an investigation of the polysemy of open close' in english and mở đóng in vietnamese (from the cognitive perspective) = nghiên cứu tính đa nghĩa của động từ mở đóng trong tiếng anh và tiếng việt

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART A: INTRODUCTION 1
1. RATIONALE OF THE STUDY 1
2. SCOPE OF THE STUDY 1
3. OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY 1
4. RESEARCH QUESTIONS 2
5. ORGANIZATION OF THE STUDY 2
PART B: DEVELOPMENT 4
CHAPTER I: LITERATURE REVIEW 5
1.1. AN OVERVIEW ON CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS 5
2.2. A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF VERBS 7
2.2.1. Verbs in English 7
2.2.2. Verbs in Vietnamese 8
3.3. COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS 9
3.3.1. Definition of terms 9
3.3.2. Major principles of cognitive linguistics 10
3.4. COGNITIVE SEMANTICS 10
3.4.1. Definition 10
3.4.2. Guiding principles of cognitive semantics 11
3.5. POLYSEMY 13
3.5.1. The traditional treatment of polysemy 13
3.5.2. Polysemy in cognitive linguistics 14
3.5.3. Summary 15
CHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGY 16
2.1. RESEARCH QUESTIONS 16
2.2. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHOD 16
2.3. METHOD AND SOURCES OF THE LANGUAGE MATERIAL 17

2.3.1. Sources of the language material 17


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2.3.2. Method of data collection 18
2.4. ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK 18
CHAPTER 3: DATA ANALYSIS 20
3.1. THE POLYSEMY OF OPEN/CLOSE IN ENGLISH 20
3.1.1. Prototypical and non-prototypical meanings of ‘open/close’ 20
3.1.1.1 .Physical meanings of ‘open’ and ‘close’ 20
3.1.1.1.1. Physical meanings of the verb ‗open‘ 20
3.1.1.1.2. Physical meanings of the verb ‗close‘ 21
3.1.1.2. Non-prototypical extended meanings of ‘open/close’ 22
3.1.1.2.1. Non-prototypical extended meanings of the verb ‗open‘ 22
3.1.1.2.2. Non-prototypical extended meanings of the verb ‗close‘ 24
3.1.1.3. Summary 25
3.1.2. Encyclopaedic knowledge and meanings of ‘open/close’ 26
3.1.3. Radial category of ‘open/close’ 29
3.2. THE ENGLISH VERBS ‘OPEN/CLOSE’ AND THEIR VIETNAMESE
EQUIVALENTS 30
3.2.1. ‘Open/close’ in English corresponds to ‘mở/đóng’ in Vietnamese 31
3.2.1.1. ‘Open’ in English corresponds to ‘mở’ in Vietnamese 31
3.2.1.2. ‘Close’ in English corresponds to ‘đóng’ in Vietnamese 32
3.2.2. Some other Vietnamese equivalents of the English verbs ‘open/close’ 33
3.2.2.1. Some other Vietnamese equivalents of the English verb ‘open’ 33
3.2.2.1. Some other Vietnamese equivalents of the English verb ‘close’ 35
3.3. SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERNENCES BETWEEN ‘OPEN/CLOSE’ IN ENGLISH
AND ‘MỞ /ĐÓNG’ IN VIETNAMESE 37
3.3.1. Similarities 37
3.3.2. Differences 39

3.4. SUMMARY 39
PART C: CONCLUSION 41


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1. CONCLUSIONS 41
2. IMPLICATIONS 42
3. LIMITATIONS OF THE RESEARCH AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER
STUDY 43
REFERENCES 44














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PART A: INTRODUCTION
1. RATIONALE OF THE STUDY
I had some troubles with the self-referential nature of the material. Since the subject is the
"meaning of meaning" at various levels, it's easy to become confused and fall into a "black
hole" where text seems meaningless. Polysemy is the term widely used in semantic analysis

to describe the situation in which a word has two or more related meanings. No matter how
simple this definition seems to be, polysemy is not a clear-cut concept. For decades, linguists
from different universities have been trying to give a sound account of what polysemy is and
how it can be accounted for. Although polysemy is at the moment a hot topic in
cognitive and computational linguistics, unfortunately, it is still true that polysemy remains
a somehow muddy field in linguistic research.
Despite this, I feel the self struggle to construct this thesis to try and represent my learning as
a result of interacting with a wide diversity of texts has been a rewarding one. It has helped
me develop polysemy in my mind as a referent to apply to my own day-to-day practices and
research in communication, teaching and learning.
2. SCOPE OF THE STUDY
Within a short time and with limited reference materials, it would be too ambitious for this
small-scaled study to cover the polysemy of all kinds of verbs, a broad field and the most
complex part of speech. Therefore, the study is limited to investigating the polysemy of the
two verbs „OPEN‟ and „CLOSE‟ with their Vietnamese equivalents within cognitive
semantic theoretical framework. The study focuses on displaying some major principles of
cognitive linguistics in general and cognitive semantics in particular which are applied to
explore the meanings of these two verbs.

3. OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY
Due to time limitation, the study aims to primarily seek for evidences of the polysemy of the
two verbs open/close and their Vietnamese equivalents from cognitive perspective. More
specifically, it focuses on:
- displaying major notions of cognitive semantics
- uncovering a semantic description of the English verbs “ open/close” in light of
cognitive semantics.


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- investigating potential Vietnamese equivalents of the English verbs “open/close”.

- finding out the similarities and differences of these two verbs from cross-linguistic
point of view.
- providing pedagogical implications for teaching and learning as well as language
research.
More detailed explication as how the aforementioned objectives have been formulated and
how these objectives can be attained is specified in chapter 2: Methodology.
4. RESEARCH QUESTIONS
On the basis of the abovementioned aims and objectives, the study is conducted to answer the
following questions:
(1) From a cognitive semantic perspective, what meanings do the English
verbs ‗open/close‘ have? How are they variedly used in this language?
(2) What are potential Vietnamese equivalents of the English verbs
‗open/close‘ in various senses?
(3) How are these verbs similar and different between English and
Vietnamese in the light of cognitive semantics?
5. ORGANIZATION OF THE STUDY
The study is divided into three main parts: Part A is the Introduction to the study. Part B is
the Development with the three chapters. Part C is the Conclusion.
Part A discusses the rationale, the scope of the study, the objectives of the study,
methodology used in the study and the organization of the study.
Part B includes three chapters as follows;
- Chapter I is Literature Review which presents all related theoretical background that
precedes and necessitates the formation of my research: an overview on contrastive
analysis, a brief description of verbs, cognitive semantics and polysemy.
- Chapter II – Methodology – describes the research procedures that have been utilized
in the study.
- Chapter III – Data Analysis – contains the core part of the study. It presents, analyzes
and synthesizes data collected and gives some findings and discussions.
The Conclusion part summarizes the major findings and implications about the polysemy of
the verbs „open‟ and „close‟ within cognitive semantic theoretical framework and suggestions

for further study.


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PART B: DEVELOPMENT

This part consists of three chapters. A review of all related theoretical foundation is done in
the first chapter, serving as a background for the study to be carried out in the rest of the part.


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Particularly, the first chapter displays my understanding of contrastive analysis, verbs,
cognitive linguistics, cognitive semantics and polysemy. A theoretical framework based on
the methodological and theoretical principles of cognitive linguistics and semantics is
established in this chapter.
Chapter 2 – Methodology – describes the methods and the research procedures of the current
study. Particularly, it describes the data collection in which considerations in selecting
materials and the sources of data are presented. Additionally, a description of data analysis is
also presented.
Chapter 3 – Data Analysis– contains the core part of the study. It presents, analyzes and
synthesizes data collected. This chapter applies the theoretical framework that is established
in chapter 2 into analyzing the meanings of the two verbs open/close and find out
Vietnamese equivalents of these English verbs.

CHAPTER I: LITERATURE REVIEW

In this chapter, a range of fundamental theoretical concepts will be introduced. I will present
all related theoretical background that precedes and necessitates the formation of my
research, especially the cognitive semantic framework of the study, i.e. an overview on


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contrastive analysis, a brief description of verbs in 1.1 and 1.2; cognitive linguistics and
cognitive semantics theory will be briefly discussed in 1.3, a review of major principles of
cognitive linguistics in general and cognitive semantics in particular which have been applied
in analyzing linguistics expressions will be included in this part; the final part 1.4 will deal
with the traditional treatment of polysemy and polysemy in cognitive linguistics.
1.1. AN OVERVIEW ON CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS
Contrastive analysis (CA), traditionally defined, is a linguistic branch whose main aim is to
help the analyst to ascertain in which aspects the two languages are alike and in which they
differ (Filipovic, 1975). The end of 19th century and the beginning of 20th century was
generally recognized as the traditional period of contrastive studies. The very term
„contrastive linguistics‟ was actually coined by American linguist and anthropologist
Benjamin Lee Whorf in his article „Languages and logic‘ published in 1941, where he
drew the distinction between comparative and contrastive linguistics. Then it was defined
as "a sub discipline of linguistics concerned with the comparison of two or more languages
or subsystems of languages in order to determine both the differences and similarities
between them", (Fisiak, 1981:1).
Robert Lado, an American linguist and EFL methodologist, is unanimously regarded as the
founder of contrastive analysis with the publication of his seminal book „Linguistics across
cultures‘ in 1957. He wrote that: "… those elements that are similar to this native language
will be simple for him, and those elements that are different will be difficult." Contrastive

analysis is the systematic study of a pair or more of languages (usually two languages), with
a view to identifying their structural differences and similarities. This term was used
extensively in the field of Second Language Acquisition in the 1960s and early 1970s.
Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (CAH), which was originally formulated in Lado's
Linguistics Across Cultures (1957), is the extension of the notion of CA attributed the ability
to predict errors to a CA of two languages, a predictability that practitioners associated with
the degree of similarity between the two systems.
Along this line, Richard, J.C et al (1992) defined CA as “the comparison of the linguistic
systems of two languages, for example the sound system or the grammatical system,‖
The Contrastive Analysis emphasizes on the influence of the mother tongue in learning a
second language in phonological, morphological and syntactic levels. Contrastive Analysis is
not merely relevant for second language teaching and learning but it can also make useful
contributions to machine translating and linguistics typology. It is relevant to the designing of


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teaching materials for use in all age groups. Some guiding principles for contrastive study
were suggested by Chaturvedi (1973):
(1) To analyze the mother tongue and the target language independently and
completely.
(2) To compare the two languages item-wise-item at all levels of their structure.
(3) To arrive at the categories of similar features, partially similar features and
dissimilar features for the target language.
(4) To arrive at principles of text preparation, test framing and target language
teaching in general.
On the other hand, it is necessary to refer to the term „contrastive rhetoric‟ in this section. It
is the study of the differences that occur between the discourses of different languages and
cultures as reflected in foreign students' writing. Contrastive rhetoric research began in the
1960s, started by the American applied linguist Robert Kaplan. Then, Ulla Connor states in
his book ‗Cross-cultural aspects of second language writing‘(1996) that contrastive rhetoric

is also an area of research in second/foreign language learning that identifies problems in
composition encountered by second/foreign language writers by referring them to the
rhetorical strategies of the first language. It maintains that language and writing are cultural
phenomena, and, as a direct consequence, each language has unique rhetorical conventions.
When people use language in different social and communication contexts, their language
often differs in terms of both grammatical and lexical choice. Biber et al (1999:24) indicate
that different registers or genres demonstrate consistent patterning. The authors find that
many descriptions of general English, based on an averaging of patterns across registers,
often obscure such register variation and are thus inaccurate and misleading. People who use
the same language in different regions and countries may also talk differently.
2.2. A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF VERBS
2.2.1. Verbs in English
We often think of the verb as being the „heart‟ of the sentence because it is the verb that
provides the central meaning to a sentence. Verbs express what the subject does or describe
something about the state or condition of the subject. Verbs are complex elements that not
only provide crucial sentence meaning, but that also provide support for other verbs,
determine what kinds of sentence elements can come after them, combine with prepositions
and adverbs to make special, idiomatic verbs known as phrasal verbs. (Andrea DeCapua,


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Grammar for Teachers, 2008:121). We can identify verbs on the basis of semantic,
structural, and morphological clues.
A word, in Jack‟s (Jack C. Richards et al, 1992:938) words, is a verb when it satisfies these
following criteria:
- Occurring as part of the predicate of a sentence;
- Carrying markers of grammatical categories such as tense, aspect, person, number,
and mood; and as
- Referring to an action or state.
According to Halliday (1994, 2004), language is „a system of meanings‟ and clause

consisting of a head verb and participants involved is the most significant grammatical unit,
because it functions as the representation of process. The most powerful conception of
reality is that it consists of "goings-on": of doing, happening, feeling, being. The basic
semantic framework for the representation of process consists potentially of three
components: the process itself, participants (Roles) in the process, circumstances associated
with the process. The process types are given by Halliday in the following frame:

On the other hand, Douglas Biber and his numerous colleagues wrote in their book Grammar
of Spoken and Written English (2007) that verbs are classified into three major classes
according to their roles as main verbs and auxiliary verbs. They are lexical verbs (also called
full verbs, e.g. open, close), primary verbs (be, have, do), and modal verbs (e.g. can, will,
might). Lexical verbs comprise an open class of words that function only as main verbs; the
three primary verbs can function as either main verbs or auxiliary verbs; and modal verbs can
function only as auxiliary verbs. In addition, verbs can be classified on the basis of their


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semantic domains and valency patterns (copular, intransitive and transitive). This
classification shares the view with Quirk R. et al (1985).
2.2.2. Verbs in Vietnamese
Unlike the English verbs, whose inflections serve to denote number, person, gender, voice,
mood, and tense, verbs in Vietnamese do not have the concord with other parts of speech. A
verb is a syntactic word which denotes an action, a progress, a state or a quality. According
to Le Bien (1999:70), and Diep Quang Ban (2001:21), in terms of general meaning, verbs are
substantives referring to progress, forms of movements. They may be activities (1), states (2),
changing progresses (3), and movements (4), etc. as follow:
(1) Cô ấy đọc sách./ Anh ấy viết thư.
(2) Tôi yêu Hà Nội./ Nó nhớ nhà./ Em hiểu bác mà.
(3) GS Ngô Bảo Châu đã trở thành nhà toán học nổi tiếng thế giới.
(4) Bạn tôi đi thành phố Hồ Chí Minh rồi.

Moreover, verbs can combine with other modal auxiliary components when functioning as
central component of a verb phrase to indicate scope of the action or activity such as ‗cũng‘,
‗đều‘, ‗cứ‘, etc.; to indicate continuation, for example: ‗còn‘, ‗vẫn‘, etc.; to indicate tense,
aspect such as ‗đã‘, ‗đang‘, ‗sẽ‘, ‗sắp‘, etc.; to refer to negative meaning like ‗chưa‘,
‗không‘, ‗chẳng‘, etc.; to indicate advice or prohibit such as ‗hãy‘, ‗đừng‘, ‗chớ‘, etc. and so
on.
With regards to linguistics, there have been many different ways to classify verbs in each
language by different authors. However, the classification of the verbs by Diep Quang Ban
and Hoang Van Thung will be applied in this thesis. They classify Vietnamese verbs into
two kinds: transitive verbs and intransitive verbs. The word “transitive” sounds pretty
complex, but in reality identifying transitive verbs is really not that difficult. Transitive
verbs express an action and are followed by a direct object (thing or person that receives the
action of the verb). They cannot stand alone and need help from other words to complete
their meaning. For example: Lan đưa cho tôi cuốn sách, Tôi yêu Hà Nội, etc. In contrast, an
intransitive verb is an action verb, but it does not have a direct object. The action ends or is
modified by an adverb or adverb phrase rather than being transferred to some person or
object. It can stand alone with complete meaning without help from other words. For
example: Trời mưa, Cô ấy hát, etc.
However, in both languages, many verbs have both a transitive and an intransitive function,
depending on how they are used. The verb break, for instance, sometimes takes a direct


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object such as Julia breaks my heart, Julia làm tan vỡ trái tim tôi and sometimes does not
like When I hear your name, my heart breaks; Khi tôi nghe đến tên anh ấy, trái tim tôi tan
vỡ.
3.3. COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS
3.3.1. Definition of terms
Cognitive linguistics (CL) is the study of the relationship between language and the human
mind. In other words, it is a school of linguistics and cognitive science, which aims to

provide accounts of language that mesh well with current understandings of the human mind.
Workers in this field seek to understand language as it relates to models of human thinking,
interpreting language in light of the social and psychological contexts in which it is generated
and understood. It emerged in the late seventies and early eighties, especially through the
work of George Lakoff, one of the founders of Generative Semantics, and Ronald
Langacker, also an ex-practitioner of Generative Linguistics. As a consequence, this new
paradigm could be seen as a reaction against the dominant generative paradigm which
pursues an autonomous view of language (Ruiz de Mendoza, 1997).
Cognitive linguistics has not developed fully-formed from a single source. It is a
concatenation of concepts proposed, tested, and tempered by a variety of researchers. The
people whose work has been most influential in the creation of this framework include
Brugman, Casad, Croft, Gilles Fauconnier, Mark Johnson, George Lakoff, Ronald
Langacker, Lindner, Eve Sweetser, Leonard Talmy, Tuggy, and Mark Turner.
Although Cognitive Linguistics as a general framework emerged in the late seventies, it is
important to bear in mind that it is not a totally homogeneous framework. Ungerer and
Schmid (1996) distinguish three main approaches: the Experiental view, the Prominence
view and the Attentional view of language. The „Experiental view‟ focuses on what might be
going on in the minds of speakers when they produce and understand words and sentences.
The „Prominence view‟ is based on concepts of profiling and figure/ground segregation, a
phenomenon first introduced by the Danish gestalt psychologist Rubin. The prominence
principle explains why, when we look at an object in our environment, we single it out as a
perceptually prominent figure standing out from the background. The „Attentional view‟
assumes that what we actually express reflects those parts of an event which attract our
attention. A main concept in this approach is Fillmore‟s (1975) notion of „frame‟, i.e. an
assemblage of the knowledge we have about a certain situation.


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Despite these three different viewpoints in Cognitive Linguistics, the majority of linguists
working within this paradigm share the view that linguistic knowledge is part of general

thinking and cognition.
3.3.2. Major principles of cognitive linguistics
The most fundamental principle in cognitive linguistics is embodiment (Johnson, 1987;
Lakoff, 1987). Cognitive linguistics works from the premise that meaning is embodied. This
means that meaning is grounded in the shared human experience of bodily existence. We
create mental and linguistic categories on the basis of our concrete experiences and under the
constraints imposed by our bodies. They are not a set of universal abstract features or
uninterpreted symbols (Barcelona, 1997:9). They are motivated and grounded directly in
experience, in our bodily, physical, social and cultural experiences (Janda, 2000).
The second main principle of cognitive linguistics is the theory of linguistic meaning.
Cognitive linguists believe that meanings do not exist independently from the people that
create and use them (Reddy, 1993). All linguistic forms act as clues activating the meanings
that reside in our minds and brains. This activation of meaning is not necessarily the same in
every person because meaning is based on individual experience as well as collective
experience (Barcelona, 1997:9).
3.4. COGNITIVE SEMANTICS
3.4.1. Definition
As was mentioned earlier, cognitive linguistics is not a uniform framework but rather a
combination of approaches that share common principles. Cognitive linguistics practice can
be roughly divided into two main areas of research: cognitive semantics and cognitive
(approaches to) grammar. Although the study of cognitive semantics and the one of cognitive
grammar are occasionally separate in practice, their domains of inquiry are tightly linked.
The area of study known as cognitive semantics, one of the two best-developed areas of
cognitive linguistics, is concerned with investigating the relationship between experience, the
conceptual system, and the semantic structure encoded by language. It began in the 1970s as
a reaction against the „objectivist‟ theories of meaning. The term „objectivism‟ is used by
Lakoff (1987) and Johnson (1987) to refer to those theories of linguistic meaning that
understand objective reality as independent from human cognition. In contrast to this view,
cognitive semantics is concerned with modeling the human mind as much as it is concerned

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with investigating linguistic semantics. It states that linguistic meanings come from our mind
or rather as in the prime slogan for cognitive semantics: Meanings are in the head
(Gardenfor, 1994). Cognitive semantics also sees linguistic meaning as a manifestation of
conceptual structure: the nature and organization of mental representation in all its richness
and diversity, and this is what makes it a distinctive approach to linguistic meaning (Vyvyan
Evans and Melanie Green, 2006:156). Leonard Talmy, one of the original pioneers of
cognitive linguistics in the 1970s, describes cognitive semantics as follows: „Research on
cognitive semantics is research on conceptual content and its organization in language‟
(Talmy, 2004:4). Cognitive semantics, like the larger enterprise of cognitive linguistics of
which it is a part, is not a single unified framework. Though those researchers identify
themselves as cognitive semanticists, there are still a number of principles that collectively
characterize a cognitive semantics approach. The principles that the study is based on for its
argument and discussion will be briefly presented in the following section.
3.4.2. Guiding principles of cognitive semantics
Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green identify four guiding principles that collectively
characterize the collection of approaches that fall within cognitive semantics in their book,
Cognitive Linguistics: An Introduction (2006:157) namely i) Conceptual structure is
embodied (the „embodied cognition thesis‟); ii) Semantic structure is conceptual structure;
iii) Meaning representation is encyclopaedic; iv) Meaning construction is conceptualization.
“Cognitive semanticists set out to explore the nature of human interaction with and
awareness of the external world, and to build a theory of conceptual structure that is
consonant with the ways in which we experience the world” (Vyvyan Evans and Melanie
Green , 2006:157). The experience we have of the world is embodied. In other words, it is
structured in part by the nature of the bodies we have and by our neurological organization.
The nature of conceptual organization arises from bodily experience, so part of what makes
conceptual structure meaningful is the bodily experience with which it is associated. It is
clear that conceptual structure (the nature of human concepts is a consequence of the nature
of our embodiment and thus is embodied).

The second principle is that semantic structure is conceptual structure. What are stored in our
mind are the things we can perceive and conceive from the real world which cognitive
linguists call „concepts‟. And speakers often use what they have in mind to describe an entity
using language. That is why this principle asserts that language refers to concepts in the mind
of the speaker rather than to objects in the external world. In other words, semantic structure


18
(the meanings conventionally associated with words and other linguistic units) can be
equated with conceptual structure (i.e., concepts) (Evan et al., 2006). However, the claim that
semantic structure can be equated with conceptual structure does not mean that the two are
identical. Instead, cognitive semanticists claim that the meanings associated with linguistic
units such as words, for example, form only a subset of possible concepts. After all, we have
many more thoughts, ideas and feelings than we can conventionally encode in language
(Evan et al., 2006:159).
The third guiding principle holds that semantic structure is encyclopaedic in nature. This
means that lexical concepts do not represent a complete package of meaning as we may see
in a dictionary. “Rather, they serve as „points of access‟ to vast repositories of knowledge
relating to a particular concept or conceptual domain” (Langacker, 1987) although words
have conventional meanings associated with them. Nevertheless, in order to understand the
meaning of a particular linguistic unit, apart from the conventional meaning associated with
it, hearers/readers must have an understanding of its frame of semantics (Fillmore, 1982) or a
domain (Langacker, 1987). We then „construct‟ a meaning by „selecting‟ a meaning that is
appropriate in the context of the utterance.
The fourth guiding principle associated with cognitive semantics is that language itself
(containing words, sentences of the language) does not encode meaning. Instead, as we have
seen, words (and other linguistic units) are only „prompts‟ for the construction of meaning.
According to this view, meaning is constructed at the conceptual level: meaning construction
is equated with conceptualization, a dynamic process whereby linguistic units serve as
prompts for an array of conceptual operations and the recruitment of background knowledge.

It follows from this view that meaning is a process rather than a discrete „thing‟ that can be
„packaged‟ by language (Evan et al., 2006:162).
3.5. POLYSEMY
3.5.1. The traditional treatment of polysemy
The term „polysemy‟ is derived from the Greek poly- meaning „many‟ and sem meaning
„sense‟ or „meaning‟. Traditionally, polysemy has been defined as the case when “a lexical
item … has a range of different meanings” (Crystal 1991: 267). This definition could seem to
be very simple and straightforward. It referred to a lexical relation where a single linguistic
form (i.e. a single phonological word from belonging to a single lexical category, i.e. word
class, say either N or V) has different senses that are related to each other by means of


19
regular shifts or extensions from the basic meaning (Allen 1986:147, De Stadler 1989:61-62,
Taylor 1991: 99). Lyons (1977:550) states the following features of lexical polysemy in the
form of criteria:
(a) There must be a clear derived sense relation between the polysemic
senses of a word
(b) The polysemic senses of a word must be shown to be etymologically
related to the same original source word.
(c) Lexical polysemy is a sense relation within a particular syntactic
category, i.e. lexical polysemy does not cut across syntactic word class
boundaries.
More recently, Taylor (1991:101-102) applied traditional semantic tests (or criteria) which
were more typically used to distinguish between vagueness and ambiguity, to differentiate
between monosemy and polysemy (cf. also Geeraerts, 1989; Gouws, 1989). According to
Taylor, a word is monosemous (i.e. it has only one sense) if it is vague, and it is polysemous
(i.e. it has more than one sense) if it is ambiguous. However, these definitions and linguistic
tests are problematic in some ways such as methodological problems, conceptual confusion,
etc. It is clear that the tests that are meant to distinguish polysemy as a lexical property of a

word are unreliable and unsatisfactory.
Polysemy is also always presented in opposition to homonymy. The basic criterion for
differentiating the two cases is to say that polysemy happens when one form has several
meanings and homonymy, when two lexical items happen to have the same phonological
form. It seems to be easy to differentiate these two definitions when we consider the typical
examples of polysemy, like the noun school, or examples of homonymy such as bank (river
bank and money bank). However, Allen (1986:148) and De Stadler (1989:63) identify the
problem of differentiating between polysemy and both homonymy and vagueness (i.e.
multiple significances of the same sense in particular contexts) as the main issue in defining
polysemy. They come to the conclusion that the difference between homonymy, polysemy
and vagueness are best seen as gradations on a continuum.
These traditional approaches to polysemy provide a more or less successful descriptive
analysis of what polysemy and homonymy are; what lexical items are homonymous or
polysemous. Their major problem, however, is that they fail to address several fundamental
issues: the reasons why these lexical items have several senses attached to them in the first
place; how these meanings are structured: are these senses grouped under the same lexical
item by chance or is there any motivation for the lexical item to convey specific meanings? Is


20
the semantic content of a single lexical item enough to create polysemy or, on the contrary, is
the interaction with the semantic content of the other lexical items that co-occur in the same
sentence necessary? These issues, neglected by traditional approaches, are at the core of
investigation in Cognitive Semantics. In the following section, I present the explanations that
this model provides for these questions.
3.5.2. Polysemy in cognitive linguistics
In recent years, polysemy as a lexical or semantic relation has received much attention in
various formal approaches as well as cognitive approaches. With the advent of Cognitive
Linguistics, with its initial focus on lexical semantics and linguistic categorization, as well as
with its view that meaning is central to and motivates linguistic structure, the question of

polysemy was placed center-stage again. This had as a natural consequence a remarkable
increase in the number and variety of studies on polysemy. Polysemy has been one of the
central research agendas in the field of cognitive semantics.
Why is it that CL is a much more accommodating framework for the study of polysemy than
the earlier frameworks? Unlike the single meaning approach, CL allows the proliferation of
the number of senses of a word; in other words, particular referential or conceptual
differences in the uses of a word are allowed to make up different polysemous senses.
There have been multiple lines of research that have sought to investigate the intra-lexical
structures of polysemous words such as over (Brugman, 1981; Dewell, 1994; Lakoff, 1987;
Tyler and Evans, 2001, 2004), in, on (Beitel et al., 1997; Goddard, 2002; Herskovits, 1986)
and through (Hilferty, 1999). One of the key concepts in such analyses is image-schema
(Johnson, 1987; Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Lakoff, 1987), which can be defined as the
schematic structures which are generated through our perceptual interactions and bodily
movements in our physical environment that „make it possible for us to experience,
understand, and reason about our world‟ (Johnson, 1987: 19). Making use of image-schema,
researchers in cognitive semantics have sought to visualize the sense network of various
polysemous words (Brugman, 1988; Dewell, 1994; Hilferty, 1999; Lakoff, 1987). There are
two major approaches to polysemy, the lexical network approach (Lakoff, 1987; Taylor,
1988; Tyler and Evans, 2001, 2004) and the core-schema approach (Dewell, 1994; Tanaka,
1987a, 1987b, 1990). In the lexical network approach, various senses of a given polysemous
word are seen to form a network or „radial category‟ (Lakoff, 1987), in which metaphorical
senses are derived from the central prototype. The core-schema approach, on the other hand,


21
suggests that the various senses can be derived from a single core schema which serves as a
base from which different senses derive as a result of cognitive operations such as
focalization, vantage point shift (Langacker, 1987) and image-schema transformations
(Gibbs and Colston, 1995; Kreitzer, 1997; Lakoff, 1987).
3.5.3. Summary

In this section, two approaches to polysemy have been presented. The traditional approach
defines polysemy as the case when a lexical item has a range of different meanings.
Polysemy can be differentiated from homonymy by using a set of criteria, such as the
etymology, the unrelatedness of meaning, the central or core meaning as well as some
ambiguity tests. It has been argued that this model is mainly concerned with a descriptive
analysis of polysemy, without addressing questions such as why and how polysemy is
created.
For Cognitive Semantics, a lexical item is polysemous when it has multiple meanings related
in a systematic way. These related meanings are using meaning chains or Idealized Cognitive
Models (ICMs). The meanings in a polysemic word are tied to one another and the
connections are made through our cognitive abilities. This framework provides a good
explanation for the reasons why meanings are related to specific lexical items, but it fails to
account for the way in which such polysemous senses are created.
Semanticists working on polysemy within a cognitive linguistic framework also faced
problems. Polysemy requires the researcher to determine whether two usage events are
identical or sufficiently similar to be considered a single sense, what the degree of similarity
is between different senses, where to connect a sense to others in the network, and which
sense(s) to recognize as prototypical one(s).
CHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGY

This chapter describes the methods and the research procedures that have been utilized in the
study. First the research questions will be restated in 2.1, next the research methods of the
study will be introduced in 2.2, sources of the language material will be described in 2.3,
particularly, considerations in selecting materials will be presented in this part, then the data
generation procedures and the analytical framework will be described in 2.4.


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2.1. RESEARCH QUESTIONS
Based on the theoretical background presented in chapter 1, the thesis attempts to address the

three following questions:
(1) From a cognitive semantic perspective, what meanings do the English verbs
‗open/close‘ have? How are they variedly used in this language?
(2) What are potential Vietnamese equivalents of the English verbs ‗open/close‘ in
various senses?
(3) How are these verbs similar and different between English and Vietnamese in the
light of cognitive semantics?
2.2. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHOD
This study is based on the theory of cognitive linguistics and cognitive semantics in
particular. This theory takes human experience as the motivation for what is meaningful in
the human mind; thought is not a manipulation of symbols but the application of cognitive
processes to conceptual structures. Meaning structures come not only from the direct
relationship with the external world but also from the nature of bodily and social experience
(how humans experience with the world) and from human capacity to project from some
aspects based on this experience to some abstract conceptual structures. Moreover, cognitive
semanticists have focused on the analysis of how different senses of a word are related to
each other although they have been aware that it is a non-trivial issue. Thus, in conducting
the study, a variety of different research methodological approaches were employed in order
to focus on the polysemy of the verbs open/close in English and their equivalents in
Vietnamese.
First of all, the descriptive method is applied in this study to present the theoretical
foundation which then is illustrated by examples with explanations and discussions and then
to reach conclusions by conductive reasoning.
Next, in order to answer the first research question, a theoretical framework which is based
on the methodological and theoretical principles of cognitive linguistics and semantics is
established. Then examples are analyzed based on this framework to help the researcher
come to conclusions.


23

Then, regard the second research question, one of the study‟s purposes is to find out the
potential Vietnamese equivalents of the English verbs open/close. Therefore, contrastive
analysis is incorporated in attempt to seek for evidence to answer this question.
Also, a detailed explanation of the similarities and differences between these two verbs in
English and Vietnamese will be provided to serve the last research question.
2.3. METHOD AND SOURCES OF THE LANGUAGE MATERIAL
2.3.1. Sources of the language material
The linguistic material used in support and illustration of the discussions in the various parts
of the study belongs to three different sources.
i) Monolingual and bilingual dictionaries. The dictionaries that I have made use of
when writing this thesis are listed as a particular subgroup in the Bibliography section. These
examples are followed by an abbreviated reference within brackets.
ii) Corpora of written English and Vietnamese used in this thesis contain literary,
journalistic, scientific and technical texts, transcriptions from spoken language and from
media broadcasts.
iii) Examples that occur without any bracketed indication of the source have for the
most part been constructed by the author, occasionally on the basis of an utterance that I have
seen or heard used. In addition, some of them have been taken from other linguistic studies.
I would also like to point out that the main aim of this study is not to show how frequent or
salient the meanings presented are in each language, but just the fact that it is possible to
infer them. Therefore, I have not included any data on frequencies.

2.3.2. Method of data collection
The material selection was managed under three considerations: the field of the study, the
availability of material and the feasibility of conducting the analysis.
The investigation processed from the general to the more specific data collection. Qualitative
methods were used to gather data, narrowing the focus of the research scope as the research
progresses.

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As there are three kinds of data collected in the study, three groups of measurement
instruments were employed:
(i) For the collection of examples of the English verbs open/close, I made use of some
dictionaries such as: Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary, Dictionary of Modern English
Usage, Macmillan Dictionary and Thesaurus, English-Vietnamese Dictionary, Lac Viet
MTD9 MVA 2009 Dictionary, etc., and literary works like Pride and Prejudice (Jane
Austen), Eclipse (Stephenie Meyer), Twilight (Stephenie Meyer), etc.
(ii) Online-material: Thanks to useful websites such as google.com, yahoo.com,
en.wikipedia.org, etc., I could find a rich source of material that is useful for my study,
especially the part of literature review and data collection.
(iii) Some examples were constructed by the author from personal experience.
2.4. ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK
According to Burnes (1999), data analysis involves „the describing‘ and ‗explaining‘. In the
light of this view, the collected data from different sources as presented in 2.3 were put on
those two processes. Regard the two broad categories as specified by the first two research
questions, data were presented and then analyzed and synthesized in the framework of
cognitive semantics to provide evidences for the statements and assertions that are made
about the research insights and outcomes. It can be stated that, by and large, cognitive
semantic studies have traditionally been based on decontextualized data, collected and
analyzed by means of introspection. As a consequence, the findings may be empirically
problematic: not all fine-grained sense distinctions are necessarily supported by the data (cf.
Gries and Divjak, submitted).
Some significant theories and approaches best exemplify the four guiding principles in
cognitive semantics included image-schema theory, encyclopedic semantics approach,
categorization and Idealized Cognitive Models (ICMs) approach, cognitive lexical semantics
approach, conceptual metaphor theory, conceptual metonymy approach, Mental Spaces
theory, and conceptual blending theory. In this paper, some of them are applied: Cognitive
lexical semantics, encyclopedic semantics approach, categorization and Idealized Cognitive
Models (ICMs) approach.

25
When speaking about polysemy, the fact that we are dealing with multiple meanings is not
the main point but the fact that those multiple meanings are related in a systematic and
natural way.
According to Lakoff (1987), polysemy has to be understood as categorization, that is to say
the idea that related meanings of words form categories and that these meanings bear family
resemblance, an idea introduced by Austin (1961). Taylor (1995: 108) explains this family
resemblance category in terms of „meaning chains‟. He compares these „meaning chains‟ to
Lakoff‟s „radial categories‟. A category is structured radially with respect to a number of
subcategories: there is a central subcategory, defined by a cluster of covering cognitive
models and in addition, there are noncentral extensions which are not specialized instances of
the central subcategory, but variants of it. In other words, a radial category is structured with
respect to a prototype, and the various category members are related to the prototype by
convention, rather than being „generated‟ by predictable rules. As such, word meanings are
stored in the mental lexicon as highly complex structured categories of meanings or senses.
ICMs are complex structured wholes or gestalts. They do not necessarily fit the world very
precisely. Polysemy is therefore the result of the extension of ICMs to form radial categories.
Sometimes, a single ICM can be the basis for a collection of senses that form a single natural
category.
In the present study, the author argues strongly for more dictionary/corpus-based work in
lexical semantics in general and cognitive semantics in particular, a domain that is considered
by many not to be particularly well-suited for corpus-linguistic studies. This approach is used
to bear on polysemous near-synonyms that express „open/close‘ in a contrastive English-
Vietnamese analysis. Hence, the focus of the study is on presenting a corpus-based
methodology that can be used to pursue cognitively-inspired lexical semantic analyses.

CHAPTER 3: DATA ANALYSIS



26
In this chapter, I analyze the different meanings that the two verbs open/close can convey in
the two different languages under investigation: English and Vietnamese. The organization
of this chapter is as follows: Section 3.1 focuses on the prototypical physical meanings and
the different non-prototypical extended meanings of these two verbs from the point of view
of cognitive semantics. Section 3.2 offers an account of Vietnamese equivalents that these
verbs can convey from a cross-linguistic point of view. Section 3.3 describes the similarities
and differences of these two verbs between English and Vietnamese. Section 3.4 summarizes
the results from previous sections.
3.1. THE POLYSEMY OF OPEN/CLOSE IN ENGLISH
3.1.1. Prototypical and non-prototypical meanings of ‘open/close’
A word is understood as polysemous if all its multiple meanings are systematically related.
The relation between the different polysemous senses of a word is not whimsical and
random, but motivated. This motivation finds its grounds in our understanding and bodily
experience of the world in which we live. A lexical item is not generally polysemous in itself.
It needs the help of the semantic content of other lexical items in order to obtain those
polysemous senses.
In this section, the different meanings of „open/close‟ in general as well as its synonyms are
discussed in the light of cognitive semantics. According to Oxford Advanced Learners
Dictionary, Dictionary of Modern English Usage (Henry Fowler, Oxford University Press),
Macmillan Dictionary and Thesaurus, Lac Viet MTD9 MVA 2009 Dictionary, English-
Vietnamese Dictionary, Wikipedia, and some other dictionaries, the English verbs „open‟ and
„close‟ have some physical and extended meanings as follows:
3.1.1.1 .Physical meanings of ‘open’ and ‘close’
3.1.1.1.1. Physical meanings of the verb ‘open’

The first sense of open is to separate the edges of something, or to take off its cover so that
you can see or remove what is inside. As for instance examples (1), (2), (3) show:
(1) She opened her shopping bag and took out an umbrella.
(2) Can you open this jam jar?
(3) Open your books at page 25.
(Macmillan Dictionary and Thesaurus)


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if something such as a flower opens, it moves into its widest position and you can see its full
shape in the following example:
(3) My parachute failed to open and I nearly died!
The second sense of this verb is exemplified in (4) (5). It means to move a door or window
into a position that allows people or things to pass through.
(4) I opened the window — surprised when it opened silently, without sticking, not
having opened it in who knows how many years. (Twilight, 2005:72)
(5) He opened the passenger door, holding it for me as I stepped in, (Twilight,
2005:90)
If something such as a door opens, it moves into a position that allows people or things to
pass through in the following example:
(6)- The door opened again, and the cold wind suddenly gusted through the room,
(Twilight, 2005:15)
Another case of this meaning is illustrated in the phrasal verb ‗to open onto/into something‘
as in (7):
(7) The kitchen door opens onto a patio. (Macmillan Dictionary and Thesaurus)
The third physical sense is introduced as to move your arms or legs wide apart, to move your
lips and teeth apart, to move your eyelids apart or to make your fingers straight so that they
are closed as in the following examples:
(8) He opened his arms for me and I sat on his lap, nestling into his cool stone
embrace. (Eclipse, 2007:19)

(9) I opened my mouth to ask, but he spoke before I could. (Twilight, 2005:174)
(10) When I opened my eyes in the morning, something was different. (Twilight,
2005:27)
(11) His hand closed for a brief second, his fingers contracting gently, and then it
opened again. (Eclipse, 2007:258)
3.1.1.1.2. Physical meanings of the verb ‘close’
The first physical meaning of close is expressed in (12), (13), (14) and (15) as „to move to
cover an open area‟. If you close something, or if it closes, it moves to cover an open area:
(12) Close the door quietly behind you.
(13) Did the fridge door close completely?
(14) Her mouth closed after a moment and she said nothing.
(Macmillan Dictionary and Thesaurus)


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(15) I didn't even have time to close my eyes. (Twilight, 2005:29)
A further development of this meaning is that ‗close‘ can also be understood as to move
together the parts of something that was spread to its full size as in (16):
(16) He was as much awake to the novelty of attention in that quarter as Elizabeth
herself could be, and unconsciously closed his book. (Pride and Prejudice, 45)
(17) Closing the umbrella, she ran for the car.
The second and also the last physical meaning of this verb is to put or have your fingers,
hands, or arms around someone or something in the phrasal verb to ‗close around/over‘:
(18) Her hand closed tightly over his. (Macmillan Dictionary and Thesaurus)
(19) She closed her hand tightly over his.
3.1.1.2. Non-prototypical extended meanings of ‘open/close’
In this section, I analyze the non-prototypical meanings of the two verbs ‗open/close‘ in
English. Non-prototypical meanings are all those extended meanings, both physical and
metaphorical, that these verbs can convey apart from the central prototypical meaning.
Traditionally, these extended meanings are mentioned in terms of metaphoric and metonymic

senses. Based on the linguistic framework of Cognitive Linguistics, it is argued that these
semantic extensions were not the result of chance, but that they were grounded in our
experience of the senses themselves. Moreover, the extended meanings are also obtained by
the interaction of the semantic content of both the verb and its complements. The role of the
semantics of both the verb and its complements in the overall meaning of a sentence is not
the same in all extended meanings; in some cases, the verb is more important and in some
other cases, the complements are.
Due to the vast number of extended meanings which relate physical activity with the intellect
or mental activity, I have organized them into different groups.
3.1.1.2.1. Non-prototypical extended meanings of the verb ‘open’
It can be said that the most familiar extended meaning of open is „to become available to use,
to visit or to see‟. This range of meanings would be discussed with a detailed description in
each particular case.
First, if a shop or a public building, etc. opens at a particular time, or if someone opens it, it
regularly becomes available for people to visit or use at that time. This meaning is illustrated
as follows: