MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING
HANOI OPEN UNIVERSITY

BUI THI KIM ANH

A STUDY ON THE SEMANTIC FEATURES OF
ENGLISH COLLOCATIONS CONTAINING THE VERB
“MAKE” WITH REFERENCE TO THEIR
VIETNAMESE EQUIVALENTS
(NGHIÊN CỨU NHỮNG ĐẶC ĐIỂM NGỮ NGHĨA CỦA
QUÁN NGỮ CHỨA ĐỘNG TỪ “MAKE” CÙNG NGHĨA
TƯƠNG ĐƯƠNG TRONG TIẾNG VIỆT)

M.A. THESIS
Field: English Language
Code: 60220201

Hanoi, 2016

1


Front hard cover
Back hard cover

BUI THI KIM ANH

ENGLISH LINGUIAGE

2014 - 2016


degree of Master in English Language. Except where the reference is
indicated, no other person’s work has been used without due
acknowledgement in the text of the thesis.
Hanoi, 2016

Bui Thi Kim Anh

Approved by
SUPERVISOR

(Signature and full name)

Date:……………………
4


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For the accomplishment of this thesis, first of all, I am greatly
indebted to my supervisor, Dr. Nguyen Thi Van Dong, who has kindly
and patiently guided me throughout the process of the study. Her
insights, advice, support, and encouragement have made the process of
the study not only precious but also a meaningful one.
Besides, I would like to thank all my respectable lecturers for
teaching me all the courses that I have taken at Hanoi Open University.
I would also like to thank all my colleagues who made great
contribution to my research. Without their assistance and participation,
this study would not have been successful.
Finally, I am deeply grateful to my beloved parents, husband and
my children for their love and support which have enabled me to
overcome all the challenges during my study.


7


LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES
Table 2.1. Collocations vs idioms free word combinations.
Table 4.1. Semantic features of Make in English and Vietnamese.

8


TABLE OF CONTENTS
Certificate of originality
Acknowledgments
Abstract
List of abbreviations
List of tables and figures
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Certificate of originality
Acknowledgments
Abstract
List of abbreviations
List of tables and figures
Chapter1. INTRODUCTION............................................................ 11
1.1. Rationale for the study .................................................................. 11
1.2. Aims of the study .......................................................................... 13
1.3. Objectives of the
study……………………………………………..5
1.4. Scope of the study ......................................................................... 14
1.5. Significance of the study ............................................................... 14

4.1. Data results and analysis ............................................................... 39
4.2. Semantic Features of the Verb “Make” in English Collocations.... 44
4.2. Semantic Features of the Verb ‘Làm’ in Vietnamese Collocations 50
4.3. Similarities .................................................................................... 56
4.4. Differences.................................................................................... 57
Chapter 5. CONCLUSION ............................................................... 65
5.1. Summary of major findings........................................................... 65
5.2. Pedagogical implications of the study ........................................... 65
5.2.1. For EFL Learning in general ...................................................... 65
5.2.2. Implications for learning vocabulary .......................................... 66
5.2.2. For Translation from English to Vietnamese and Vice Versa ..... 68
5.3.Limitation of the study ................................................................... 69
5.4.Suggestion for further study ........................................................... 70
REFERENCES .................................................................................. 72

10


Chapter 1
INTRODUCTION
This chapter presents the background of the study, reasons for
choosing the topic, statements of the problem, objectives of the study,
significance of the study, and outline of the study.
1.1. Rationale for the study
Nowadays, English has become one of the most important
international languages in the world. The number of people who
communicate and use it as the first language has been increasing day by
day. British linguist Wilkins (1972:111) once stated “While without
grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be
conveyed”. This argument has been supported by many researchers in

focuses on the semantic features of English collocations containing the
verb ‘make’ with reference to their Vietnamese equivalents. We choose
the study the semantic features of the ‘make’ collocations because the
verb ‘make’ is one of the most commonly used verbs in English and
when it collocates with other words, Vietnamese learners often feel
confused, especially about meaning of the verb ‘make’ collocations.
Besides, a great number of teachers have unsuitable way of teaching
collocation due to the limited awareness of its importance, leading to the
limitation in using collocation of the students. Without the knowledge of
collocations, students are not bound to approach the native-like level of
proficiency in language. In fact, students have not paid appropriate
attention to learning collocations. The collocations with ‘make’ is very
popular in English, however, students still have difficulty in using them.
To solve this problem, learners should be fully aware of the importance
of collocations, raising the awareness of teaching and using collocations.
For these reasons, I decided to choose this as the theme for my
MA thesis. The study is so entitled “A study on the semantic features of

12


English collocations containing the verb “make” with reference to their
Vietnamese equivalents”.
1.2. Aims of the study
This study aims at investigating the semantic features of English
collocations verb “make” with reference to their Vietnamese
equivalents. This study is carried out to serve major purposes:
The study is aimed at:
+ Finding the semantic features of the ‘make’ collocations in
English and those of the verb ‘làm’ collocations in Vietnamese.

collocations of make will be later discussed through analyzing EnglishVietnamese examples in different context. It is better if English
collocations with more verbs are analyzed and totalized, contributing
considerably to English learning and teaching in Vietnam. This study,
therefore, suggests them to learn about English collocations with
different types of parts of speech and discover the rules to make use of
them. The effects will be vital to students and should be encouraged to
be applied at school as well as for self-learners of English.
1.5. Significance of the study
The study is carried out basically through the descriptive and
methods. The descriptive method is employed to give in depth and
detailed description semantic features of collocations of lexical verb
“make” in English. The work starts with a review of existing study
results on collocations to provide a better understanding of the topic. By
providing an innovative approach to learning English lexical terms, the
author expects to change how student learn English words as well as
how teachers change their traditional methods of teaching vocabulary.
This study’s implications are to deal with these issues in hope that will
help students overcome their troubles.

14


With the aim of investigating the semantic features of English
collocations verb “make” with reference to their Vietnamese
equivalents, it could be a considerable contribution to different groups:
Firstly, the result of the research is expected to give a positive
result for the readers so that they will have a deeper understanding of
collocations “make” found in this novel as well as enrich their
vocabulary and apply those collocations in their writing and speaking
activities. The verb ‘make’ and the verb ‘làm’ are highly frequently used

and the research methods used in implementing and developing the
study. This chapter focuses on research questions, research setting,
approaches to investigate the research problem, the principles,
techniques to collect and analyze data, etc.
Chapter IV: Findings and Discussion introduces the results of the
survey which semantic features of English collocations containing the
verb ‘make’ with reference to their Vietnamese equivalents. The
research implications for learning English as a foreign language can be
found as the last part of this chapter.
Chapter V: Conclusion provides concluding remarks. Summarizes
major findings of the study, points out the limitations and proposes some
suggestions for further research.

16


Chapter 2
LITERATURE REVIEW
The second chapter covers review of related literature. It contains
review of previous studies and review of the theoretical studies.
2.1. Review of the Previous Studies
There are some previous studies related to the analysis of
collocation expressions. The descriptions of the previous research
findings are as follows.
As students of other languages, Vietnamese students also meet
difficulties when acquiring English collocations. In a conference at the
University of Western Sydney, Trinh (1995) mentioned to collocation, in
particular English collocation, particularly those for whom English is
their second and weaker language. The results showed that there were
very few syntactic errors, and that the examiners probably have treated

university of economics and business administration. However, a
detailed investigation into the collocations of lexical verb “make” has
not been taken. There has neither been any works that gave the insights
to the comparison between English collocations and Vietnamese ones. In
the frame of an M.A. thesis, the author would like to contribute a very
minor investigation focusing on the collocation “Verb + noun” (lexical
collocation) with the verb “make” in order to facilitate students when
dealing with these combinations of words. Also, the Vietnamese
equivalents are given to compare and contrast.
Once again, the author has to repeat that it is true that little work
has been conducted towards MAKE and its collocations so far. Plus,
when it comes to studies about their Vietnamese equivalents, it is even
harder to find such topic-related work. It is also clear that MAKE studies
have not been analyzed systematically, as has been pointed out in the
previous paragraph. The author, as a result, makes an attempt to
investigate both syntactic and semantic features of English collocations
with the verb MAKE and their Vietnamese equivalents with regards to
18


methods, implications and findings in comparison with other earlier
studies as cited previously. Therefore, the researcher decided to conduct
a research to find out how many collocations containing the verb “make”
exactly found in the book, what types of collocation expressions, what
the dominant types of collocation used, and what kind of problems
existing in understanding collocation expression.
2.2. Review of theoretical background.
2.2.1. Semantic features.
Semantics (from Ancient Greek: σηµαντικός sēmantikós,"signific
ant") is the study of meaning - in language, programming languages,

of meaning of words. This view is also shared by Cornelius Puschmann:
“Semantic feature analysis allows us to decompose words into bundles
of attributes” and “semantic features can be used to describe differences

19


between antonyms, superordinates and their hyponyms, and near
synonyms”.
E.g:
GRAPE

DOG

PRAIRIE DOG

ANIMATE

ANIMATE

ANIMAL

FRUIT

ANIMAL

RODENT

EDIBLE


being. The verb is the heart of a sentence - every sentence must have a
verb. Recognizing the verb is often the most important step in
understanding the meaning of a sentence. In the sentence ‘The dog bit
the man’, ‘bit’ is the verb and the word which shows the action of the
sentence. In the sentence ‘The man is sitting on a chair’, even though
the action doesn't show much activity, ‘sitting’ is the verb of the
sentence. In the sentence ‘She is a smart girl’, there is no action but a
20


state of being expressed by the verb ‘is’. The word ‘be’ is different from
other verbs in many ways but can still be thought of as a verb.
A verb always has a subject. E.g: in the sentence ‘John speaks
English’ John is the subject and speaks is the verb. In simple terms,
therefore, we can say that verbs are words that tell us what a subject
does or is; they describe:
- action (Ram plays football.)
- state (Anthony seems kind.)
According to Jack C. Richards et al (1992:398), in English, a word
is a verb when it satisfied these following criteria:
- Occur as part of the predicate of a sentence;
- Carries markers of grammatical categories such as tense, aspect,
person, number, and mood; and.
- Refers to an action or state.
Almost verbs in English change in form in accordance with tense,
mood, person, etc. for example: ‘Lower fares make it advantageous to
travel in winter.’; ‘I first made his acquaintance in 2006’; ‘Please stop
making that noise annoying’, etc.
In Vietnamese, verbs are one of the two fundamental parts of
speech like nouns. Verbs in Vietnamese also play an important role in

or phrase that relates it to phenomena in the real world or in a fictional
or possible world.
Connotative meaning or Connotation
In [13,p.57] Amvela and Jackson point out that “con notations
constitute additional properties of lexemes, e.g: poetic, slang, baby
language, biblical, casual, formal, humorous, legal, literary, rhetorical.”
2.2.4. Transference of Meaning
2.2.4.1. Metaphor
“Metaphor is the transference of meaning (name) from one object
to another, based on similarity between two objects.” [Nguyen Hoa]
2.2.4.2. Metonymy
22


Harris thinks that metonymy is another form of metaphor in which
the thing chosen for the metaphorical image is closely associated with
the subject with which it is to be compared.
2.2.5. English Collocations
2.2.5.1. Definition of Collocations
All languages have a large numbers of collocations, and linguists
have defined collocation in different ways.
There are various definitions of collocation. It will be noted that
forming a precise definition is difficult because different linguists have
different and conflicting definitions as what Bahns (1993:57) says:
“Regrettably, collocation is a term which is used and understood in
many different ways”. Most of the researchers who define collocation
agree that it is a lexical unit consisting of a cluster of two or three words.
Firth is widely regarded as the father of this term and we can see that
most of the definitions are paraphrases of Firth’s (1957:183) definition
that collocations are “words in habitual company”. This is a quite

speech (e.g. Baker, 1992; Benson and Ilson, 1997). Most of the
definitions are paraphrases of Firth (1957: 183) definition that
collocations are “words in habitual company”.
Most of the definitions have at their core some sense of the ‘cooccurrence’ of words. For instance, Colin Mclntosh et al (2009) gives a
general definition of collocation that collocation is the way words
combine in a language to produce natural-sounding speech and writing.
In short, collocations are not easily defined. From a teacher’s point of
view, it is necessary to have a more transparent and practical definition
for the students.
Although there are different ways to define what collocation is,
these definitions share a common view that a collocation is a word or

24


phrase used frequently in a combination but it is not easy for learners to
guess.
2.2.5.2. Types of collocations
There is general agreement in the literature on the division of
collocates into lexical or grammatical categories.
Lexical collocations
Lexical collocation is defined by Lewis & Hill (1998) as having
five

main

categories:

adjective/noun,