The Structure of Noun Phrase in English and Vietnamese

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4A06 Nguyen Kim Phung The Structure of N
Contrastive Analysis

Pre-modification Head Post-modification

Pre-modification	Head Noun
Post-modification
Pre-determiner	Identifier	Numeral/ Indefinite quantifier	Adjective	Noun modifier	Adjective/adverb Relative clause Non-finite clause Prepositional phrase

Table 2: The Structure of Noun Phrase in Vietnamese

Pre-modification			Head		Post-modification
Totality (thành tố phụ chỉ tổng lượng)	Numeral/ Quantifier (thành tố phụ chỉ số lượng)	Focus marker “cái” (“cái” chỉ xuất)	Classifier (T1) (loại từ)	Noun (T2)	Attributive modifier (thành tố phụ nêu đặc trưng miêu tả)	Demonstrative (thành tố phụ chỉ định)
Tất cả	những	cái	con	mèo	đen	ấy
-3	-2	-1	0		1	2

Although English belongs to the Indo-European language family, and the Vietnamese language belongs to the Austro-Asiatic family (Lan, n.d.), the two languages’ noun phrases have many things in common. First, both are endocentric structures (cấu trúc hướng tâm), which means they both have a head noun. Second, in both languages, the head noun can have pre-modification to the left and post-modification to the right. Let’s consider the following examples:

a house on the hill (English)
một ngôi nhà ở trên đồi (Vietnamese)

In the two examples, the heads are house and ngôi nhà. House is preceded by a pre-modifier (an article “a”) and followed by a post-modifier (a prepositional phrase “on the hill”). In the same pattern, ngôi nhà is placed between a pre-modification (numeral “một) and a post-modification (a prepositional phrase “ở trên đồi”).
The difference in language family also accounts for the differences between English and Vietnamese noun phrases.
The first distinct feature that makes Vietnamese noun phrases different from the English noun phrases is the head noun itself. As we all agree, Vietnamese nouns cannot indicate number. That is to say while English needs the morpheme “-s” or “-es” to indicate the plural form of a noun, a Vietnamese noun does not change the form whether it is singular or plural. This is well-demonstrated in this example: một con mèo (one cat), hai con mèo (two cats). However, it does not mean that we cannot differentiate a singular noun from a plural noun in Vietnamese. The numeral and the classifier are responsible for this function. For example:

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