to…”. However, for hypothetical circumstances, only the
verb “wish” is used while “want” is not because not all
people’s volition may come true. That is, we would like
things to be different from what they are, and we have
regrets about the present situation.
From the practice of teaching English as a foreign
language, we have discovered that Vietnamese learners
have a tendency to use only some popular verbs such as
want, wish..., while the other verbs in the subgroup of
wishing verbs are ignored or are not properly used. Having
a good grasp of wishing verbs in general seems to be a
difficult task for learners of English. It is undeniable that
some learners of English feel confused and unconfident in
using them in speaking and writing. Therefore, this paper is
conducted with the purpose of helping learners of English
understand how to use these verbs correctly, avoid mistakes
as well as misunderstanding, and reach their
communicative target better.
2. Literature Review and Theoretical Background
2.1. Literature Review
Up to now, there have been many published works on
wishing verbs by English and Vietnamese linguists. Quirk
et al. [9] focused on the usage of the important
constructions to express wishes. Swan [10] described and
analyzed verbs denoting wishes in terms of their syntactic
features and how to use them in the context.
In Vietnamese, the studies of modal verbs including
wishing verbs by Di
ệp Quang Ban and Hoàng Văn Thung
[1], Bùi Tr
ọng Ngoãn [2] are made as a glimpse.
As can be seen, the previous studies only discussed
wishing verbs in general. So far, to the best of my
knowledge, there has been no bilateral contrastive analysis
of wishing verbs between English and Vietnamese in terms
of semantics. Therefore, this paper is an attempt to discover
the related aspects still untouched, making a small
contribution to the study of English as a foreign language in
general and the study of wishing verbs in particular,
especially to learners of both languages.
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