A study of the Syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic features of discourse marker 'only' and its vietnamese translational equivalents

Abstract

This is a study of the linguistic features of the discourse marker “only” in English and its equivalents in Vietnamese. The data for the investigation are mainly chosen from famous bilingual short stories and modern novels. A qualitative approach is used throughout the paper to find out distinguishing syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic features of “only” in English and its translational equivalents in Vietnamese. Based on the findings, a comparison is made between the two languages in terms of linguistic features and some implications for language teaching-learning and for translation, are put forward. The research is, hopefully, beneficial to English users in general and to English learners, teachers and translators in particular