1
VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES

BÙI THỊ HUYỀN

QUALIFIERS IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE NOMINAL GROUPS:
A SYSTEMIC FUNCTIONAL COMPARISON

ĐỊNH NGỮ TRONG NHÓM DANH NGỮ ANH VIỆT: SO SÁNH THEO
QUAN ĐIỂM CHỨC NĂNG HỆ THỐNG M.A. THESIS Field: English Linguistics
Code: 60 22 15
HÀ NỘI – 2010 2

Acknowledgements i
Abstract ii
Table of contents iii
List of abbreviations v
Part 1: INTRODUCTION
1. Rationale 1
2. Research questions 2
3. Scope of the study 3
4. Significance of the study 3
5. Methods of the study 3
6. Design of the study 4
Part 2: DEVELOPMENT
Chapter 1: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
1.1. Schools of grammar 5
1.1.1. Traditional grammar 5
1.1.2. Systemic functional grammar 6
1.2. Basis syntactical notions
1.2.1. Words 10
1.2.2. Phrases 12
1.2.2.1. Traditional grammar 12
1.2.2.2. Functional grammar 14
1.2.3. Clauses 14
1.3. Nominal clauses
1.3.1. Traditional grammar 16
1.3.2. Functional grammar 19
1.4. Qualifiers 20
7


8
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

SFC
FG
S
V
O
C
A
Det / d
m
h
q
pro.
F
P
Prep.
RP
Cir.
Mat.
Par.
NG (s)
VG
Systemic functional grammar
Functional grammar
Subject
Verb
Object

were born so many that actually we do not know how many languages are still being used and
have existed up to now. Each language has its own history and appears in a specific period. It
reflects relatively clearly the society, the economy, the culture of a country. We have achieved
a lot of accomplishments in the field of biology, information technology, astronomy and other
fields, including linguistics. In the late 19
th
and the early years of the 20
th
century, English
colonies spread over many continents. Therefore, it is unavoidable that English has been a
dominant language since then. All most of newspapers, magazines, radios, TV broadcasts use
English as a main language. And we may not know when it was considered as an international
language in meetings, dialogues, conferences, etc.
In Vietnam, English is a compulsory subject in secondary, high schools and in
universities as well. Teachers of English worldwide in general, Vietnamese teachers of
English and learners in particular always think of how to teach and learn English with easier
ways. We teach and learn English to fulfill the language function of communication. It is
argued that when we say a person has learned a new language we mean that he has learned its
sound system (understanding speech and speaking well), learned to use its grammar, and
learned at least a limited vocabulary. Over the two centuries, English grammar has been
viewed by many scholars with different schools, such as: traditional grammar, structural
grammar, transformational generative grammar and systemic functional grammar. Each of
those schools has its own ideas, but in whatever way the term “grammar” is used to indicate
syntax in a narrow sense or morphonology and syntax or, in the broadest sense, to include
phonology, syntax and semantics, syntax is always the core of the grammar of a language.
While traditional, structural and generative grammars pay so much attention to the
formal aspect of language, functional grammar is one whose conceptual framework on which
the grammar is based is a functional rather than a formal one. 11
3. SCOPE OF THE STUDY
The research questions mentioned above have already implied that this study focuses
only on investigating qualifiers of English nominal groups. The investigation of this aspect of
English is conducted in comparison with that in Vietnamese to find out the similarities and
differences between them; and from these findings, the investigation will suggest some
implications for teaching and learning English in the Vietnamese context.

4. SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY
To have a deeper understanding of functional grammar in general and nominal groups
in particular, and to be aware of the mistakes made by Vietnamese students, the author
chooses qualifiers as the main study. The research could serve as a good consolidation of
systemic-functional grammar‟s positions about qualifiers in nominal groups, and the
representation of English and Vietnamese qualifiers based on functional grammar may be a
useful way for teaching and learning nominal groups. Besides this, the research also includes
some implications for communicative teaching and learning qualifiers in nominal groups.

5. METHODS OF THE STUDY
To achieve the aims above, the study uses descriptive, contrastive and qualitative
methods of language research.
Descriptive methods: Theoretical issues are studied. Then they are re-examined to
form the theoretical framework for the study. Real-life illustrations along with examples
extracted from different kinds of books are also exhibited comprehensively to constitute fully
the understanding of the theories and the realization of them.
Comparative methods: The English and Vietnamese qualifiers in nominal groups will
be made, which is inductive in nature. Its reliability and validity will be ensured by the
descriptive method. Qualifiers in English and Vietnamese nominal groups will be compared in
terms of position and meaning so as to search out the resembling and the distinctive features of

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Part 2: DEVELOPMENT

CHAPTER 1: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
1.1. Schools of grammar
“Within linguistics, „grammar‟ is normally used in a narrow technical sense to
distinguish it chiefly from phonology and semantics”
Palmer (1984)
“Grammar deals with language forms and meanings and the way they are
interconnected”
Jacobs (1995)
Grammar has been studied by many linguists and grammarians from different schools.
To have a better understanding of different schools of grammar, due to the limit of pace and
time, this chapter will present the two major schools of grammar (traditional and functional
grammars).
1.1.1. Traditional grammar
Traditional grammars is a theory of the structure of language based on ideas Western
societies inherited from ancient Greek and Roman sources. It is not a unified theory that
attempts to explain the structure of all languages with a unique set of concepts (as is the aim of
linguistics). There are different traditions for different languages, each with its own traditional
vocabulary and analysis. In the case of European languages, each of them represents an
adaptation of Latin grammar to a particular language. Developed in the eighteenth century,
traditional grammars bore the following characteristics which were summarized by Aitchison
(1991). First, the traditional grammars are prescriptive, logical rather than descriptive.

situation on our choice of language wording. Yet a change, for example, in the social role we
are playing or in whom we are talking to will typically prompt us to alter, sometimes quite
significantly, the actual form of words we use. Indeed, it is by the selection not just of lexical
items but also of grammatical structures that we are able to express different meanings. In this
way we can begin to point out the link between language wording, meaning expressed and
situational context. 15
The primary studies of grammar represented rules of grammar in terms of words in
sentences, with words serving functions as Subject, Predicate, Object and Adverbial, i.e., the
„grammar as rule‟ type of theory. Beside that, the theory takes over too much from the
European languages which started with Greek and Latin. What about non-European languages
such as Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean, etc.? Therefore, it allows us to see only a
small fragment of grammar. It is necessary to have a richer theory which can provide us with a
way of interpreting the overall organization of the grammar of a language as a system of
information. And systemic-functional theory was developed in work of Chinese. It takes the
resource perspective rather than the rule perspective; and it is designed to display the overall
system of grammar rather than only fragments.
Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) is a theory of language which is concerned with
describing language in terms of its semantic function in the social and cultural contexts within
which it is put to use by speakers. In this way it differs from the formal, syntactic approach of
traditional grammars. Eggins (1994) suggests that SFL is distinct amongst linguistic theories
as “it seeks to develop both a theory about social process and analytical methodology which
permits the detailed and systematic description of language patterns”.
Studied by many functional grammarians like Halliday (1985, 1994), Bloor (1994),
Eggins (1994), Thompson (1996), Hoang Van Van (2005) and many others, Systemic
Functional Grammar (SFG) or functional grammar (FG) tries to incorporate meaning,
function, context, and grammatical categories. Meanings are typically divided into three broad
areas, called metafunctions: the ideational, grammar for representing the world; the

generates all and only the grammatical sentences in a language?” Instead of trying to
determine all closed systems and listing all words of a language, Halliday's theory tries to
determine no closed system nor set of resources. In SFG, every system can be expanded with
new resources and a system is a "small set" of resources that is closer to the grammatical than
the lexical end of the lexicogrammatical continuum. This means that no grammatical system is
not expansible by the use of a new resource and, instead of postulating that a sentence is
grammatical or ungrammatical, SFG documents the relative frequencies of choices and
assumes these relative frequencies reflect the probability that each resource will be chosen.
Thus, SFG does not describe language as a finite rule system, but rather as a system realized 17
by instantiations which is continuously expanded by the very instantiations that realize it and
which is continuously reduced with the birth of newer generations and the death of older ones.
In the functional perspective, we should also see Halliday‟s idea on clause. He states
that “The clause is functional unit with a triple construction of meaning.” He uses the notions
of Theme, Subject and Actor for the three aspects of meaning of the English clause. The three
notions are commonly defined as psychological subject, grammatical subject and logical
subject, respectively, with the term “Subject” understood in the common sense. For example
Halliday (1985)
(a) The duke has given my aunt that teapot.
(b) My aunt has been given that teapot by the duke.
(c) That teapot the duke has given to my aunt.
The subjects in the three above clauses are “the duke”, “my aunt”, and “the duke”,
respectively according to the traditional grammar. In the functional view, we can see:
The duke
has given my aunt that teapot.
3 kinds of Subject (psychological, grammatical and logical)
contexts, common to all systemic linguists is an interest in language as social semiotic
Halliday (1978) - how people use language with each other in accomplishing everyday social
life. This interest leads systemic linguists to advance four main theoretical claims about
language:
- that language use is functional
- that its function is to make meanings
- that these meanings are influenced by the social and cultural context in which they
are exchanged
- that the process of using language is a semiotic process, a process of making mean-
ings by choosing.
These four points, that language use is functional, semantic, contextual and semiotic,
can be summarized by describing the systemic approach as a functional-semantic approach to
language. The purpose of this thesis is to use functional grammar as a tool to describe, analyse
and compare the Qualifiers in English and Vietnamese nominal groups. But before doing
these, it is necessary to look at the basic syntactic notions.
1.2. Basic syntactical notions
1.2.1. Words
The most tangible elements of a language are its words. Words are participants for the
study of language system rather than functions of language. The matter of words came from
the ancient with the distinguishing between nouns and verbs by Aristotle. A complete theory
of words appeared in the period of Alexandria (3
rd –
1st – centuries, BC).
According to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, a word is the smallest free form (an
item that may be uttered in isolocation with semantic or pragmatic content) in a language, in 19
contrast to a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning. A word may consist of only
one morpheme (e.g. wolf), but a single morpheme may not be able to exist as a free form (e.g.

belong. On the other hand, the word orange referring to a fruit occurs in contexts such as „This
ripe orange is tasty.
Or just a very simple definition, in the book of Lexical Functional Grammar, Falk
(2006) claimed that words are the “atoms” out of which syntactic structure is built. Syntactic
rules cannot create words or refer to the internal structures of words, and each terminal node
(or “leaf” of the tree) is a word. Falk (2006: 13).
It seems very hard to find a satisfactory definition of the notion “word”, some
criteria have been sought to clarify it and make it more convincing. Palmer‟s is a typical one.
He suggests three main approaches to define what a word is.
“The first is to see the word as a semantic unit, a unit of meaning; the second sees it
as a phonetic or phonological unit, one that is marked, if not by “spaces” or pauses, at least
by some features of the sounds of the language; the third attempts to establish the word by a
variety of linguistic procedures that are associated with the idea that the word is in some ways
an isolable and indivisible unit”.
As we have seen different definitions of word, we matter how argumentative it is,
word actually is the smallest syntactical element. Words can be classified more specifically in
diverse cases.
1.2.2 Phrases
1.2.2.1 Traditional grammar
Before giving more detailed about phrases, we just start this point with the definition
of phrases from the Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture (1998), which says
a phrase is “a group of words without a finite verb” or from the Longman Dictionary of
language teaching and applied linguistics (1992) gives a definition of a Phrase typically in
English. „Phrase is a group of words which form a grammatical unit. A phrase does not
contain a finite verb and does not have a subject – predicate structure‟. Actually, most
dictionaries give somewhat similar concepts of phrase.
Generally, a phrase involves a grouping of two or more words. They use “phrase” to
refer to a special kind of embedded sentence one without a finite verb. For examples, in the
sentences “I don‟t know where to do”, “where to go” is a noun phrase, not a noun clause.


…; indefinite pronouns: someone, something, ; possessive pronouns: yours, his, hers…;
demonstrative pronouns: this, that, these, those;
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1.2.2.2 Functional grammar
Many systemicists prefer the term 'group' to 'phrase'. Halliday (1994: 180) actually
distinguishes between 'group' and 'phrase': 'A phrase is different from a group in that, whereas
a group is an expansion of a word, a phrase is a contraction of a clause.' Against this
background he recognizes just one class of phrase, the prepositional phrase, which he
describes as consisting of 'a preposition plus a nominal group, for example “on the burning
deck” in which the preposition is seen as a minor verb, a minor predicator, having the nominal
group as its complement (Halliday 1994: 212).
In Syntax in functional grammar Morley (2000) gave some kinds of phrases, including
nominal phrase, adjective phrase, verb phrase, adverbial phrase, prepositional phrase,
subordinator phrase and genitive phrase. He preferred the term “nominal phrase” to nominal
group because he claimed that a nominal phrase may be a noun or a pronoun as its headword.
It also marks a commonality of terminology across units of word, phrase and clause rank, and
a commonality with the other core phrase labels, e.g. adjectival, verbal, adverbial, and
prepositional. Nominal phrases with noun headwords may typically be preceded and modified
(pre-headword modification or premodification) or determined by an article, a genitive phrase,
a pronoun, an adjective (adjectival phrase) or another noun (nominal phrase), and they may be
followed and qualified (post-headword modification or postmodification) by a prepositional
phrase or subordinate clause, or in certain cases an adjective or nominal phrase. Morley (2000:
54).
Some grammar books also give the same list of kinds of phrases like Morley‟s. We are
going back to phrase later in this chapter when we specifically deal with noun phrase, which is
directly interrelated to our problem in question “nominal clause”.
1.2.3 Clauses

non-finite clause (a clause whose V element is a non-finite clause), and verbless clause (a
clause containing no V element).
That the conception is defined by Halliday is clause as a functional unit with a triple
construction of meaning. In his explanation, a clause functions simultaneously (a) as the
representation of the phenomena of experience; (b) as the expression of speech function; and
(c) as the bearer of message, which is organized in the form of theme plus exposition In the 24
view of speech function, Halliday‟s “clause” has a two-part structure consisting of modal
element and propositional element.
Like a verb, a clause designates a process – that is, a relation tracked through timeb
Taylor (2002) gives the definition of clause as follows; a clause may be defined as a linguistic
structure that designates this kind of conceptually autonomous process, created through the
elaboration of the participants in a temporal relation. Taylor (2002: 413) he focuses more on
clause structure – its participants, the semantic role of the participants, and their syntactic
expression, in relation to the kinds of situations that clauses designate.
In whichever approach, traditional, functional or cognitive, a clause is combined
components of a sentence, i.e. it consists of five elements: S, V, O, C and A. And it has three
main types: adverbial clauses, adjective clauses and noun clauses. Adverbial clauses are to
modify the verb of the main clause or sometimes to become modifier of the entire sentence.
Adjective clauses are to modify a preceding noun or a pronoun. And noun clauses functions as
Subject, Subjective complement, Object of a verb, Object of a preposition and Appositive. In
this study, we are going to deal with noun clauses but under a more functional label “nominal
clauses”. More about nominal clauses will be mentioned in the next section.
1.3 Nominal clauses
1.3.1. Traditional grammar
The nominal clause or noun clause is a clause that functions as a noun or a noun
phrase. It may occur as a subject, object complement, in apposition or as a prepositional
complement as in the view of traditional grammar. Therefore, noun clauses perform eight

Do you know when the train should arrive?
Our dog eats whatever we put in his bowl.
Noun Clauses as Object Complements
The fourth grammatical function that noun clauses can perform is the object
complement. Object complements are defined as words, phrases, and clauses that directly
follow and describe the direct object. For example, the following italicized noun clauses
function as object complements:
Her grandfather considers his biggest mistake that he did not finish college.
The committee has announced the winner whoever wrote the essay on noun clauses.
I have often declared the problem that most students do not understand grammar. 26
Noun Clauses as Indirect Objects
The fifth grammatical function that noun clauses can perform is the indirect object.
Indirect objects are defined as words, phrases, and clauses that follow a ditransitive verb and
indicate to or for whom or what is action of the verb is performed. For example, the following
italicized noun clauses function as indirect objects:
The judge will give what you said some deliberation during her decision.
The group has given that most Americans do not support their cause little
consideration.
Noun Clauses as Prepositional Complements
The sixth grammatical function that noun clauses can perform is the prepositional
complement. Prepositional complements are defined as words, phrases, and clauses that
directly follow a preposition to complete the meaning of the prepositional phrase. For
example, the following italicized noun clauses function as prepositional complements:
Some people believe in whatever organized religion tells We have been
waiting for whoever will pick us up from the party.
My husband did not think about that I wanted some nice jewelry for my
birthday.

clause and the nominal –ing clause are similar to that – clause in function and semantics,
respectively.
1.3.2 Functional grammar
Nominal clauses (in traditional grammar known as noun clauses) are subordinate
clauses which usually play an integral role in relation to the superordinate clause. They are
called nominal clauses because they specify a concrete or abstract entity and typically could be
interrogated by the word What? (sometimes also Who?) or replaced in the sentence structure
by the pronoun it or that (or he/she). In this way they are seen as performing a 'nominal'
function. As mentioned above (in the part of nominal phrase), the label 'nominal clause' is
chosen in preference to 'noun clause' as a term which is more generalized and which captures
the fact that the nominal function is fulfilled both by a subordinate clause or a phrase, which
may itself be a single word (a noun or pronoun) (Morley, 2000: 63).
In Halliday‟s systemic-functional grammar (1985), we find an analysis of intraclausal
constituents in terms of groups and phrases (1985: 158). Groups are taken to be expansions of 28
words, that is, word complexes which have a certain logical structure (like head and modifier).
A phrase is the contraction of a clause, with no logical structure. Thus, in a prepositional
phrase the preposition is like a minor verb or predicator which has a nominal group as its
complement. To sum up, instead of using the term noun phrase as in traditional grammar), the
term nominal group is used in functional grammar to cover all word groups that can function
as participants in processes, including all what can be called noun phrase, participle phrase or
pronoun, and the term nominal group will be used in the next chapters.
1.4. Qualifiers
What of the element which follows the Thing? Halliday calls this element as Qualifier.
In other words, Qualifiers are those elements which are placed after the headword and are,
therefore, also determined by position. Which follows the Thing is either a phrase or a clause?
In certain, fairly limited circumstances in English this position and role may be filled by an
adjective, e.g. the secretary general, the princess royal, the president elect, the person