Russian Linguistic Bulletin (Apr 2021)

ENGLISH PERCEPTION VERBS COGNITIVE METAPHORS AND THEIR EQUIVALENCE IN VIETNAMESE

  • Phuong, N.H.

DOI
https://doi.org/10.18454/RULB.2021.25.1.28
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 2021, no. 1 (25)
pp. 115 – 122

Abstract

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The semantics of English perception verbs are various, complicated, and subtle. It is necessary to have a profound understanding of specific contexts to translate these verbs into Vietnamese. For instance, the verb "see" can have dozens of meanings in different situations, such as contemplating, seem to be, considering, checking, supervising, watching, thinking, noticing, hoping, turning to somewhere, etc. As a result, this article aims to research and study the cognitive metaphor equivalence of English perception verbs in Vietnamese. In total, 3,946 sentences with perception verbs were inspected and collected as research data from two sets of English-Vietnamese, Vietnamese-English bilingual novels. Linguistic methods, such as descriptive, analytical, contrastive, and metaphor identification methods, have been used to analyze and investigate the basic ways that these verbs can convey cognitive metaphor meanings. Research results show that there are six modes of cognitive metaphor formation. These results help learners, translators, and interpreters of Vietnamese and English use them effectively and comprehensively in their bilingual interactions.

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