A Study Of Linguistic Features Of Behavioral Clauses In English And Vietnamese

Abstract

This study focuses on a functional analysis of behavioral clauses and interpreting linguistic features of English and Vietnamese behavioral clauses. Qualitative and contrastive methods were adopted in this study because they best suited the requirements to the description of behavioral clauses and the comparisons of them in English and Vietnamese. Wordsmith 5.0 and Navigation pane were exploited to select 678 English Vietnamese behavioral clauses and 602 Vietnamese behavioral clauses from novels and short stories. The main functional framework to describe collected behavioral clauses is the ideational metafunction within the system of Transitivity developed by Halliday (1994) and Halliday & Matthiessen (2000, 2004, 2014). The discussion is devoted to the interpretation of four subtypes of behavioral domains namely semiotic, social, biological and physical behavior together with the associated patterns and core elements of English and Vietnamese behavioral clauses at lexicogrammar and ideational metafunction level. Furthermore, an attempt has been made to offer a contrastive analysis of them and explore the communication effects of English and Vietnamese behavioral clauses and ideational metaphors in given contexts. The contrastive analysis reveals that both English and Vietnamese behavioral clauses have some similar features of domains, lexicogrammar and ideational metafunction. However, major distinctions between English – a synthetic language and Vietnamese – an analytic language bring about some differences in realization of these behavioral domains and behavioral clauses. The in-depth analysis of behavioral clauses shows that phrasal verbs result in some ambiguous cases to identify and label Range while Vietnamese behavioral clauses do not include firmly bonded phrasal verbs to make meaning. Finally, this study also discusses the notions and the three kinds of semantic shifts of ideational metaphor in English and Vietnamese as well as compares these shifts in the two languages. Finally, the contributions of the study also reflect the ongoing discussion on the clause analysis between English and Vietnamese.