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HO CHI MINH UNIVERSITY OF EDUCATION

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH


CONVERSION IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE:


A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS

Instructor: Mr. Nguyễn Ngọc Vũ


Student : Huỳnh Phương Dung
Class : 4A06

Ho Chi Minh City


December 27, 2009
Student: Huỳnh Phương Dung Conversion in English and Vietnamese
Class: 4A06 Contrastive Analysis

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

method of communicating ideas, emotions and desires by means of a system of voluntarily

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).

Conversion, a popular phenomenon in languages, is a positive process of word – formation ,

which manifests the systematical autoregulations in languages. Interestingly, it is a productive

process of word – formation in both English and Vietnamese. However, the conversion

phenomenon of Vietnamese, an isolating language, and the conversion phenomenon of English,

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
Class: 4A06 Contrastive Analysis

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

root: {father: verb} = {father: noun} + {Ø}.


Meanwhile, Vietnamese is an isolating language, which means its bound morphemes

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

different. English is an inflectional language, and conversion in English is referred to as zero

derivation. Whereas Vietnamese is an isolating language, so conversion in Vietnamese is the

process in which an item shifts from a word-class to another without changing its form. So

people used to identify conversion as hymonymous.

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Student: Huỳnh Phương Dung Conversion in English and Vietnamese
Class: 4A06 Contrastive Analysis

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

closed class categories to open class categories.


Conversion of verb to noun
 Nouns converted from verbs expressing state of manner or feelings: hope, miss, love,

doubt, experience, fear, etc.


 Nouns expressing activities or events: laugh, guess, walk, attack, jump, spy, etc.
 Nouns as the objects of the original verbs: answer (‘that would be answered’), buy, call,

visit, increase, etc.


 Nouns as the subjects of the input verbs: judge, spy, clone, bore, cheat, etc.
 Nouns showing the instrument of the verb: cover, wrap, etc.
Conversion of noun to verb
 Verbs expressing the action of put in/on the noun: to bottle, to pocket, to film, etc.
 Verbs describing actions done with the original nouns as instrument: to knife, to hammer,

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

noun)”: to water, to coat, to carpet, to mask, etc.


 Verbs which mean “send/ go by (the original noun)”: to mail, to telephone, to ship, to

motor, to cycle, ect.


 Verbs which mean “make/ change … into (the noun)”: to rule, to silence, to schedule, to

cash, etc.
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Student: Huỳnh Phương Dung Conversion in English and Vietnamese
Class: 4A06 Contrastive Analysis

Conversion of adjective to verb


 Verbs which mean “to make adj”: to slow, to black, to calm, to wet, to dirty, etc.
 Verbs which mean “to become adj”: to empty, to dry, to clean, etc.
Conversion of adjective to noun
 Nouns indicating person: the poor, the rich, the blind, the deaf, etc.
 Nouns indicatinng state: the dark, the red, the blue, etc.
Converion of adjectives to adverbs: hard, early, late, etc.
Conversion of closed class categories to open class categories
 Prepositions → verbs: to up (= to get up, to rouse oneself: She upped and left without a

word.), to down (= to knock sb to the ground: He suddenly downed his wife.)


 Prepositions → adverbs: in (= contained within a an object, an area or a substance: I can’t

drink coffee with milk in.), on [= on sb’s body, being worn: What did she have on? (=

What was she wearing?)]


 Prepositions → nouns: the ups and downs = the mixture of good and bad things in life or

in a particular situation or relationship.


 Adverbs → nouns: the inside (= the inner part of sth: The inside of the box is blue.)
 Auxiliary verbs → nouns: must (= sth that you must do, see, buy, etc.: This novel is a

must for all lovers of crime fiction)


 Phrase → adjectives: under – the – weather (I felt very under – the – weather.), out of

date (These figures are very out of date.),etc.


APPROXIMATE CONVERSION
Approximate conversion is “the process by which a word, in course of changing its

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,

convert, contrast,rebel, etc.


Slight change in spelling: there are some nouns ending in voiceless fricative

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
Class: 4A06 Contrastive Analysis

consonant into /-z/, /-v/ and /-δ/, respectively (Bartolomé & Cabrera): advice → advise, thief →

thieve, breath → breathe.

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Student: Huỳnh Phương Dung Conversion in English and Vietnamese
Class: 4A06 Contrastive Analysis

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

changing its phonology features.


In this process, one word has the root meaning, and the meaning of the second word is

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

an adjective which means having the typical characteristics of a Vietnamese.

(2) Tôi bảo đảm cái đó sẽ có hiệu qua1 như mong muốn

Cô ấy làm việc rất hiệu qua2.

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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

sentence which modifies the verb làm việc.


Thirdly, we should also take in consideration the case of conversion from adjectives to

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.

Ex.: Anh ấy mượn cưa1 để cưa2 gỗ.

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

done with that kind of equipment has the root meaning.


In conversion process, the input word and the output word have the same spelling and

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
Class: 4A06 Contrastive Analysis

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

new words and problem in translation.


As I have said above, English is an inflectional language, which means it has a lot of

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.

We tend to write a sentence like this:


The report calls for a ban on the importion of hazardous waste.
From the verb import, we mistakenly add the suffix –tion to make its noun instead of applying

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

hard, late, etc.


Ex.: He studied hardly (instead of the true sentence: He studied hard.)
The following list contains some affixes that Vietnamese learners mistakenly add to

English words to constitute new words.


 To form nouns: –tion, –ment, –ness, –ship, –er, –ity, etc.
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Student: Huỳnh Phương Dung Conversion in English and Vietnamese
Class: 4A06 Contrastive Analysis

 To form verbs: –ify, –en, –ize, etc.


 To form adjectives: –ful, –ish, –ic, –able, –al, etc.
 To form adverbs: –ly, –wards.
As Vietnamese learners who study English as a foreign language, we usually have

difficulty in expressing our thoughts and ideas. The problem of translation is common and

natural. Conversion is also a challenge for us in the process of translation.


When translating the Vietnamese sentence: Im lặng là vàng into English, we usually

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
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conversion phenomenon in both English and Vietnamese so that we are able to avoid making

mistakes in using and translating between the two languages.

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).

Vietnam: Hochiminh City.


Hồ Lê. (1976). Vấn đề cấu tạo từ của tiếng Việt hiện đại (164). Vietnam: Hanoi.
(2006). Từ Điển Tiếng Việt. Vietnam: Hanoi – Danang.
(2005). Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary 7th Edition. England: Oxford.
Bartolomé, Ana I. Hernández and Gustavo Mendiluce Cabrera. (2005). Grammatical Conversion

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 –

Different levels of conversion in Vietnamese. Retrieved Dec 10, 2009, from

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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Student: Huỳnh Phương Dung Conversion in English and Vietnamese
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Sapir, E. (1921). Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech – Chapter 1. Introductory:

Language Defined. Retrieved Dec 5, 2009, from http://www.bartleby.com/186/1.html.

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