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A Vietnamese Morphology
A Vietnamese Morphology
A Vietnamese Morphology
Overview[edit]
Vietnamese is often considered to be monosyllabic as its morphemes are considered
to be monosyllabic e.g. "tim" meaning "heart". However, some
Vietnamese words may consist of one or more syllables, composed of monosyllabic
morphemes that form together to create another word. An instance of a compound
word "mạnh mẽ" is derived from morphemes mạnh meaning "strong", mẽ meaning
"dramatic", fused together to create the word mạnh mẽ to mean "powerful".
There is a general tendency for words to have one or two syllables. Words with two
syllables are often of Sino-Vietnamese origin. A few words are three or four syllables.
A few polysyllabic words are formed from reduplicative derivation.
Additionally, a Vietnamese word may consist of a single morpheme or more than one
morpheme. Polymorphemic words are either compound words or words consisting of
stems plus affixes or reduplicants.[2]
Most Vietnamese morphemes consist of only one syllable. [3] Polysyllabic morphemes
tend to be borrowings from other languages. Examples follow:
Register Tones
The tones of all reduplicated words are always within the same tonal register
(either upper or lower). For example, nhỏ "small" with the hỏi tone when
reduplicated appears as nho nhỏ "smallish" with a ngang-toned reduplicant —
both syllables are in the upper tonal register.
Vietnamese has several different types of reduplicative patterns including both
total, partial, initial, final, rhyming, and alliterative patterns involving only
reduplicated material or both reduplicated material and affixation.
Reduplicant position. The resulting reduplicants can be either initial
(preceding the base) or final (following the base).
Initial reduplication:
bự "big" > bừ bự "quite big" (less) (base: bự, initial reduplicant: bừ-)
•
• khắm "fetid" > khăm khắm "smelly" (base: khắm, initial
reduplicant/affix: khăm-)
Final reduplication:
• mập "be fat" > mập mạp "be chubby" (base: mập, final
reduplicant/affix: -mạp)
• khóc "to weep" > khóc lóc "to whimper" (base: khóc, final
reduplicant/affix: -lóc)
Total reduplication involves copying the entire word base:
Prefixes
familiar (added to
lão- lão Thinh "ol’ Thinh, good old Thinh" (lão- + Thinh surname)
surnames)
Suffixes
Ablaut[edit]
See also[edit]
• Vietnamese syntax
• Vietnamese phonology
• Vietnamese language
Notes[edit]
1. ^ Comparison note: As such its grammar relies on word order and sentence structure rather than
morphology (in which word changes through inflection). Whereas European languages tend to use
morphology to express tense, Vietnamese uses grammatical particles or syntactic constructions.
2. ^ The reduplicant is the reduplicated part that is copied from the base. Reduplicants are similar in form
to affixes.
3. ^ An exception to this may be demonstratives like đây "here", nầy "this", đấy "there", nấy "that", etc.,
which may be analyzed as consisting of the following sub-syllabic morphemes: đ- "nominal
deictic", n- "noun modifier deictic", -ây~-ầy "proximal", -ấy "medial", etc. (See the demonstrative section
in the syntax article.)
4. ^ Borrowed from Malay pulau.
5. ^ A compound of dưa "melon" + chuột "mouse".
6. ^ From vội vàng "hurriedly", which is from vội "be in a hurry".
7. ^ Mair, Victor (October 2, 2012). "Vietnamese polysyllabism". Language Log. Retrieved July 21, 2022.
8. ^ Called từ láy in Vietnamese.
9. ^ Tonal harmony should not be confused with the more common phenomenon of tone sandhi which is
not present in Vietnamese.
10. ^ The term register is used in the Vietnamese linguistic literature; however, it should not be confused
with the term register as used in the general phonological literature to refer to a contrastive complex of
tone and voice quality.
11. ^ The term segment refers to either a consonant or a vowel.
12. ^ Martin Haspelmath has used the term duplifix to refer to this type of morpheme, Thompson (1965)
uses the term chameleon affix.
13. ^ One Vietnamese linguist has considered an inserted vowel element in certain "dramatic"
reduplications of disyllabic words to be an infix. These have the following form, where xxx represents
sounds in the first syllable, yyy represents sounds in the second syllable, and a (or à or ơ) is the inserted
vowel):
xxx.yyy > xxx-y-a-yy-xxx.yyy.
Examples:
Bibliography[edit]
• Beatty, Mark Stanton. (1990). Vietnamese phrase structure: An X-bar approach.
(Master's thesis, University of Texas at Arlington).
• Emeneau, M. B. (1951). Studies in Vietnamese (Annamese) grammar. University of
California publications in linguistics (Vol. 8). Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Nguyễn, Đình-Hoà. (1997). Vietnamese: Tiếng Việt không son phấn. Amsterdam:
John Benjamins Publishing Company.
• Nguyễn, Phú Phong. (1992). Vietnamese demonstratives revisited. The Mon-Khmer
Studies Journal, 20, 127-136.
• Nguyễn, Tài Cẩn. (1975). Từ loại danh từ trong tiếng Việt hiện đại [The word class of
nouns in modern Vietnamese]. Hanoi: Khoa học Xã hội.
• Nhàn, Ngô Thanh. (1984). The syllabeme and patterns of word formation in
Vietnamese. (Doctoral dissertation, New York University).
• Noyer, Rolf. (1998). Vietnamese 'morphology' and the definition of word. University of
Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, 5 (2), 65-89. ([1])
• Phong, Nguyễn Phu. (1976). Le syntagme verbal in vietnamien. Mouton: Le Haye.
• Shum, Shu-ying. (1965). A transformational study of Vietnamese syntax. (Doctoral
dissertation, Indiana University).
• Thompson, Laurence E. (1963). The problem of the word in Vietnamese. Word, 19 (1),
39-52.
• Thompson, Laurence E. (1965). Nuclear models in Vietnamese immediate-constituent
analysis. Language, 41 (4), 610-618.
• Thompson, Laurence E. (1991). A Vietnamese reference grammar. Seattle: University
of Washington Press. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. (Original work published
1965).
• Uỷ ban Khoa học Xã hội Việt Nam. (1983). Ngữ-pháp tiếng Việt [Vietnamese
grammar]. Hanoi: Khoa học Xã hội.
External links[edit]
• Vietnamese Online Grammar Project
• Vietnamese/Cambodian references (Linguist List)
• Additional Vietnamese references (Linguist List)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_grammar