AN INVESTIGATION INTO LINGUISTIC FEATURES OF TWO ACTION VERB COMBINATIONS IN VIETNAMESE AND THEIR ENGLISH TRANSLATIONAL EQUIVALENTS

Abstract

Using compound verbs efficiently in communication and translation is really important. There are some certain types of compound verbs but this study is intended to investigate the linguistic features of Vietnamese verb-verb compounds which are made up of two verbs denoting action and their English translational equivalents. To achieve this goal, some theoretical backgrounds about verbs, compound verbs, verb - verb compounds, and their syntactic, semantic features given by various linguists were sorted to. The sources of data used in observation and analysis were extracted from bilingual novels and short stories in which Vietnamese is a source language. Through this study, a qualitative analysis and a descriptive approach have been done to find out the syntactic and semantic features of Vietnamese verb – verb compounds denoting action. In syntactic aspect, there were four grammatical functions of VVCs in Vietnamese: subjects, predicators, adverbials and noun phrase modifiers. In semantic aspect, the meaning relations of two verb constituents inside of Vietnamese verb – verb compounds include non – idiomatic and idiomatic compounds. From the result conducted, some implications and suggestions to effectively use two action verb combinations in Vietnamese and their English translational equivalents as well as some recommendations for further study were given.