MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING
HANOI OPEN UNVERSITY

M.A. THESIS

A STUDY ON THE SYNTACTIC AND SEMANTIC
FEATURES OF THE ENGLISH VERBS “LOOK”, “SEE”,
“WATCH” WITH REFERENCE TO THEIR VIETNAMESE
EQUIVALENTS
(NGHIÊN CỨU ĐẶC ĐIỂM CÚ PHÁP VÀ NGỮ NGHĨA CỦA
CÁC ĐỘNG TỪ “LOOK”, “SEE”, “WATCH” TRONG TIẾNG
ANH VÀ SỰ TƯƠNG ĐƯƠNG TIẾNG VIỆT )

ĐỖ THỊ TOAN

Hanoi, 2016


MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING
HANOI OPEN UNVERSITY

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M.A. THESIS

A STUDY ON THE SYNTACTIC AND SEMANTIC
FEATURES OF THE ENGLISH VERBS “LOOK”, “SEE”,
“WATCH” WITH REFERENCE TO THEIR VIETNAMESE
EQUIVALENTS

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This thesis could not have been completed without the help and support
from a number of people. First of all, I’d like to express my sincere
appreciation to my supervisor Dr. Dang Ngoc Huong , who has patiently
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 many other lecturers, without whose
support and encouragement it would never have been possible for me to have
this thesis accomplished.
Last but not least, I am greatly indebted to my family, my lover for the
sacrifice they have devoted to the fulfillment of this academic work.

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ABSTRACT
Among the most popular English words being used currently worldwide,
the verbs look, see, watch have been , without a doubt , given great attention
by linguists so far. Therefore, an initial investigation into syntactic and
semantic features of the English verbs look, see, watch with reference to their
Vietnamese equivalents would provide valuable experience to further studies
of linguistics in general and teaching them for students at Nguyen Du
secondary school in particular.

Numerous examples have been analyzed



C

Complement

N

Noun

NP

Noun phrase

Prep.

Preposition

p.

Page

=

Equal to / the same as

sb

somebody

sth

2.2.2.1.Definition of a verb .......................................................................... 10
2.2.2.2.Collocation ..................................................................................... .11
2.2.2.3.Synonyms ......................................................................................... 13
2.2.2.4. Definition of perception verbs ....................................................... 13
2.2.2.5. Syntactic features of perception verbs in English ......................... 13
2.2.2.6. Semantic features of perception verbs in English ........................ 14
2.3.Summary ................................................................................................ 15
Chapter 3. METHODOLOGY.......................................................................... 16
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3.1.Research-governing orientations ........................................................... 16
3.1.1.Research questions .............................................................................. 16
3.1.2. Research setting ................................................................................. 16
3.1.3.Research approach .............................................................................. 17
3.1.4.Principles for intended data collection and data analysis ................... 17
3.2.Research methods. ................................................................................. 18
3.2.1. Major methods vs. supporting methods ............................................. 18
3.2.2.Data Collection techniques ................................................................. 19
3.3.Summary ................................................................................................ 19
Chapter 4.FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION ..................................................... 20
4.1.Syntactic and semantic features of the English verbs Look, See, Watch.... 20
4.1.1.Syntactic features of the English verbs Look, See, Watch ................. 20
4.1.1.1.Syntactic features of the verb “look” ........................................... 20
4.1.2. Semantic features of English verbs look, see, watch ........................ 28
4.1.2.1. Semantic features of the verb “look” ............................................. 28
4.1.2.2. Semantic features of the verb “see” ............................................... 29
4.1.2.3. Semantic features of the verb “watch” .......................................... 32
4.2.The English verbs look , see and watch and their Vietnamese
equivalents ................................................................................................... 33

INTRODUCTION
1.1. Rationale for the research
Vocabulary in general plays an important role in any language as we
cannot communicate without words. British linguist Wilkins (1972:111) once
stated “without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed”. There is a common
assumption that the more words a learner knows, the larger the learner’s
vocabulary knowledge is. However, words are not used alone and separately
but go with each other and depend on each other. Words are combined into
phrases. There are free phrases and fixed phrases. The latter often confuse
learners because there are not any fixed rules for all the combinations. Englishas-a-second-language learners often have difficulties treating fixed phrases in
their learning process. That is why many learners cannot communicate fluently
although they know a lot of words. Therefore, the possible combinations of
words or collocations have to be taken into consideration.
Among verbs of English, we find that the verbs look, see, watch are
quite frequently used. These verbs can occur in different syntactic patterns
that reflect various meanings in real-life communication. They can occur in the
same syntactic patterns, but may have different meanings depending on the
situation in which they are used.
As a teacher of English at Nguyen Du secondary school, I found that my
learners have faced many problems when they use this group of verbs. They
often feel confused to choose the right verb and make errors in using them.
Therefore, I have carried out a study to find out how to use these verbs
accurately and correctly from the analysis of their syntactic and semantic
features with reference to their equivalents in Vietnamese.
That is why the subject : “A study on the syntactic and semantic
features of the English verbs “look”, “see”, “watch” with reference to their
Vietnamese equivalents” is chosen to study for the thesis. We hope to
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1.4. Scope of the research
*Academic scope
The study focuses on studying the syntactic and semantic features of
English verbs look, see, watch and their equivalents in Vietnamese so as to
make crucial contributions to the field of linguistics and improve the efficiency
of teaching English verbs for students in Nguyen Du secondary school. The
findings hopefully would bring out various suggestions for teachers and
researchers to conduct further studies related to English collocations with the
verbs look, see, watch as well as advance teaching effectiveness of
collocations. Due to the limited time as well as the scope of the study, the
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author focuses on the syntactic and semantic features of the English verbs
look, see, watch with their Vietnamese equivalents only. That means phrasal
verbs and idioms of these English verbs are excluded in the study. Such
approach definitely helps students efficiently expand their lexical items as
students are exposed to a new look at how words are frequently used in reality,
not purely words’ definition without notes for practical ways of using them. It
is better if English collocations with more verbs are analyzed and totalized,
contributing considerably to English learning and teaching in Vietnam.
*Social scope
The applications of this work will, hopefully, contribute greatly to find
out appropriate methods to teaching English verbs in Vietnam and make
changes how Vietnamese learners of English not only in their study at school
as a compulsory subject but also in their daily use of English as a foreign
language. As mentioned previously, regarding English lexical terms, students
often learn English words’ definitions separately with their actual uses. In fact,
teachers and students often make their own examples without collecting and
analyzing examples of collocations indicating how native speakers combine

Practical significance:
The author hopes that this study ‘s findings and conclusion would
make great contributions to raise the importance of studying English verbs
look, see, watch with reference to their Vietnamese equivalents. First of all,
when students study about collocations, they might learn them by heart easily,
however, the main problem will lie in applications of these words in
appropriate contexts. Therefore, learning about the syntactic and semantic
features of these verbs is the beginning of the whole process. The main step is
to understand comprehensively how they are applied in diverse situations and
students can only do this by analyzing examples made by native speakers, not
their own. This research offers them a method to do this. Secondly, regarding
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translation, students will have problems with understand the meanings if they
learn the words’ definitions separately with its locations and meanings. This
study’s implications are to deal with these issues in hope that will help students
overcome their troubles. Findings of this study will provide information that
can help learners and translators gain an insight into how the speech act verbs
with

look, see and watch can be employed in discourse in English by

Vietnamese learners and translators.
1.6.Structural organization of the thesis
This thesis is organized into five chapters.
Chapter 1 – Introduction – gives a brief overview of the research with
the rationale for choosing the topic of the research, aims, objectives, scope,
significance of the thesis and structural organization of the thesis.
Chapter 2 – Literature review – presents the previous studies relating

and Informatics, Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (2003); Dictionary of
Contemporary English (2003) in which mentioned about verbs: look, see,
watch;R.J Rees (1973: p.1-2): studied the broad sense and narrow sense of
these verbs. In Vietnam, the linguist Nguyen Hoa has made contributions to
the study of discourse analysis in An Introduction to Semantic Analysis, Hanoi
National University publication and Professor Tran Huu Manh (2008)
analyzed

the fundamentals of English traditional syntax, Hanoi National

University publication.
Some studies of Vietnamese researchers that the author has found so
far tend to make comparisons between ways of using some popular structures
with the verbs they chose. They also listed grammatical structures and
provided a wide range of examples and Vietnamese translated versions in
order to help other linguists to obtain the examples’ meanings more broadly.
Thanks to this, when these authors presented their conclusion, their findings
can be viewed on a more comprehensive scale.
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First of all, in terms of collocations, Lan (2010) investigated deeply
into the lexical verb DO as she still saw greater opportunities to open more
pages about the analyses of collocations despite various studies came
previously.
Lan pointed out how Vietnamese learners of English and examiners
paid their attention to the differences between syntactic and grammatical errors
while acquiring English collocations, figuring out they almost consider these
notions one type of error.
Secondly, while uncovering the dissimilarities between the usages of

2.2.1.1. Theory of syntax
In the past, syntactic clues have sometimes been utilized in
lexicography as an aid to establishing polysemy. In the theoretically oriented
linguistic literature, too, the claim had often been made that a difference in
meaning (Diixon, 1985). In the present work, however, a stronger claim has
been tried to explore: that a syntactic similarity is likely to reflect a similarity
in meaning, so that shared syntactic patterns are likely to reflect shared
semantic components. To the extent to which this claim is validated, shared
syntactic properties can be seen as evidence for postulated semantic structure.
Regarding how syntax is defined, it is clear that syntax is the study of
structure of language. In other words, its main targets are said to be the set of
rules, principles, and processes that govern the structure of sentences in a given
language. For this reason, the goal of many syntacticians is to discover the
syntactic rules common to all languages. They are to dictate how words from
different parts of speech are put together to convey a complete thought.
It is also said that Syntax is a form of grammar and it is concerned
primarily with word order in a sentence and with the agreement of words when
they are used simultaneously. It is also true that every language has developed
a specific mechanism that is similar to syntax to make a boundless number of
sentences. This is a common feature that can be witnessed in all languages.
2.2.1.2. Theory of semantics
Semantics is a branch of linguistics, which deals with meaning or the
content of communication. According to Hurford and Heasley (1983:1),
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semantics is the study of meaning in language. Language is a means of
communication, and people use language to communicate with others by
making conversations, giving information, and other things to make social
relationship. Human beings have been given the capacity to talk, to

a sub-field studies how speakers convey meaningful messages or receive and
understand these meanings. The sub-field is Semantics which is the study of
meanings in language. In other words, linguists are to find an answer for the
question of how language is organized to be meaningful. Since humans cannot
see meanings, it is the most abstract level of linguistic analysis.
Additionally, there is one idea that can be regarded as the most
important subject in contemporary semantics, pointing out that meaningful
units could combine with each other systematically to form larger meaningful
units and that understanding sentences is an appropriate method to work out
these combinations. Researchers, therefore, are to look for general rules to
indicate the relationships between forms or arrangements of words in sentences
and meaning. It is not an easy job as these relationships are often very
complex.
2.2.2. Theoretical Background
2.2.2.1.Definition of a verb
As has already been mentioned, verbs are very important constituents
of sentences. Because of the complexity of the verbal characteristics and also
because of the existence of an extensive number of publications dealing with
their characteristics in great depth, this part of the thesis does not, by any
means, intend to give a comprehensive description of verbal characteristics and
behavior of verbs.
The opening short definition of a verb from Longman English
Grammar states that “a verb is a word (run) or a phrase (run out of) which
expresses the existence of a state (love), seem) or the doing of an action (take,
play) (Alexander 1998, 159). A very general division of verbs is provided by
Quirk et al. (1985), who divide verbs as a class of words into three principal
categories. They classify them according to their function within the verb
phrase and label them full or lexical verbs such as leave, primary verbs
consisting of be, have and do, and modal auxiliary verbs such as will, might,
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words which are used in lexical cohesion of texts and contained a cohesive
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force upon pairs of words such as boy and girl. Later, collocation was
identified by Palmer(1981) as a succession of two or more words in which they
must be considered as an integral whole. The linguist said that piecing words
together should not be a proper method as each component part had its
individual meaning that should not be taken slightly. Another case is that of
Beson et al (1986) who divided collocation into two categories namely lexical
collocation and grammatical collocation. While the former consists of nouns,
adjectives, verbs and adverbs the later consists of a dominant word, which is
the same as a verb, a noun, or an adjective as a whole, and a preposition or
grammatical structure. After that, Kuo (2009) later suggested 7 types of
collocations based on the theory of Beson et al.
Last but not least, idioms somehow share a number of similarities with
collocations and free compounds in their order of words and it is also true that
idioms have their specific meanings, both literal and figurative ones. First of
all, Farrokh (2012) defined idioms as relatively frozen expressions whose
meanings do not reflect the meanings of their component parts, using to kill
two birds with one stone to prove his statement. More specifically speaking,
unlike collocations and free compounds, the meaning of a normal idiom cannot
be guessed by combining the meanings of each element. Secondly, idioms can
appear as words, combinations of words, phrases, or even entire clauses and
sentences. As a result, translating idioms from a language to another one is
always the hardest job since much of their meanings will not be obtained
clearly and precisely if they are perceived literally or separately. Thirdly, in
terms of characteristics of collocation, there are two main features that should
be taken into consideration cautiously.
These sections below present each characteristic clearly. The first

event codes by the clause. Within the clause, these participants occupy the
grammatical roles of, most commonly, subject, direct object, indirect object,
adverb or predicate. These grammatical roles are marked in English by a
combination of morphology and word order. But they also have other, more
subtle, grammatical-behavioral properties, such as various constraints on their
distribution in grammatical environment.
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According to the grammatical classification of verbs, verbs fall into
three broad subclasses-those that require only one role (intransitive verbs),
those which require two roles (copular) and those require two or more roles
(transitive verbs). There is a considerable difference between intransitive
subjects and transitive subject.
It is clear that verbs are one of the most central syntactic category in
language. They have deep relations with the other categories: nouns because
they select arguments which are often nominal or adverbs because adverbs
modify verbs, prepositions, which, in turn assign thematic roles to NPs Verbs
associated with adverbs permit the computation of aspect.
These syntactic features of perception verbs are the basis of analyzing
the syntactic features of the English verbs: see, look, watch in English and
Vietnamese in chapter 4.
2.2.2.6. Semantic features of perception verbs in English
According to R.M.W.Dixon (1991), he defined “a verb is the center of
a clause”. A verb refers to some activity and there must be a number of
participants who have roles in that activity as :Sinbad carried the old man; or it
may refer to a state, and there must be a participant to experience the state as:
My legs aches.
Perception verbs are subcategorized into three classes: the “agentive
LISTEN-class” (as in I listened to the tenor), the “experiencer HEAR-class”

This chapter presents the research questions and method of the study to
tackle the proposed issues. In other words, the section provides a description of
the subjects of the study and the procedure to carry out the research with
details of the action plan.
3.1. Research-governing orientations
3.1.1. Research questions
In this study, the author is going to investigate the semantic and
syntactic features of the English verbs look, see, watch as well as their
equivalents in Vietnamese by reading through a great number of sources such
as books, dictionaries… While analyzing the entire terms, conclusion will be
pointed towards what these above-mentioned features are and what
pedagogical applications should be suggested. Such knowledge has to base on
the ways grammarians and linguists of each time study the verbs look, see,
watch particularly and it is what the study aims at in the first place.
In order to gain the aims of the study, the thesis is expected to find out
the answers for the following questions:
1. What are the syntactic and semantic features of the English verbs
look, see, watch in English?
2. What are the Vietnamese equivalents of these English verbs look,
see and watch?
3. What are the possible implications of teaching and learning English
verbs look, see, watch for Vietnamese learners of English?
3.1.2. Research setting
The research is conducted with references from diverse reliable
sources such as dictionaries, encyclopedia, reference books at library and on
some websites in which the English verbs look, see, watch

and their

Vietnamese equivalents are used. Through years teaching English grammar