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DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
ABSTRACT
Language plays an essential role in human life. It is the indispensable means of
communication for human beings to convey their thoughts and ideas in every daily activity.
Edward Sapir, the great philologist, defined language as “a purely human and non – instinctive
produced symbols” (Sapir). And within these “means of a system of voluntarily produced
symbols”, word is the core of a language. In fact, we directly deal with words to communicate
with one another every day. The field of word – formation is also a lucrative field in linguistics.
As it is so important a part of a language that there are usually many different ways of forming
words in each language to fulfill the need for interaction in its society which is developing
ceaselessly. Among these interesting ways is grammatical conversion or conversion (in short).
process of word – formation in both English and Vietnamese. However, the conversion
an synthetic language, are quite different from each other. So this research is aimed at helping
readers have a closer look at the process of conversion in English and Vietnamese so that they
can avoid mistakes in using word forms when learning and communicating in these two
languages.
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Student: Huỳnh Phương Dung Conversion in English and Vietnamese
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LITERATURE REVIEW
Word – formation is the creation of new word. In each language, the process of word –
formation is developing constantly, adding day – by – day the new words to its vocabulary to
meet the need of communication. Because of its own characteristics, a language has its own
ways of forming words. Some of the main ways to form a new word in English are affixation,
compounding, conversion, reduplication, clipping, acronymy, blending, and back – formation (or
reversion) whereas in Vietnamese words are mainly created by the processes of compounding,
reduplication and conversion. As we can see, conversion has an important part in the word –
formation of both English and Vietnamese languages. In conversion process, a word is created
without any change in form from its input word. Basically, in both English and Vietnamese, a
word which is created through the process of conversion is identical in form to its original word.
However, to their nature, the process of conversion in each language is different. This difference
can be traced back to the morphological difference between English and Vietnamese.
Morphology is the study of word – structure and word – formation. So what is a word?
Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (7th edition) defines a word as “a single unit of language
which means sth and can be spoken or written”. This “single unit of language”, according to
Bloomfield – an American structuralist, is “a minimum free form” which can be spoken alone
with meaning in normal speech. More specifically and structurally, a word is “a unit of language
that carries meaning and consists of one or more morphemes which are linked more or less
tightly together, and has a phonetic value” (“Word (linguistics)”), or in other words, words are
built up by morphemes. Kamil Wiśniewski points out that “Morphemes in morphology are the
smallest units that carry meaning or fulfill some grammatical function” (2007). Both English and
Vietnamese have two kinds of morphemes: free morphemes and bound morphemes. Free
morphemes are morphemes which can form words by themselves, i.e. they can be used alone
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Student: Huỳnh Phương Dung Conversion in English and Vietnamese
Class: 4A06 Contrastive Analysis
with meaning. On the contrary, bound morphemes are ones that cannot stand alone with meaning
but have to be combined with another morpheme to constitute words. English words as well as
Vietnamese words are formed through the combination of these two kinds of morphemes;
however, rules for the combining of morphemes in each language is different from the other. In
English, the bound morphemes may be added to the existing words or free morphemes to create
new words. These bound morphemes, including prefixes like un–, re–, super–, anti–, en–,… and
suffixes like –able, –tion, –er, –ship, –ful,…, cannot occur alone as independent words. This
morphological feature is one of the criteria classifying English as a synthetic language. Actually
the English conversion process also reflects the inflectional feature of its language. Conversion
in English, in fact, is referred to as zero derivation in which zero morphs are added to the base to
constitute words. This process can be demonstrated in the following formula: {output word} =
{input word} + {Ø}. Take the case of the word father for example.
(1) Ben’s a wonderful father.
n
(2) He claims to have fathered over 20 children.
v
From the noun father (in sentence 1), the verb to father (in sentence 2), which has related
meaning with the base, i.e. to become the father of a child by making a woman pregnant (Oxford
Advanced Learner’s Dictionary), is formed through conversion by adding the zero morph to the
cannot be attached to a base to form a new words like in English language. They stand alone as
independent words and can be compounded with free morpheme to form a word like đẹp đẽ
(with đẹp as free morpheme and đẽ as bound morpheme). Conversion in Vietnamese is,
therefore, the process in which an item changes its word-class without changing its phonology
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Student: Huỳnh Phương Dung Conversion in English and Vietnamese
Class: 4A06 Contrastive Analysis
feature. For example, in Tắt Đèn, Ngô Tất Tố wrote: “Vừa nói hắn vừa bịch1 luôn vào ngực chị
Dậu mấy bịch2 rồi lại sấn đến trói anh Dậu”. In this sentence, bịch1 is a verb which means “đấm
mạnh vào người” (Từ Điển Tiếng Việt). In the second case, the word bịch2 has changed its word
class from a verb to a noun which has related meaning to the input as cái/quả đấm mạnh vào
người.
To sum up, (grammatical) conversion is one of the word-formation means in both English
and Vietnamese. However, to their nature, the process of conversion in each language is
process in which an item shifts from a word-class to another without changing its form. So
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Student: Huỳnh Phương Dung Conversion in English and Vietnamese
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CONVERSION IN ENGLISH
Conversion is a process which creates new lexical items out of those that already exist.
"Conversion is the derivational process whereby an item changes its word-class without the
addition of an affix" (Quirk, Randolph and Greenbaum, p. 441). In English, conversion is fairly
productive to increase its lexicon. There are two kinds of conversion: complete conversion and
approximate conversion.
COMPLETE CONVERSION
Complete conversion is the process of shifting the word class of a word without any
change in its form. The input and the output word are are “completely identical in their phonetic
realization” (Plag, p. 134). The major categories of complete conversion are the conversion of
verb to noun, conversion of noun to verb, conversion of adjective to verb, and conversion of
to file, etc.
Verbs which mean to act as the nouns with respect to…: to host, to nurse, to father, etc.
Verbs which have the meaning of “to give (the input noun)/ to provide with (the input
cash, etc.
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Student: Huỳnh Phương Dung Conversion in English and Vietnamese
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drink coffee with milk in.), on [= on sb’s body, being worn: What did she have on? (=
grammatical function, may undergo a slight change of pronunciation or spelling” (Tô Minh
Thanh, p. 102).
Slight change in pronunciation: some nouns which are formed from verbs through
conversion have a slightly different stress from the stress of their original verbs (usually the
stress is shifted from second to the first syllable): record, export, conflict, extract, insult, permit,
consonants /-s/, /-f/ and /-θ/ which are converted into verbs with the voicing of the final
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Student: Huỳnh Phương Dung Conversion in English and Vietnamese
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consonant into /-z/, /-v/ and /-δ/, respectively (Bartolomé & Cabrera): advice → advise, thief →
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Student: Huỳnh Phương Dung Conversion in English and Vietnamese
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CONVERSION IN VIETNAMESE
When using Vietnamese, we usually come across some words which is used in another
word class but not its original word class. Consider this sentence:
Anh ấy vác cuốc1 ra cuốc2 đám đất trước nhà để trồng khoai.
Cuốc1 is a noun which means “nông cụ gồm một lưỡi sắt tra thẳng góc vào cán dài, dùng để bổ,
xới đất” (Từ Điển Tiếng Việt, 225) while cuốc2 functions as a verb which carries the meaning
“Bổ, xới đất bằng cái cuốc” (Từ Điển Tiếng Việt, 225). Obviously, the meanings of cuốc1 and
cuốc2 are related to each other. However, they are used in two diferrent word classes: one as
noun and the other as verb. This phenomenon is called (grammatical) conversion in Vietnamese.
So conversion in Vietnamese is the process in which an item changes its word-class without
derived from the first one. Take the conversion of adjectives to nouns for example.
(1) Anh ấy rất kiên nhẫn1.
(2) Kiên nhẫn2 là một đức tính tốt.
Kiên nhẫn in the first sentence is an adjective while in the second sentence it is a noun serving
as the subject of the sentence. The adjective kiên nhẫn has the root meaning, i.e.: “có khả năng
tiếp tục làm việc đã định một cách bền bĩ, không nản lòng, mặc dù thời gian kéo dài, kết quả
chưa thấy” (Từ Điển Tiếng Việt, 524) and the noun kiên nhẫn is created from this adjective with
related meaning.
The second case is the conversion of nouns to adjectives or adverbs.
(1) Tôi yêu Việt Nam1.
Cô ấy nhìn rất Việt Nam2.
Việt Nam, naturally, is a proper noun. Nevertheless, in the second sentence, Việt Nam is used as
(2) Tôi bảo đảm cái đó sẽ có hiệu qua1 như mong muốn
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Student: Huỳnh Phương Dung Conversion in English and Vietnamese
Class: 4A06 Contrastive Analysis
The noun hiệu qua in the first sentence is converted into the adverb hiệu qua in the second
adverbs as in this sentence: Anh ấy học rất chăm chỉ. Chăm chỉ is, originally, an adjective while
in the above sentence it is used as an adverb. So the conversion process has taken place in this
example.
However, there are also some cases in which two words that have the same phonology
feature and related meaning are from two different word-classes, and it can’t be decided which
word has the root meaning. That is usually the case of conversion between nouns and verbs.
Cưa1 refers to a kind of equipment, i.e. “Dụng cụ để xẻ, cắt gỗ, kim loại và vật liệu cứng khác,
lưỡi bằng thép mỏng có nhiều răng sắc nhọn” (Từ Điển Tiếng Việt, 228). Meanwhile, cưa2
expresses an action done with that equipment, i.e. “Xẻ, cắt, làm cho đứt bằng cái cưa” (Từ Điển
Tiếng Việt, 228). And it is really hard to identify whether the kind of equipment or the action
pronunciation, so this process is often mistaken for hymonymy. In his book Vấn đề cấu tạo từ
của tiếng Việt hiện đại, Hồ Lê has pointed out that “Sự chuyển loại là một phương thức cấu tạo
từ, có khả năng tạo từ mới trên cơ sở từ đã có, bằng cách giữ nguyên vỏ âm của từ cũ, tạo ra một
nghĩa mới có mối quan hệ lô-gích nội tại nhất định với nghĩa của từ cũ, và đưa ra những đặc
trưng ngữ pháp của từ cũ... và giữa nghĩa của từ ấy với nghĩa của từ được chuyển loại chỉ có một
sự liên hệ duy nhất” (p. 164); whereas hymonymy is an accidental phenomenon relating to word
meaning. Wikipedia points out that “Từ đồng âm trong tiếng Việt là những từ phát âm giống
nhau hay cấu tạo âm thanh giống nhau, nhưng nghĩa hoàn toàn khác nhau” (Từ đồng âm trong
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Student: Huỳnh Phương Dung Conversion in English and Vietnamese
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Tiếng Việt). Therefore, conversion and hymonymy are two completely different phenomena by
nature.
Ex.: (1) Anh tôi đi mua sơn1 sơn2 nhà.
(2) Ruồi đậu1 trên mâm xôi đậu2.
In the first sentence, the meanings of sơn1 which is a noun referring to “hóa chất dạng lỏng,
dùng để chế biến chất liệu hội họa, hoặc để quét lên đồ vật cho bền, đẹp” (Từ Điển Tiếng Việt,
871) and the verb sơn2 which means “quét sơn lên bề ngoài của đồ vật” are clearly related to
each other. So we call this phenomenon conversion. However, the second phenomenon is
different. According to Từ Điển Tiếng Việt (2006) by Viện Ngôn Ngữ Học, đậu1 is a verb
meaning “ở trạng thái yên một chỗ, tạm thời không di chuyển” (p. 302) whereas đậu2 refers to
the seeds of a kind of plant “cây nhỏ, có nhiều loài, tràng hoa gồm năm cánh hình bướm, quả
dài, chứa một dãy hạt, quả hay hạt dùng làm thức ăn” (p. 302). From these two definitions, the
meaning of đậu1 is completely different from that of đậu2 although the two words have the same
phonology features. In this case, the phenomenon is not called conversion but hymonymy.
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Student: Huỳnh Phương Dung Conversion in English and Vietnamese
Class: 4A06 Contrastive Analysis
DISCUSSION
Nowadays, English, as a global language, is widely studied in many other countries
including Vietnam. Many Vietnamese people from various age groups study English for different
purposes: for education, for career, for entertainment, etc. In fact, English is an interesting as
well as a challenging language for Vietnamese learners to study since English and Vietnamese
are from different branches of the language tree. It has lots of fundamental rules which are so
different from Vietnamese ones that put Vietnamese learners in many difficulties. Among these
difficulties is the use of words as the word formations of English and Vietnamese have some
differences such as the conversion process I have discussed so far. Concerning conversion,
Vietnamese learners of English usually encounter two problems: tendency to add suffixes to form
bound morphemes to add to input words to create new words. Thus one of the most common and
typical ways to form words is affixation. “Affixation is the process by which an affix is added to
a base to form a new word” (Tô Minh Thanh, 102). Vietnamese learners who are strongly
influenced by this rule tend to add suffixes to every word to form a new one when using English.
the conversion process, i.e. the noun of the verb to import is import.
Similarly, when we form an adverb from an adjective, we are likely to put the suffix –ly
to the adjective although there are some adverbs which have exacly the form of its input like
difficulty in expressing our thoughts and ideas. The problem of translation is common and
make a mistake, i.e. we use the adjective silent for im lặng like this: Silent is gold.
Im lặng originally is an adjective, whereas in the above sentence it is a noun functioning
as the subject of the sentence. This is the conversion of Vietnamese. So when we deal with this
matter, we have to understand clearly the conversion process of each language to find the right
equivalent. With the above sentence, the correct translation is: Silence is gold.
It is the same case when Vietnamese learners deal with some English and Vietnamese
adjectives and adverbs. In Vietnamese, it is correct to say: Anh ấy nói tiếng Anh rất lưu loát. In
this sentence lưu loát serves as an adverb modifying the verb nói despite the fact that its original
word class is adjective. Clearly the process of conversion takes place here. So if we use the word
– by – word method to translate this sentence, the product will be like like this: He speaks
English very fluent whereas the right one must be: He speaks English very fluently.
CONCLUSION
Conversion is an effective way to create new words in both English and Vietnamese.
Days after days many new words are being created through the process of conversion. We
constantly come across some cases in which a housewife says that she is going to microwave the
chicken or friends talk about zip – coding their letters or pizza a bit before they freeway on home.
In daily conversations we talk about a star who stars in a film shown at a theatre where an usher
ushers or our plan to Christmas in Hawaii or a tailor who use scissors to scissor the material. For
this reason, as Vietnamese learners of English, we should have a profound knowledge of the
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Student: Huỳnh Phương Dung Conversion in English and Vietnamese
Class: 4A06 Contrastive Analysis
conversion phenomenon in both English and Vietnamese so that we are able to avoid making
REFERENCES
Nguyễn Thiện Giáp. (2002). Từ Vựng Học Tiếng Việt. Vietnam: Hanoi.
Từ đồng âm trong Tiếng Việt. Retrieved Dec 15,2009, from
http://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Từ_đồng _âm_trong_Tiếng_Việt.
Tô Minh Thanh. (2006). Giáo trình: Hình Thái Học Tiếng Anh_English Morphology (102).
in English: Some new trends in lexical evolution. Retrieved Dec 10, 2009, from
http://accurapid.com/Journal/31conversion.htm.
Trương Thị Diễm. Các cấp bậc khác nhau của hiện tượng chuyển loại trong Tiếng Việt –
http://www.kh-sdh.udn.vn/zipfiles/So11/7_DIEM_TRUONGTHI.doc.
Quirk, R. and S. Greenbaum. (1987). A University Grammar of English (441). London:
Longman.
Plag, Ingo. (2002). Word – formation in English (134). England: Cambridge.
Word (linguistics). Retrieved Dec 17, 2009, from http://www.spiritus-temporis.com/word-
linguistics-/
Wiśniewski, Kamil. (2007). Morphology. Retrieved Dec 5, 2009, from http://www.tlumaczenia-
angielski.info/linguistics/morphology.htm
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Class: 4A06 Contrastive Analysis
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