A study on the adjectives and their collocations asmodifiers of noun phrases in english and vietnamese online newspapers on environmental problems

Abstract

The study attempts to investigate the semantic and syntactic features of adjectives and their collocations as modifiers of noun phrases in online newspapers in English and Vietnamese on environmental problems. This investigation is based on a corpus of 150 English samples and 150 Vietnamese ones randomly gathered from different websites such as: http://www.tuoitre.com.vn, http://moitruong.com.vn/, http://vnexpress.net/, http://environment.umn.edu/, http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/, http://news.bbc.co.uk, ect. The research is carried out throrough the adoption of descriptive, quantitative, qualitative and contrastive approaches. The most important and significant aspect of the study, the similarities and differences between English and Vietnamese adjectives on environmental problems in the view of syntactic and semantic features, is presented in order to help learners have better use of language in communication. The findings of the study show the frequency and variety in terms of semantic and syntactic features of adjectives. Lastly, suggestions have been made based on the result of the analysis in order to apply the adjectives and their collocations as modifiers of noun phrases effectively in teaching and learning lanuages.