Vietnamese demonstratives: A spatially-based polysemy network

Abstract

For all human beings, a crucial function of language is to draw attention to things in the world. Like most languages, Vietnamese has its set of 'pointing words' that fulfil this function, including này 'this', đây 'this/here ' and đấy, đó, kia 'that/there', ấy 'that', and nọ 'that'. Though the meaning of these seven words has expanded and changed over time, all of them originally served to orient the hearer's attention to something proximal or distal to the speaker's location. These words are termed demonstratives in English or chỉ định từ in Vietnamese.Chỉ định từ currently play a wide range of syntactic and semantic roles. They can occur as the determiner in a noun phrase (nhà này 'this house', nhà ấy/kia/nọ 'that house') or appear on their own as either pronominals (đây/đấy, đó, kia là nhà tôi 'this/that is my house') or as locative adverbs (lại đây 'come here', đến đấy/đó/kia 'go there'). In the appropriate syntactic environments, these terms allow the speaker to 'point' not only to specific objects but also to abstract, invisible concepts that are present, distant, remembered or imagined. Despite the wide range of uses of chỉ định từ, an exhaustive analysis of their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic functions has previously been lacking in Vietnamese.Even a cursory analysis of the seven Vietnamese demonstratives reveals that each has not just one meaning or sense, but rather a complex network of related senses, or polysemy network. For example, the demonstrative ấy has thirteen different senses, including the function of indicating the position of a referent in space (a spatial sense), preceding discourse (an anaphoric sense) or in the memory of the speaker and/or hearer (as in recognitional, presentational, place holder, or avoidance usages). In addition, ấy has extended senses indicating person deixis, discourse cohesion, modality and interjective usages.Unquestionably, the form ấy has a wide variety of uses in Vietnamese. Is it coincidence that these uses share the same form ấy? If that were the case, the uses of ấy would be unconnected homonymous meanings. Or are these uses somehow related? If so, then the uses of ấy are polysemous senses, and it should be possible to trace how each sense evolved from another, ultimately tracking the evolution of the polysemy network back to a single ancestral sense.This study analyses the form and function of chỉ định từ as found in a range of written texts, and finds that the various functions of Vietnamese demonstratives are related. The extensions responsible for the current range of demonstrative functions follow recognised paths of metaphoric and metonymic change, so that these changes can be reconstructed from synchronic data even in the ii absence of direct historical evidence.Although all of the seven demonstratives are argued to be polysemous as the result of semantic extensions, each demonstrative has followed its own path of change and no two demonstratives have identical polysemy networks. These differences are due both to the individual semantics...

A comparison between English demonstratives and Vietnamese demonstratives in argumentative essays

“…A completely contradictory pattern of demonstrative use could be recognized in Vietnamese essays when proximal demonstratives đây(này) tended to mark topic continuity and distal demonstratives đấy(đó), kia, ấy tended to signal topic discontinuity, which is similar to what was suggested by Bui (2014). She examined all instances of anaphoric demonstratives from various written discourse materials and concluded that while proximal demonstrative này expressed more important topics which were likely to be discussed again in the following discourse, distal demonstrative ấy indicated less important topics which were not likely to appear again.…”

“…He suggested classifying Vietnamese demonstratives into three categories in accordance with their degree of distance: proximal đây(này), medial đấy(đó), ấy and distal kia; and implied that this distinction also had some relevance with the demonstratives' morphological features. However, this approach was revisited and refuted by Bui (2014) with a more comprehensive analysis of examples from various sources of written discourse (journals, poetry, conversations recorded in books). She argued that it was not appropriate to use the morphological approach to distinguish demonstratives, and there was no significant difference between the medial đấy(đó), ấy and distal demonstratives kia as Nguyen (1992) had proposed.…”

“…She argued that it was not appropriate to use the morphological approach to distinguish demonstratives, and there was no significant difference between the medial đấy(đó), ấy and distal demonstratives kia as Nguyen (1992) had proposed. Bui (2014) then presented a new distinction of Vietnamese demonstratives as shown in Table 1: While the proximal demonstrative đây can appear in the head position and act as a pronoun, the only possible position of the other proximal demonstrative này is a determiner for nouns or noun phrases. For distal demonstratives, there are commonly four words, in which đấy and đó are interchangeable in most cases; together with kia, these three demonstratives can appear in both head and determiner position.…”

“…In her study, Bui (2014) also offered accounts for the metaphoric extensions of proximal and distal demonstratives by analyzing their spatial, temporal, presentational, and discourse usage from the perspectives of semantics and pragmatics. Additionally, the role of demonstratives as sentencefinal particles was also discussed in Nguyen (2021), revealing that they were used to express the psychological distance between the speaker and the statement.…”

“…One distinct referential use of Vietnamese demonstratives observed in this study's writing samples was the involvement of distal demonstrative đó in constructing different discourse connectives, which can be summarized and displayed in Table 5. In these cases, the information that the demonstrative referred to in the preceding text could be considered the source of semantic relations marked by these connectives (Bui, 2014). Take excerpt (21) as an example, the linking phrase từ đó ('thus') indicated a causal relation, in which the subsequent information (having the spirit of selfcontrol, self-confidence, and creativity) was the consequence of the previously mentioned one (the ability of self-assessment).…”