MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING
HANOI OPEN UNVERSITY

M.A. THESIS

SYNTACTIC FEATURES OF ENGLISH NOUN
PHRASES WITH REFERENCE TO THEIR
VIETNAMESE EQUIVALENTS
(ĐẶC ĐIỂM CÚ PHÁP CỦA CỤM DANH TỪ TIẾNG ANH
TRONG LIÊN HỆ TƯƠNG ĐƯƠNG VỚI TIẾNG VIỆT)

TRẦN THỊ MAI HƯƠNG

Hanoi, 2016

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Front hard cover
Back hard cover

TRẦN THỊ MAI HƯƠNG

ENGLISH LANGUAGE

(2014 – 2016)

②


MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING

Hanoi, 2016

Trần Thị Mai Hương

Approved by
SUPERVISOR

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Phan Văn Quế
Date:……………………

i


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This thesis could not have been completed without the help and
support from a number of people.
First and foremost, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Phan Van Que , my supervisor, who has patiently and
constantly supported me through the stages of the study, and whose
stimulating ideas, expertise, and suggestions have inspired me greatly
through my growth as an academic researcher.
A special word of thanks goes to all my lecturers at the Faculty of
Graduate Studies at Hanoi Open University for their useful lectures,
supports, encouragement and for inspiring me the love for English teaching
and doing scientific research.
Besides, the study could not have been prepared without the support
of the lecturers and students of tourism and foreign language department of
Sao Do university and many others, without whose support and
encouragement it would never have been possible for me to have this thesis
accomplished.


Co:

Object complement

Cprep:

Prepositional complement

Cadj:

Adjectival complement

App:

Appositive

A:

Adverbial

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LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES
Table 3.1. Information of the research participants

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Table 4.1: The learners’ acquisition levels on the use of article in

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Abstract

Iii

List of abbreviations

Iv

List of tables and figures

V

Chapter 1: INTRODUCTION

1

1.1.

Rationale for the research

1

1.2.

Aims of the research

2


5

Review of previous studies

2.1.1. Previous studies oversea

5

2.1.2. Previous studies in Vietnam

6

2.2.

7

Review of theoretical background

2.2.1. Noun phrases in English

7

2.2.2. Noun phrases in Vietnamese

10

Chapter 3: METHODOLOGY

13


15
vi


3.2.2. Data collection techniques

16

3.2.3. Data analysis technique

17

3.3.

18

Summary

Chapter 4: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION
4.1.

English noun phrases

19
19

4.1.1. Structure of English noun phrases

19



52

4.4.

54

Implications in teaching and translating noun phrases

4.4.1. Noun phrases from some chapters of “Pride and Prejudice” 54
by Jane Austen and the translated version
4.4.2. Results of the survey

66

4.4.3. Mistakes of Vietnamese students when learning English

68

noun phrases
4.4.4. Suggestions for teaching and translating noun phrases

70

Chapter 5: CONCLUSION

73

5.1.


vii


Chapter 1
INTRODUCTION
1.1.

Rationale for the research
English is the most popular language in the world. It plays an important

role in our social-economic life of human beings. Indeed, in the minds of
many people, there is no longer an issue. They argue that English has
already become a world knowledge by virtue of the political and economic
progress made by English speaking nations in the past 200 years. It is now
the main language of books, newspapers, airports, international business and
academic conferences, science technology, medicine, diplomacy, sports,
international competition, pop music and advertising. In order to speed up
the country’s economy, and to improve living standards as soon as possible,
it is very necessary for scientists, technicians and engineers to learn and
acquire English so as to keep up date with the latest developments in
technology taking place in the world. Learning and teaching English,
reading with comprehension or translating material from English into
Vietnamese or vice versa, always create difficulties for learners particularly
because of the differences between English and Vietnamese.
There are differences in phonology, vocabulary and grammar. In order
to help learners acquire a better knowledge of English, it is of great
importance to predict difficulties arising from the differences between the
two languages and solve them. In English grammar, word combination in
phrase is considered to be one of the most difficult phenomena.
Among the five different types of phrases in English (namely noun


- Describing the syntactic features of English noun phrases with
reference to their Vietnamese equivalents.
- Finding out the similarities and differences about syntactic features
between English noun phrases and Vietnamese noun phrases.
- Giving out some suggestions for teaching and translating noun
phrases.

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1.4.

Scope of the research
Noun phrase is an important and complicated part of English

grammar in English. However, due to constraints as well as the framework
of a graduation thesis, it is impossible to touch all the differences and
similarities in syntactic features of noun phrases of all schools. In this
research, I only mention some common syntactic features of English noun
phrases from perspective of traditional grammar and Vietnamese noun
phrases and then find out the similarities and differences between noun
phrases in English and Vietnamese. The research is focused only on noun
phrases in some selected chapters rather than in the whole novel of the
source language text and the translated version. The sources of data are
typical written examples from the collected materials or extracts from
“Pride and Prejudice” in the source language text and its translated version.
1.5.

Significance of the research



Chapter 2
LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1.

Review of previous studies

2.1.1. Previous studies oversea
There were many works overseas related to noun phrase such as
Keizer, E. (2007). The English Noun Phrase: The Nature of Linguistic
Categorization, Studies in English Language (series). Cambridge:CUP .
Quirk, Greenbaum et al (1972) in the book “A comprehensive
grammar of the English language” studied the structure and syntactic
functions of English noun phrases.
Fromkin et al (1990) considers "a noun phrase could be an article
followed by a noun (the car,...). A noun phrase could also be made of a head
and a prepositional phrase as its modifier such as (a man in a uniform). A
noun phrase could also contain an adjective phrase as the modifier in the
head.”
According to Paul Robert (1964), "all sentences contain two main
parts, a noun phrase and a verb phrase".
There were also many other studies related to noun phrases such as
Xiao Li, (2010). Understanding the Semantic Structure of Noun Phrase
Queries. Microsoft Research. Association for Computational Linguistics;
Nulty, Paul (2007) Semantic classification of noun phrases. Optimization
Techniques; Programming Models; Dynamic Analysis or Lita Taylor, Claire
Grover, Ted Briscoe. The syntactic regularity of English noun phrases.
Department of Linguistics University of Lancaster.
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some similarities and differences between word order in English and
Vietnamese.
Moreover, the thesis of Nguyen Anh Thi (2007), Reflections on the
application of noun phrases in English – Vietnamese translation aimed at
finding out whether there is a correlation between the comprehension of
English noun phrases and the translation performance.
These previous works studied about some issues of noun phrases but
the research on the syntactic features of English noun phrase with reference
to their Vietnamese equivalents haven’t been paid much attention. So I
decide to do this research.
2.2.

Review of theoretical background

2.2.1. Noun phrases in English
2.2.1.1. Definitions of English noun phrases
By traditional, grammar is usually used to refer to the grammar
written by classical Greek scholars, the Roman grammars largely derived
from the Greek tradition, the speculative work of the medieval and the
prescriptive approach in the 18th century. The noun phrase can be defined in
many ways; however, most scholar of traditional grammar agree on the
following definition which is quoted from A comprehensive grammar of the
English language (Quirk and Greenbaum, 1972): “The noun phrase
typically functions as subject, object, complement of the sentence and
complement of the preposition phrase”. It can be inferred from the
definition that the functions of noun phrases bring about the recognition of
noun phrase. For example:
Sarah has written fifty books for children.


we use in a sentence as subject, direct, indirect object, complement or as
prepositional complement. In addition to, In Quirk and Greenbaum’
viewpoint (1973), the complex noun phrases consist of three components:
the head, the premodification, and the postmodification.
We see that there are many different attitudes about noun phrases
because this is studied from different aspects like: the function of noun
phrases, role of noun phrases, or components of noun phrases. However, all
definitions include some common features such as components and their
relationships of noun phrases.
2.2.1.2. Structure of English noun phrases
Basic noun phrases
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Structurally speaking, in the first place, basic noun phrases consists
of pronouns, numerals or nouns with articles (indefinite, definite or zero) or
nouns with other closed – system items that occur before the noun head
including pre – determiners, determiners and post – determiners. Many
linguists argue that pronouns are a special class of noun. According to
Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, and Svartvik (1972), the implication of the name
as pronouns is that they replace nouns or rather whole noun phrases, since
they cannot normally occur with determiners. For example, personal
pronouns have two sets of case forms: subjective and objective: “I” / “me”,
“We” / “us”, … Subjective personal pronouns functions as subject and
sometimes as subject complement while objective personal pronouns as
object, prepositional complement and sometimes as subject complement.
These can be illustrated by;
He is happy.
I saw him at the station.
Like personal pronouns, other types of pronouns including reflexive,

the head. These post – modifiers are mainly realized by prepositional
phrases, finite clause (or relative clauses), non finite clauses, adjective
phrases, noun phrases or adverbial phrases:
2.2.2.

Noun phrases in Vietnamese

2.2.2.1. Definitions of Vietnamese noun phrases
Noun phrases in Vietnamese, like that of English, play a very
important role in sentences. As was stated earlier, in European languages,
especially those inflectional languages, there is a system of grammatical
categories in nouns, such as number, gender, and case. These are marked by
suffixes. English, although being a little inflectional language, has this
grammatical phenomenon, especially in number. Vietnamese is an un –
inflectional and isolating language and the word order in the language is of
special importance, relating to the word order in the noun phrase.
Vietnamese linguist focus on the combination between Vietnamese nouns

10


and other modifications as well as the combination among modifications in
the relationship with nouns.
In Vietnamese, when a noun is used to perform some functions in a
sentence, some modification is often added to form a phrase. Such phrases
in which there is a noun acting as a head are called noun phrases.
To make more clearly, we give more definitions from Vietnamese
grammarians: According to Đỗ Thị Kim Liên: “A noun phrase is
combination of words in which the noun is a central element and it has one
or more subordinate elements around to supplement grammatical meanings

These noun phrases consist of three parts. In some cases, such phrases
can be seen to have only two parts:
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a. Those with premodification and the head
Phần đầu

Phần trung tâm

Premodification

Head

b. Those with the head and postmodification
Phần trung tâm

Phần cuối

Head

Postmodification

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Chapter 3
METHODOLOGY
3.1.


information, involves gathering mass of raw data from different powerful
sources. In the last phases, Quantitative Research is used to count and
classify features and construct statistical models and figures to explain what
is observed on syntactic features of noun phrases in English and
Vietnamese.
3.1.4. Principles/criteria for intended data collection and data analysis
3.1.4.1. Research participants
The 120 participants of this study were selected from second-year
learners (including males and females) at Tourism and Foreign language of
Red Star University. English is one of the compulsory subjects, but in fact a
certain numbers of learners are facing a big challenge in mastering English.
Therefore, those who were chosen for the investigation must be the
ones who have acquired certain English knowledge. They have already
finished two textbooks of Know How. They have basic sentence structures
and vocabulary. And they are required to complete some tasks dealing with
English noun phrases
Table 3.1: Information of the research participants
Gender of participants

Number of participants

Male

40

Female

80

To implement the survey, all the participant are required to complete

3.2.

Research methods

3.2.1. Major methods and supporting methods
3.2.1.1. Major methods
Descriptive research method and comparative method will be used in
the study. Firstly, the descriptive method is used in the first stage to give the
deep and detail description of syntactic features of English noun phrases
with reference to Vietnamese equivalents. Secondly, the comparative
method will be used to find out the similarities and differences between the
syntactic features of English noun phrases and Vietnamese noun phrases.
In this research method, survey questionnaires in form of a written
test is used as one of data collection methods to evaluate the participants’
ability in understanding English noun phrases and translating noun phrases
Then statistic method is applied to present quantitative descriptions in
manageable form to simplify large amounts of data in a sensible way.
3.2.1.2. Supporting methods
The analytical method is used to define elements to form an English
noun phrase and Vietnamese noun phrase. Moreover, this method also helps
to analyze syntactic features of English noun phrases with reference to
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