AN INVESTIGATION INTO SYNTACTIC AND SEMANTIC FEATURES OF SOME ENGLISH DIMENSIONAL ADJECTIVES AND THEIR VIETNAMESE EQUIVALENTS

Abstract

In this study, we would like to investigate the syntactic and semantic features of some English DAs (tall - short, high - low, deep - shallow, thick - thin, wide - narrow, broad - narrow) and their VEs in the light of cognitive linguistics. These adjectives pairs define the dimensions tallness, height, depth, thickness, width and breadth, respectively. Furthermore, the first member of each pair is unmarked and the second is marked. Due to the limitation of the study, we mainly focus on examining unmarked adjectives tall, high, deep, thick, wide, broad on their spatial and non-metaphorical sense carefully. We’d like to choose these adjectives to investigate for the following reasons. Firstly, they are all considered as DAs commonly used in both English and Vietnamese with a high frequency. Secondly, each of the adjectives has its own dimension of entities, which enables us to discover their use in various dimensions. Through the study of these adjectives, we can easily find out the similarities and differences in spatial cognition of English and Vietnamese.