4
TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART A: INTRODUCTION 1
1. RATIONALE OF THE STUDY 1
2. SCOPE OF THE STUDY 1
3. OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY 1
4. RESEARCH QUESTIONS 2
5. ORGANIZATION OF THE STUDY 2
PART B: DEVELOPMENT 4
CHAPTER I: LITERATURE REVIEW 5
1.1. AN OVERVIEW ON CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS 5
2.2. A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF VERBS 7
2.2.1. Verbs in English 7
2.2.2. Verbs in Vietnamese 8
3.3. COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS 9
3.3.1. Definition of terms 9
3.3.2. Major principles of cognitive linguistics 10
3.4. COGNITIVE SEMANTICS 10
3.4.1. Definition 10
3.4.2. Guiding principles of cognitive semantics 11
3.5. POLYSEMY 13
3.5.1. The traditional treatment of polysemy 13
3.5.2. Polysemy in cognitive linguistics 14
3.5.3. Summary 15
CHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGY 16
2.1. RESEARCH QUESTIONS 16
2.2. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHOD 16
2.3. METHOD AND SOURCES OF THE LANGUAGE MATERIAL 17

3.4. SUMMARY 39
PART C: CONCLUSION 41 6
1. CONCLUSIONS 41
2. IMPLICATIONS 42
3. LIMITATIONS OF THE RESEARCH AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER
STUDY 43
REFERENCES 44 7
PART A: INTRODUCTION
1. RATIONALE OF THE STUDY
I had some troubles with the self-referential nature of the material. Since the subject is the
"meaning of meaning" at various levels, it's easy to become confused and fall into a "black
hole" where text seems meaningless. Polysemy is the term widely used in semantic analysis

- finding out the similarities and differences of these two verbs from cross-linguistic
point of view.
- providing pedagogical implications for teaching and learning as well as language
research.
More detailed explication as how the aforementioned objectives have been formulated and
how these objectives can be attained is specified in chapter 2: Methodology.
4. RESEARCH QUESTIONS
On the basis of the abovementioned aims and objectives, the study is conducted to answer the
following questions:
(1) From a cognitive semantic perspective, what meanings do the English
verbs ‗open/close‘ have? How are they variedly used in this language?
(2) What are potential Vietnamese equivalents of the English verbs
‗open/close‘ in various senses?
(3) How are these verbs similar and different between English and
Vietnamese in the light of cognitive semantics?
5. ORGANIZATION OF THE STUDY
The study is divided into three main parts: Part A is the Introduction to the study. Part B is
the Development with the three chapters. Part C is the Conclusion.
Part A discusses the rationale, the scope of the study, the objectives of the study,
methodology used in the study and the organization of the study.
Part B includes three chapters as follows;
- Chapter I is Literature Review which presents all related theoretical background that
precedes and necessitates the formation of my research: an overview on contrastive
analysis, a brief description of verbs, cognitive semantics and polysemy.
- Chapter II – Methodology – describes the research procedures that have been utilized
in the study.
- Chapter III – Data Analysis – contains the core part of the study. It presents, analyzes
and synthesizes data collected and gives some findings and discussions.
The Conclusion part summarizes the major findings and implications about the polysemy of
the verbs „open‟ and „close‟ within cognitive semantic theoretical framework and suggestions

This part consists of three chapters. A review of all related theoretical foundation is done in
the first chapter, serving as a background for the study to be carried out in the rest of the part. 10
Particularly, the first chapter displays my understanding of contrastive analysis, verbs,
cognitive linguistics, cognitive semantics and polysemy. A theoretical framework based on
the methodological and theoretical principles of cognitive linguistics and semantics is
established in this chapter.
Chapter 2 – Methodology – describes the methods and the research procedures of the current
study. Particularly, it describes the data collection in which considerations in selecting
materials and the sources of data are presented. Additionally, a description of data analysis is
also presented.
Chapter 3 – Data Analysis– contains the core part of the study. It presents, analyzes and
synthesizes data collected. This chapter applies the theoretical framework that is established
in chapter 2 into analyzing the meanings of the two verbs open/close and find out
Vietnamese equivalents of these English verbs.


analysis is the systematic study of a pair or more of languages (usually two languages), with
a view to identifying their structural differences and similarities. This term was used
extensively in the field of Second Language Acquisition in the 1960s and early 1970s.
Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (CAH), which was originally formulated in Lado's
Linguistics Across Cultures (1957), is the extension of the notion of CA attributed the ability
to predict errors to a CA of two languages, a predictability that practitioners associated with
the degree of similarity between the two systems.
Along this line, Richard, J.C et al (1992) defined CA as “the comparison of the linguistic
systems of two languages, for example the sound system or the grammatical system,‖
The Contrastive Analysis emphasizes on the influence of the mother tongue in learning a
second language in phonological, morphological and syntactic levels. Contrastive Analysis is
not merely relevant for second language teaching and learning but it can also make useful
contributions to machine translating and linguistics typology. It is relevant to the designing of 12
teaching materials for use in all age groups. Some guiding principles for contrastive study
were suggested by Chaturvedi (1973):
(1) To analyze the mother tongue and the target language independently and
completely.
(2) To compare the two languages item-wise-item at all levels of their structure.
(3) To arrive at the categories of similar features, partially similar features and
dissimilar features for the target language.
(4) To arrive at principles of text preparation, test framing and target language
teaching in general.
On the other hand, it is necessary to refer to the term „contrastive rhetoric‟ in this section. It
is the study of the differences that occur between the discourses of different languages and
cultures as reflected in foreign students' writing. Contrastive rhetoric research began in the
1960s, started by the American applied linguist Robert Kaplan. Then, Ulla Connor states in
his book ‗Cross-cultural aspects of second language writing‘(1996) that contrastive rhetoric

consisting of a head verb and participants involved is the most significant grammatical unit,
because it functions as the representation of process. The most powerful conception of
reality is that it consists of "goings-on": of doing, happening, feeling, being. The basic
semantic framework for the representation of process consists potentially of three
components: the process itself, participants (Roles) in the process, circumstances associated
with the process. The process types are given by Halliday in the following frame:

On the other hand, Douglas Biber and his numerous colleagues wrote in their book Grammar
of Spoken and Written English (2007) that verbs are classified into three major classes
according to their roles as main verbs and auxiliary verbs. They are lexical verbs (also called
full verbs, e.g. open, close), primary verbs (be, have, do), and modal verbs (e.g. can, will,
might). Lexical verbs comprise an open class of words that function only as main verbs; the
three primary verbs can function as either main verbs or auxiliary verbs; and modal verbs can
function only as auxiliary verbs. In addition, verbs can be classified on the basis of their 14
semantic domains and valency patterns (copular, intransitive and transitive). This
classification shares the view with Quirk R. et al (1985).
2.2.2. Verbs in Vietnamese
Unlike the English verbs, whose inflections serve to denote number, person, gender, voice,
mood, and tense, verbs in Vietnamese do not have the concord with other parts of speech. A
verb is a syntactic word which denotes an action, a progress, a state or a quality. According
to Le Bien (1999:70), and Diep Quang Ban (2001:21), in terms of general meaning, verbs are
substantives referring to progress, forms of movements. They may be activities (1), states (2),
changing progresses (3), and movements (4), etc. as follow:
(1) Cô ấy đọc sách./ Anh ấy viết thư.
(2) Tôi yêu Hà Nội./ Nó nhớ nhà./ Em hiểu bác mà.
(3) GS Ngô Bảo Châu đã trở thành nhà toán học nổi tiếng thế giới.
(4) Bạn tôi đi thành phố Hồ Chí Minh rồi.

provide accounts of language that mesh well with current understandings of the human mind.
Workers in this field seek to understand language as it relates to models of human thinking,
interpreting language in light of the social and psychological contexts in which it is generated
and understood. It emerged in the late seventies and early eighties, especially through the
work of George Lakoff, one of the founders of Generative Semantics, and Ronald
Langacker, also an ex-practitioner of Generative Linguistics. As a consequence, this new
paradigm could be seen as a reaction against the dominant generative paradigm which
pursues an autonomous view of language (Ruiz de Mendoza, 1997).
Cognitive linguistics has not developed fully-formed from a single source. It is a
concatenation of concepts proposed, tested, and tempered by a variety of researchers. The
people whose work has been most influential in the creation of this framework include
Brugman, Casad, Croft, Gilles Fauconnier, Mark Johnson, George Lakoff, Ronald
Langacker, Lindner, Eve Sweetser, Leonard Talmy, Tuggy, and Mark Turner.
Although Cognitive Linguistics as a general framework emerged in the late seventies, it is
important to bear in mind that it is not a totally homogeneous framework. Ungerer and
Schmid (1996) distinguish three main approaches: the Experiental view, the Prominence
view and the Attentional view of language. The „Experiental view‟ focuses on what might be
going on in the minds of speakers when they produce and understand words and sentences.
The „Prominence view‟ is based on concepts of profiling and figure/ground segregation, a
phenomenon first introduced by the Danish gestalt psychologist Rubin. The prominence
principle explains why, when we look at an object in our environment, we single it out as a
perceptually prominent figure standing out from the background. The „Attentional view‟
assumes that what we actually express reflects those parts of an event which attract our
attention. A main concept in this approach is Fillmore‟s (1975) notion of „frame‟, i.e. an
assemblage of the knowledge we have about a certain situation. 16
Despite these three different viewpoints in Cognitive Linguistics, the majority of linguists
working within this paradigm share the view that linguistic knowledge is part of general


17
with investigating linguistic semantics. It states that linguistic meanings come from our mind
or rather as in the prime slogan for cognitive semantics: Meanings are in the head
(Gardenfor, 1994). Cognitive semantics also sees linguistic meaning as a manifestation of
conceptual structure: the nature and organization of mental representation in all its richness
and diversity, and this is what makes it a distinctive approach to linguistic meaning (Vyvyan
Evans and Melanie Green, 2006:156). Leonard Talmy, one of the original pioneers of
cognitive linguistics in the 1970s, describes cognitive semantics as follows: „Research on
cognitive semantics is research on conceptual content and its organization in language‟
(Talmy, 2004:4). Cognitive semantics, like the larger enterprise of cognitive linguistics of
which it is a part, is not a single unified framework. Though those researchers identify
themselves as cognitive semanticists, there are still a number of principles that collectively
characterize a cognitive semantics approach. The principles that the study is based on for its
argument and discussion will be briefly presented in the following section.
3.4.2. Guiding principles of cognitive semantics
Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green identify four guiding principles that collectively
characterize the collection of approaches that fall within cognitive semantics in their book,
Cognitive Linguistics: An Introduction (2006:157) namely i) Conceptual structure is
embodied (the „embodied cognition thesis‟); ii) Semantic structure is conceptual structure;
iii) Meaning representation is encyclopaedic; iv) Meaning construction is conceptualization.
“Cognitive semanticists set out to explore the nature of human interaction with and
awareness of the external world, and to build a theory of conceptual structure that is
consonant with the ways in which we experience the world” (Vyvyan Evans and Melanie
Green , 2006:157). The experience we have of the world is embodied. In other words, it is
structured in part by the nature of the bodies we have and by our neurological organization.
The nature of conceptual organization arises from bodily experience, so part of what makes
conceptual structure meaningful is the bodily experience with which it is associated. It is
clear that conceptual structure (the nature of human concepts is a consequence of the nature
of our embodiment and thus is embodied).

It follows from this view that meaning is a process rather than a discrete „thing‟ that can be
„packaged‟ by language (Evan et al., 2006:162).
3.5. POLYSEMY
3.5.1. The traditional treatment of polysemy
The term „polysemy‟ is derived from the Greek poly- meaning „many‟ and sem meaning
„sense‟ or „meaning‟. Traditionally, polysemy has been defined as the case when “a lexical
item … has a range of different meanings” (Crystal 1991: 267). This definition could seem to
be very simple and straightforward. It referred to a lexical relation where a single linguistic
form (i.e. a single phonological word from belonging to a single lexical category, i.e. word
class, say either N or V) has different senses that are related to each other by means of 19
regular shifts or extensions from the basic meaning (Allen 1986:147, De Stadler 1989:61-62,
Taylor 1991: 99). Lyons (1977:550) states the following features of lexical polysemy in the
form of criteria:
(a) There must be a clear derived sense relation between the polysemic
senses of a word
(b) The polysemic senses of a word must be shown to be etymologically
related to the same original source word.
(c) Lexical polysemy is a sense relation within a particular syntactic
category, i.e. lexical polysemy does not cut across syntactic word class
boundaries.
More recently, Taylor (1991:101-102) applied traditional semantic tests (or criteria) which
were more typically used to distinguish between vagueness and ambiguity, to differentiate
between monosemy and polysemy (cf. also Geeraerts, 1989; Gouws, 1989). According to
Taylor, a word is monosemous (i.e. it has only one sense) if it is vague, and it is polysemous
(i.e. it has more than one sense) if it is ambiguous. However, these definitions and linguistic
tests are problematic in some ways such as methodological problems, conceptual confusion,
etc. It is clear that the tests that are meant to distinguish polysemy as a lexical property of a

polysemy was placed center-stage again. This had as a natural consequence a remarkable
increase in the number and variety of studies on polysemy. Polysemy has been one of the
central research agendas in the field of cognitive semantics.
Why is it that CL is a much more accommodating framework for the study of polysemy than
the earlier frameworks? Unlike the single meaning approach, CL allows the proliferation of
the number of senses of a word; in other words, particular referential or conceptual
differences in the uses of a word are allowed to make up different polysemous senses.
There have been multiple lines of research that have sought to investigate the intra-lexical
structures of polysemous words such as over (Brugman, 1981; Dewell, 1994; Lakoff, 1987;
Tyler and Evans, 2001, 2004), in, on (Beitel et al., 1997; Goddard, 2002; Herskovits, 1986)
and through (Hilferty, 1999). One of the key concepts in such analyses is image-schema
(Johnson, 1987; Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Lakoff, 1987), which can be defined as the
schematic structures which are generated through our perceptual interactions and bodily
movements in our physical environment that „make it possible for us to experience,
understand, and reason about our world‟ (Johnson, 1987: 19). Making use of image-schema,
researchers in cognitive semantics have sought to visualize the sense network of various
polysemous words (Brugman, 1988; Dewell, 1994; Hilferty, 1999; Lakoff, 1987). There are
two major approaches to polysemy, the lexical network approach (Lakoff, 1987; Taylor,
1988; Tyler and Evans, 2001, 2004) and the core-schema approach (Dewell, 1994; Tanaka,
1987a, 1987b, 1990). In the lexical network approach, various senses of a given polysemous
word are seen to form a network or „radial category‟ (Lakoff, 1987), in which metaphorical
senses are derived from the central prototype. The core-schema approach, on the other hand, 21
suggests that the various senses can be derived from a single core schema which serves as a
base from which different senses derive as a result of cognitive operations such as
focalization, vantage point shift (Langacker, 1987) and image-schema transformations
(Gibbs and Colston, 1995; Kreitzer, 1997; Lakoff, 1987).
3.5.3. Summary

three following questions:
(1) From a cognitive semantic perspective, what meanings do the English verbs
‗open/close‘ have? How are they variedly used in this language?
(2) What are potential Vietnamese equivalents of the English verbs ‗open/close‘ in
various senses?
(3) How are these verbs similar and different between English and Vietnamese in the
light of cognitive semantics?
2.2. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHOD
This study is based on the theory of cognitive linguistics and cognitive semantics in
particular. This theory takes human experience as the motivation for what is meaningful in
the human mind; thought is not a manipulation of symbols but the application of cognitive
processes to conceptual structures. Meaning structures come not only from the direct
relationship with the external world but also from the nature of bodily and social experience
(how humans experience with the world) and from human capacity to project from some
aspects based on this experience to some abstract conceptual structures. Moreover, cognitive
semanticists have focused on the analysis of how different senses of a word are related to
each other although they have been aware that it is a non-trivial issue. Thus, in conducting
the study, a variety of different research methodological approaches were employed in order
to focus on the polysemy of the verbs open/close in English and their equivalents in
Vietnamese.
First of all, the descriptive method is applied in this study to present the theoretical
foundation which then is illustrated by examples with explanations and discussions and then
to reach conclusions by conductive reasoning.
Next, in order to answer the first research question, a theoretical framework which is based
on the methodological and theoretical principles of cognitive linguistics and semantics is
established. Then examples are analyzed based on this framework to help the researcher
come to conclusions. 23

24
As there are three kinds of data collected in the study, three groups of measurement
instruments were employed:
(i) For the collection of examples of the English verbs open/close, I made use of some
dictionaries such as: Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary, Dictionary of Modern English
Usage, Macmillan Dictionary and Thesaurus, English-Vietnamese Dictionary, Lac Viet
MTD9 MVA 2009 Dictionary, etc., and literary works like Pride and Prejudice (Jane
Austen), Eclipse (Stephenie Meyer), Twilight (Stephenie Meyer), etc.
(ii) Online-material: Thanks to useful websites such as google.com, yahoo.com,
en.wikipedia.org, etc., I could find a rich source of material that is useful for my study,
especially the part of literature review and data collection.
(iii) Some examples were constructed by the author from personal experience.
2.4. ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK
According to Burnes (1999), data analysis involves „the describing‘ and ‗explaining‘. In the
light of this view, the collected data from different sources as presented in 2.3 were put on
those two processes. Regard the two broad categories as specified by the first two research
questions, data were presented and then analyzed and synthesized in the framework of
cognitive semantics to provide evidences for the statements and assertions that are made
about the research insights and outcomes. It can be stated that, by and large, cognitive
semantic studies have traditionally been based on decontextualized data, collected and
analyzed by means of introspection. As a consequence, the findings may be empirically
problematic: not all fine-grained sense distinctions are necessarily supported by the data (cf.
Gries and Divjak, submitted).
Some significant theories and approaches best exemplify the four guiding principles in
cognitive semantics included image-schema theory, encyclopedic semantics approach,
categorization and Idealized Cognitive Models (ICMs) approach, cognitive lexical semantics
approach, conceptual metaphor theory, conceptual metonymy approach, Mental Spaces
theory, and conceptual blending theory. In this paper, some of them are applied: Cognitive
lexical semantics, encyclopedic semantics approach, categorization and Idealized Cognitive
Models (ICMs) approach.


CHAPTER 3: DATA ANALYSIS
26
In this chapter, I analyze the different meanings that the two verbs open/close can convey in
the two different languages under investigation: English and Vietnamese. The organization
of this chapter is as follows: Section 3.1 focuses on the prototypical physical meanings and
the different non-prototypical extended meanings of these two verbs from the point of view
of cognitive semantics. Section 3.2 offers an account of Vietnamese equivalents that these
verbs can convey from a cross-linguistic point of view. Section 3.3 describes the similarities
and differences of these two verbs between English and Vietnamese. Section 3.4 summarizes
the results from previous sections.
3.1. THE POLYSEMY OF OPEN/CLOSE IN ENGLISH
3.1.1. Prototypical and non-prototypical meanings of ‘open/close’
A word is understood as polysemous if all its multiple meanings are systematically related.
The relation between the different polysemous senses of a word is not whimsical and
random, but motivated. This motivation finds its grounds in our understanding and bodily
experience of the world in which we live. A lexical item is not generally polysemous in itself.
It needs the help of the semantic content of other lexical items in order to obtain those
polysemous senses.
In this section, the different meanings of „open/close‟ in general as well as its synonyms are
discussed in the light of cognitive semantics. According to Oxford Advanced Learners
Dictionary, Dictionary of Modern English Usage (Henry Fowler, Oxford University Press),
Macmillan Dictionary and Thesaurus, Lac Viet MTD9 MVA 2009 Dictionary, English-
Vietnamese Dictionary, Wikipedia, and some other dictionaries, the English verbs „open‟ and
„close‟ have some physical and extended meanings as follows:
3.1.1.1 .Physical meanings of ‘open’ and ‘close’
3.1.1.1.1. Physical meanings of the verb ‘open’

(9) I opened my mouth to ask, but he spoke before I could. (Twilight, 2005:174)
(10) When I opened my eyes in the morning, something was different. (Twilight,
2005:27)
(11) His hand closed for a brief second, his fingers contracting gently, and then it
opened again. (Eclipse, 2007:258)
3.1.1.1.2. Physical meanings of the verb ‘close’
The first physical meaning of close is expressed in (12), (13), (14) and (15) as „to move to
cover an open area‟. If you close something, or if it closes, it moves to cover an open area:
(12) Close the door quietly behind you.
(13) Did the fridge door close completely?
(14) Her mouth closed after a moment and she said nothing.
(Macmillan Dictionary and Thesaurus) 28
(15) I didn't even have time to close my eyes. (Twilight, 2005:29)
A further development of this meaning is that ‗close‘ can also be understood as to move
together the parts of something that was spread to its full size as in (16):
(16) He was as much awake to the novelty of attention in that quarter as Elizabeth
herself could be, and unconsciously closed his book. (Pride and Prejudice, 45)
(17) Closing the umbrella, she ran for the car.
The second and also the last physical meaning of this verb is to put or have your fingers,
hands, or arms around someone or something in the phrasal verb to ‗close around/over‘:
(18) Her hand closed tightly over his. (Macmillan Dictionary and Thesaurus)
(19) She closed her hand tightly over his.
3.1.1.2. Non-prototypical extended meanings of ‘open/close’
In this section, I analyze the non-prototypical meanings of the two verbs ‗open/close‘ in
English. Non-prototypical meanings are all those extended meanings, both physical and
metaphorical, that these verbs can convey apart from the central prototypical meaning.
Traditionally, these extended meanings are mentioned in terms of metaphoric and metonymic