The aspect meaning of đang marker in Vietnamese (contrastive study to Mandarin Chinese)

Abstract

Đang is a marker that denotes the typical imperfective meaning in Vietnamese. Vietnamese and Mandarin Chinese languages belong to the same isolating language typology, but the đang marker is not always translated into 在 or 着 marker in Mandarin Chinese. The results of the study shows that the đang marker can interact with individual level state situation, stage level state situation, activity situation, accomplishment situation, achievement situation and semelfactive situation. Based on the attributes of the situation, the đang marker possible to convey different aspect meanings. With each situation type, we also need to pay attention to their extended attributes. Accordingly, the aspect meaning of a situation is the summation of the meaning of the verb, the aspect marker, the situation type, and the surrounding arguments. In this article, to clarify the aspect meaning of the đang marker as well as equivalent means of translation in Mandarin Chinese, we proceed to collect corpus, describe, analyze and contrast this marker into Mandarin Chinese based on the semantic - syntax level. The contrastive study of aspectual markers has an important role in helping learners better understand the connection between the source language and the target language. Seeing the differences between the markers will help learners limit the negative transfer process in learning a foreign language.