An experiment of investigating syntactic behavior of nouns and verbs in Vietnamese in terms of iconicny

Abstract

This paper deals with syntactic behavior of nouns and verbs in Vietnamese. Generally, in our language nouns differ from verbs in that they are different in compound with such other words as những, các, này, no... (as for nouns) or đã, dang, sẽ, xong, rói... (as for verbs). However, in some cases, a noun or a verb may lack these abilities. According to the hypothesis of iconicity in syntax, the syntactic behavior of nouns and verbs in Vietnamese are determined by the way they are used either prototypically or nonprototypically. The categories of nouns and verbs actually manifest themselves only when the discourse requires them to: the less a linguistic element is required by the discourse either to report an discrete discourse event or to introduce a discrete entity participating in the state of affairs, the less saliently it will be marked as verbs or nouns.