and Vietnamese nominal structure……………….
2.2. Person pronouns………………………………………………………………
2.2.1. Subjective and objective personal pronouns…………………….
2.2.2. Possessive pronouns……………………………………………
2.3. One……………………………………………………………………………
2.3.1. One as a substitute for a nominal group head/ substitute one …………
2.3.2. One as a substitute for an indefinite nominal group/ indefinite one …….
2.4. The same………………………………………………………………………
2.4.1. Say the same……………………………………………………………
2.4.2. Do the same………………………………………………………………
2.4.3. Be the same………………………………………………………………
PART C: CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………
3.1. Concluding remarks…………………………………………………………….
3.2. The implication of the study for teaching and learning of English……………
3.3. Limitation of the study………………………………………………………….
3.4. Suggestions for further study…………………………………………………


REFERENCES……………………………………………………………………
BOOKS FOR QUOTATIONS…………………………………………………….
43
45
vii Symbols and Abbreviations

The history of linguistics has seen the everlasting development of different
approaches to linguistics and language teaching, each of which defines its own tasks, scopes
and objectives. Traditionally, linguists have been concerned with the phonological, lexical
and syntactical features and studied sentences which are preferably taken out of context.
Besides, the focus of traditional practice of language teaching and learning has been on the
analysis of single sentences, normally at the levels of phonology, vocabulary and grammar.
Later, with the view that incomplete sentences can still make sense when occurring
in some particular context, according to (Cook 1989: ix) complete understanding of stretches
of language can only be obtained if they are considered “in their full textual, social and
psychological context” linguists have shifted their attention from complete sentences to
discourse.
In common with coherence, cohesion takes an active role in building up discourse, in
general, and of course, conversation as a genre of discourse, in particular. Truly, Halliday
and Hasan (1976) make a detailed classification of the cohesive devices in English. These
authors distinguish between grammatical and lexical cohesion. According to them,
grammatical cohesion embraces four different devices: reference, ellipsis, substitution and
lexical. In Vietnam, it seems that all the issues related to substitution especially Nominal
substitution in conversation are still in limited exploration. It is easy to find that substitution
in Vietnamese is still a concept which has been needed receive much Vietnamese
researchers‟ exploration. Searching for the study of substitution, we only can see in Tran
Ngoc Them‟s work (1985), more recently, Diep Quang Ban‟s (1998). These authors‟ effort
seems to be made to give a very general and basic concept of substitution as well as types of
it in Vietnamese. Thus, we might wonder whether substitution, and within the minor thesis,
nominal substitution actually works in Vietnamese conversation. Furthermore, in recent
years, reference, ellipsis, and lexical have been closely studied in contrastive with
Vietnamese, within the framework of minor thesis a careful and profound study of English
and Vietnamese nominal substitution is, theoretically speaking, equally important and
necessary.
Because of the above mentioned reasons, my final thesis entitled: “Contrastive
analysis of nominal substitution in English and Vietnamese conversation”. I do hope that this

Since this study examines nominal substitution as a cohesive device, only substitution across
sentences is taken into account. Because of the limited time and knowledge, this study is
only focused on some domains as follows:
- Only nominal substitution in English and its equivalent expressions in Vietnamese
conversation are investigated.
- I will take into consideration many cases of nominal substitution so the data used for
illustration exemplification are taken from various sources.
3 - I am going to deal with nominal substitution occured in the written transcription of this
conversation, not in a tape – recorded conversation.
4. Methodology of the study
Since the main purpose of the study is to contrast nominal substitution in English
conversation and Vietnamese conversation, the result of which will be exploited for
language learning and teaching, CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS (C.A.) is used as the major
method of the study. I will take English language as the base language and Vietnamese as
the comparative language.
Besides, systemization and generalization are also used as sub-methods to support
C.A. method. Thus, in the comparative analysis of examples in both English and
Vietnamese, translation is the main technique given to highlight the similarities (or
differences) in the nominal substitution in the two languages. During the process of
comparison, there may arise cases where some nominal substitution occurs only in
Vietnamese, but can hardly be found in English discourse. To deal with these cases, I shall
give out literal translation of the examples for the sake of highlighting the similarities (or
differences) in the nominal substitution in the two languages. For C.A. to be effective and
persuasive, I mainly take notice of two levels of translation: semantic and pragmatic.
The illustrating material in the thesis is authentic examples. They are taken from a
wide variety of sources in English and Vietnamese: modern novels, modern short stories as
well as data sources from ebook and so on. Some examples are drawn from grammar books

which it is being used if you want to achieve successful communication. Therefore, the
concept of discourse has been paid considerable attention to by several linguists since 1952.
The most straightforward definition of discourse is the one often found in textbooks for
students of linguistics: “Language above the sentence” (Cameron 2001: 10).
According to Cook (1989: 6) discourse is “stretches of language perceived to be meaningful,
unified and purposeful". In his point of view, the kind of language, language has been used
to communicate something and is felt to be coherent (and may, or may not, happen to
correspond to a correct sentence or a series of correct sentences) – language in use, for
communication is called discourse. Discourse can be anything from a conversation to a great
novel or a lengthy legal case. Cook (1989:10) also argues that “What matters is not its
conformity to rules, but the fact that it communicates and is recognized by its receivers as
coherent". Discourse is supposed to be meaningful and thus to be used to communicate with
one person in a way that another person does not have the necessary knowledge to make
sense of. The study of discourseis often referred to as discourse analysis.
1.1.2. Discourse and Sentence
It is obvious that we have two different kinds of language as potential objects for
study. The sentence is abstracted in order to teach a language or literacy, or to study how the
rules of language work according to Cook (1989). Sharing the same idea with Cook, Brown
& Yule (1983) state that the sentence is just a grammatical unit and it is quite abstract
because it has no producers and no receivers – that is to say, it can exist independently of
5 any speaker of that language. It is most often used in the teaching and learning of a language
and also in explaining how the rules of a language work.
Discourse, on the contrary, is the language in use, for communication. In addition, it
has been used to communicate something and felt to be coherent and cohesive. Conversely,
though sentence and discourse are different, they are not mutually exclusive. Discourse may
be composed of one or more well-formed grammatical sentences. But of course, it may also
be composed of incomplete sentences. That is the language we often find in notices, signs,

discourse) in which many situational factors are involved; it can be both written and spoken,
and there will be no limit on the size of a text. Thus, text is a purely linguistic, formal object,
while discourse has both linguistic and non-linguistic properties.
1.1.4. Discourse analysis
Discourse analysis is concerned with the study of the relationship between language
and the contexts in which it is used. To be more specific, it examined how stretches of
language, considered in their full textual, social and psychological context, become
meaningful and unified for their users. It is a rapidly expanding field, providing insights into
problems of processes of language use and language learning, and is therefore of great
importance to language teachers.
Zellig Harris, an American linguist, was the first person who recognized discourse as
one main object of study in linguistics. Harris (1952) was interested in the distribution of
linguistic elements and the links between the text and its social situation. This idea was then
developed by Dell Hymes (1964), who provided a sociological perspective with the study of
speech in social setting. The linguistic philosophers such as Austin (1962), Searle (1969) and
Grice (1975) also made great impact in the study of language and social action, which is
reflected in speech act theory and the formulation of conversational maxims and the
appearance of pragmatics. It was in 1973 that discourse analysis was dealt with perfectly and
concretely in M.A.K Halliday‟s functional approach to language. Halliday's linguistic model
emphasizes the social function of language and the thematic and informational structure of
speech and writing. His approach is completely influential in British discourse analysis, of
which some famous linguists are Sinclair and Coulhard (1975).
Traditionally, language teaching has concentrated on pronunciation, grammar and
vocabulary, and while these remain the basis of foreign language knowledge, discourse
analysis can draw attention to the skills needed to put this knowledge into action and to
achieve successful communication.
1.1.5. Spoken and Written Discourse
Discourse can be classified into two kinds, namely: Oral Discourse or Spoken
Discourse and Written Discourse. The terms spoken discourse has been used to refer to the
spoken text such as conversations, interview, lessons, lectures and so on. The problems

transcriptions and written language are absolutely not like. In order to make the data used in
this thesis as close as possible to the original discourse, I seek to provide adequate
representations.
1.2. The theories of conversation
1.2.1 The concept of conversation
So far in this study we have looked at discourse in general. Our attempt is made to
look specifically at a typical kind of spoken language as conversation. According to Cook
8 (1989), the term conversation is widely used, in a non-technical sense, and people seem
capable of distinguishing it from other kinds of talk. They mean, broadly speaking, that the
talk is less formal. Discourse analysts, indeed, are rather vague about what they mean by
“conversation” too, and some seem to use the term to describe any kind of oral interaction.
We shall define the term as follows. A conversation is defined as “talk between two or more
people in which thoughts, feelings and ideas are expressed, questions are asked and
answered, or news and information are exchanged” (Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary,
2000). Clearly, it is communication by two or more people, or by one's self and
conversational communication also the most basic and widespread means of conducting
human affairs. Conversation, as we have seen here, involves far more than knowledge of the
language system and the factors creating coherence in one-way discourse; it involves the
gaining, holding, and yielding of turns, the negotiation of meaning and direction, the shifting
of topic, the signaling and identification of turn type, the use of voice quality, face and body.
For a successful conversation, the partners must achieve a workable balance of
contributions. A successful conversation includes mutually interesting connections between
the speakers or things that the speakers know. For this to happen, those engaging in
conversation must find a topic on which they both can relate in some sense.
To sum up, conversation is notoriously difficult to understand and analyze and it can
seem almost contradiction in terms. However, with the focus of discourse analysis and
especially in this study the focus of conversation, a typical form of spoken discourse, we will

substitute or zero substitution. (Halliday & Hassan, 1976:92) For example:
1) Do you have any matches? - I can give you one. [Substitution]
2) Have you seen the film? - Yes, I have. [Ellipsis]
Halliday and Hasan (1976:4) also define cohesion in a similar way: “The concept of
cohesion is a semantic one; it refers to relations of meaning that exist within the text, and
that define it as a text.” They also point out that cohesion often occurs where the
interpretation of some elements in the discourse is dependent on that of another. To
summarize, cohesion refers to the linguistic elements that make a discourse semantically
coherent; or as Nguyen Hoa (2000: 23) indicated “cohesion refers to the formal relationship
that causes texts to cohere or stick together”. He holds the view that speakers relate their
utterances to previous ones through the use of cohesive relations; a cohesive tie is
established. Cohesive ties then enter into cohesive chains, which run throughout a text,
revealing how different parts of a text are related to each other.
1.3.2. Coherence and cohesion
In this section we shall treat cohesion and coherence as two distinct concepts. In fact
the use of term „cohesion‟ may be preferable because both „cohesion‟ and „coherence‟ have
the function of binding the discourse/text together by creating sequences of meaning.
Therefore an awareness of cohesion and coherence in all texts especially in conversation
10 discourse is a very important skill for learners to develop. Basically, cohesion refers to the
formal relationship that causes text to cohere or stick together (Nguyen Hoa: 2000). It is
indicated by grammatical, logical and lexical relationships found among or between the
sentences of a text. The problems can be treated comprehensively in the book by Halliday
and Hasan (1976) as: “A text has texture and this is what distinguishes it from something
that is not a text ………the texture is provided by cohesive relation”. Coherence, in contrast,
refers to the type of semantic or rhetorical relationships that underline texts. That is to say
coherence is concerned with the sequencing of the configuration of the concepts and relation
of the textual world which underlies and is realized by the surface text (cohesion). In other

(conversation).
1.4. Types of Cohesion
According to Halliday and Hasan (1976), the classification of cohesion is based on the
linguistic form. The type of cohesion depends either on semantic relation in the linguistic
system or on lexico-grammatical relations. In other words, the cohesive relation can be
interpreted as being either lexicogrammatical in nature or semantic. It can be made clearer in
the following description:
Nature of cohesive relation
Type of cohesion
Relatedness of form
Relatedness of reference
Semantic connection
Substitution and ellipsis; lexical collocation
Reference; lexical reiteration
Conjunction
Table 1.1: Type of Cohesion (Source: Haliday and Hasan, 1976:304)
Consequently, we can refer to grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion as follows:
Grammatical cohesion
Lexical cohesion
Reference
 Exophoric
 Endophoric
- personal
- demonstrative
- comparative
Substitution
 Norminal substitution
 Verbal substitution
 Clausal substitution
Conjunction

advanced in terms of collocation by Firth (1957) and later developed by Halliday (1961,
1966). Lexical cohesion occurs when two words in a discourse are semantically related in
some way. Halliday and Hasan (1976) classify lexical cohesion into two main categories:
reiteration and collocation. Evidently, these two kinds of cohesion work together to
contribute to the creation of discourse. Within the scope of minor thesis, this study is only
focused on the findings of linguistics means used for nominal substitution in English
conversation and the equivalent linguistics means used for nominal substitution in
Vietnamese conversation.
1.5. Substitution
1.5.1 The concept of substitution
The notion of substitution has traditionally been considered as a formal feature
within the sentence. However then, since linguists have shifted their attention from complete
sentences to discourse, the notion of textuality has been seriously investigated, substitution
has been taken into consideration across sentences as a cohesive device. Those influential
linguists who take the above –sentence approach to substitution are Quirk et. al. (1972) and
Halliday & Hasan (1976). Substitution, the device as Quirk. et. al (1972) defines for
abbreviating and avoiding repetition. Across sentences, substitution seems to be optional,
and for stylistic reasons. Within sentences, it is sometimes obligatory. Most of the substitutes
or PRO-FORMS within sentences are also used across sentences. In the view of Halliday
and Hasan (1976: 32), substitution is a relation within the text on the lexico-grammatical
level. A substitute is a sort of counter which is used in place of the repetition of a particular
item.
13 Obviously, it is all agreed that substitution is a way of avoiding repetition. Within the
scope of my study the view of substitution as a grammatical relation in the work done by
Halliday & Hasan (1976) on substitution will be taken as the theoretical framework for the
contrastive analysis.
1.5.2 Substitution, Cohesion and Discourse


contributions to translation theory, linguistics typology, the study of language universals and
the description of particular languages.
In fact, foreign language learners often have difficulties in studying language and
using it. They always get confused when they distinguish the differences as well as the
similarities between the source language (L1) and the target one (L2). Therefore, language
learners cannot use the language effectively. To sum up, contrastive analysis plays a vital
role in the development of teaching and learning foreign languages especially teaching and
learning conversation in the target language comparing with the source language.
1.6.2. Why use C.A. in this thesis?
As I have explained above, C.A. plays very key role in exploring similarities and
differences between the source language and the target language, which is very important in
learning languages, especially in learning a foreign language like English. As far as we have
seen, English and Vietnamese are different languages in terms of type and nature, so beside
similarities there are lots of differences between them in all aspects. It is C.A. that can help
learners find out those differences so that they can bridge the gap between Vietnamese and
English, leading to the successful process of mastering English. That is why C.A. is used as
the major study method in this study to analyze nominal substitution in English and its
equivalent expressions in Vietnamese conversation. And of course, the result of the
investigation is intended to be applied to the teaching and learning of English.
1.7. Summary
In conclusion, I have gone over all the fundamental notions of discourse, cohesion,
substitution as well as subtypes of substitution and nominal substitution as the core for
discussion. All theoretical background in this study has been drawn on the work by Halliday
& Hasan (1976), Halliday (1985), wherever suitable, Quirk et. al. (1972). Discourse is
viewed as the language above the sentence level – the language put to communication. It is
classified into spoken discourse and written discourse, both of which are taken consideration
in this study. The term discourse is distinguished clearly with the term sentence and text.
Apart from this, the notion and its role of discourse analysis also conversation analysis has
been paid carefully attention. All above, a close study of cohesion, some types of cohesion

Premodifier / Head / postmodifier: e.g. Those five beautiful shiny Jonathan / apples
/ sitting on the chair
Similarly, Quirk et. al. (1972) as well as Chalker (1984) use the terms
Premodification, Head and Postmodification to refer to three parts of the structure:
Premodification / Head / Postmodification: e.g. The latest / problem / for the
government
Downing & Locke (1995) also state that a noun group structure has three parts;
through the terms they use for these components are not quite the same as the ones
mentioned above:
16 Prehead / Head / Posthead: e.g. The / machine / which broken down is working
again now
Accordingly, we might reach to the conclusion that the standard structure of the
English nominal group has a maximum of three components: one Head and two optional
modifiers. Though central in the group, the Head which may be a common noun, a pronoun
or a proper noun can be substituted or even omitted. It follows that the case where the Head
is substituted will be the subject of my study.
Besides the logical structure, Halliday & Hasan (1976) also introduce the experiential
structure of the nominal group. They point out that the structure might functionally be
composed of six elements: The Deictic (usually a determiner expressing identity), the
Numerative (a numeral or other quantifier expressing quantity), the Epithet (an adjective
expressing a property), the Classifier (a common noun or a proper noun expressing a
subclass), the Qualifier (a relative clause or prepositional phrase) and what they call Thing.
The relationship between the logical and experiential structure can be illustrated as follows:

the
two
high

group]
With reference to the Vietnamese nominal structure, the two models of the structure
provided by two influential Vietnamese linguists, namely Diep Quang Ban (1996) and
Nguyen Tai Can (1996) have been looked at. Diep Quang Ban (1996) states that the
structure of the Vietnamese nominal group is composed of three components: the Head, the
Premodifier and the Postmodifier. The presence of the last two is optional:
Premodifier / Head / Postmodifier: e.g. Tất cả những cái / chủ trương / chính xác đó.
The head is said to be either a noun or a noun phrase which normally consists of a
noun as a classifier combined with another noun, a verb or an adjective ( e.g. cái nhà, cây
tre, con mèo, người thợ, niềm vui, cuộc họp, vẻ đẹp). It is clear that the combination always
expresses a single entity.
17 The Premodifier may functionally be divided into three parts: Universal Qualifier (từ
chỉ tổng lượng e.g. tất cả, hết thảy, tất thảy, cả thảy etc.), Numerative (từ chỉ số lượng or số
từ), and Indexical Word CÁI (từ chỉ xuất CÁI). Its structure is realized diagrammatically as
follows:
Universal Qualifier
Numerative
Indexical word
Head
Tất cả
những
cái
chủ trương
The Postmodifier may functionally consists of two elements: Qualifiers (định tố) and
Demonstrative (từ chỉ định e.g. này, nọ, kia, ấy, đấy, đó):
Head
Qualifier

as it lays the foundations of nominal substitution in Vietnamese. Thus, since it serves for my
purpose of study, Can‟s view of the Head of the nominal structure will be adopted.
Briefly, the structure of the Vietnamese nominal group taken in this study can be outlined as follows:
Premodifier
( phần đầu)
Head
( phần trung tâm)
Postmodifier
( phần cuối)
Universal
Qualifier
(từ chỉ tổng
lượng)
Numerative
(số từ)
Indexical
word CÁI
Head 1
(trung
tâm 1)
Head 2
(trung
tâm 2)
Qualifier
(định tố)
Demonstrative
(từ chỉ định)
Tất cả
những
cái

We
us
Second person
singular & plural
You
you
Third person
singular
He
She
It
him
her
it
plural
They
them

Table 2: English personal pronouns
As can be seen from mentioned-above personal pronouns, the third person pronouns
obviously carry cohesive force as any use of them always requires the listener or reader to
look backwards (i.e. anaphoric) in order to retrieve what has gone before. Thus, the third
person pronouns are seen as one of the main cohesive devices used for the creation of
discourse. Further more, my study centres around only common substitute words as cohesive
devices in conversation discourse and because it is not a study of personal pronouns, I am
going to work on only on the third person ones.
In the set of the third person forms, he/him and she/her are used to substitute for
persons while it/it for things. They/them replace both persons and things. Let us consider the
following examples:


Saturday. They match the scarf I‘ve bought her. (PET 3, 2003)
Cô gái: Cuốn sách trong túi này có phải tặng mẹ không bố? Con không nghĩ mẹ lại đặc biệt
thích hoa.
Bố: Bố lại nghĩ mẹ con sẽ thích nó ………………………………và thậm chí nếu như mẹ
không bao giờ đọc nó thì nó cũng có một số bức ảnh rất tuyệt.