English and Vietnamese noun phrases Running head: english and vietnamese noun phrase

Running head: ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE NOUN PHRASE

English and Vietnamese Noun Phrase: A Contrastive Analysis

Tuyen Ngoc Thi Le

University of Education

Contrastive Analysis

Instructor: Ths. Nguyen Ngoc Vu

December 30, 2009

The aim of this paper is to discuss the English and Vietnamese noun phrases and their impact upon teaching and learning English in Vietnamese situation. It is hoped that this contrastive analysis will provide as much information as possible on English and Vietnamese noun phrases. With the practical aims, it attempts to state the similarities and differences in noun phrases of the two languages in term of their internal and external structures. The study draws attention to the analysis of the heads of noun phrases in the two languages, the pre and post modifications, their positions and functions of English and Vietnamese noun phrase. Finally, some teaching implications are made for those who teach English as a Foreign Language to their students. At the same time, some kinds of error made by Vietnamese learners due to differences in word order and functions of noun phrases between the two languages will be discussed.

Language is a powerful means of communication of everyone in the world. However, each language has each own way of expressing and denominating things. Every noun, verb, adjective, adverb or other categories that we use to make up our speech has its own ways from which they are coordinated. Noun phrase, one of the major sentence constituent in a large number of languages, is not an exception. A noun phrase (NP) is a phrase whose head is a noun or a pronoun, optionally accompanied by a set of modifiers. As a result, there are differences in constituent ordering within the noun phrase between English and Vietnamese- the head initial language. This study aims to explore internal and external structure of English and Vietnamese noun phrases then some errors due to differences in word order and functions of noun phrases between the two languages as well as some teaching implications will be discussed. Through a contrastive view in this research, I hope that it will make readers clear about the similarities and differences of English and Vietnamese noun phrases in term of their internal and external structure so that they can avoid making mistakes in their translation between these two languages.