A FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS OF THE WORDS ‘SWEET’, ‘BITTER’, ‘SOUR’, ‘SALTY’ IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE

Abstract

This thesis is designed to investigate some semantic features of the words denoting taste: ‘sweet’, ‘bitter’, ‘sour’ and ‘salty’ in English and Vietnamese; especially, we consider and analyze how the words happen in Processes. The collection of samples has been taken from different novels or short stories in both languages. Over 800 examples in English and Vietnamese are used. By qualitative and quantitative methods, the data are groupes into categories depending on their semantic features and processes. Then a contrastive analysis is done based on the outlook of functional grammar to point out similarities and differences in using the words between two languages. The findings will serve as a foundation to put forward a number of implications for English teaching and learning as well as for further study.