AN INVESTIGATION INTO LINGUISTIC FEATURES OF ENGLISH ADMISSION VERBS AND THEIR VIETNAMESE EQUIVALENTS

Abstract

It is clear real that admission verbs have their own characteristics in relation with various structures and meaning nuances. There have been several research papers related to these verbs in English, yet they are still untouched in Vietnamese. Therefore, this study is carried out to investigate English admission verbs and their Vietnamese equivalents in terms of their syntactic and semantic features. The descriptive and contractive methods were employed to make a specific description of some linguistic features of admission verbs and to point out the similarities and differences between English admission verbs (EAVs) and Vietnamese admission verbs (VAVs) in the above mentioned aspects. Due to the lack of time and materials, we focus on six English admission verbs acknowledge, admit, concede, confess, grant and recognize and their Vietnamese equivalents. In addition, the findings of the study were presented based on a collection of 376 samples of English and Vietnamese sentences consisting of admission verbs which are taken from novels and short stories by English and American writers. Syntactically, AVs combined with an object are used in both languages. Furthermore, the structures of AVs with that- clause occupy the highest frequency in English and Vietnamese. AVs are used as intransitive verbs more frequently in Vietnamese than in English. The prepositions following the noun and the verb after AVs tend to be used more in Vietnamese than in English. Semantically, the meaning nuances of EAVs and their Vietnamese equivalents are investigated. All of AVs have the meaning nuance of accepting or agreeing, often unwillingly, that something is true. However,