How Meanings Conflated into Verbs in Vietnamese: A Cognitive Perspective

Abstract

This study looks into the complex patterns of conflation that Vietnamese verbs display, providing insight into the subtle interactions that exist between language, cognition, and culture. The study investigates the systematic combination of different conceptual categories, including Action, Cause, Manner, Motion, Path, Perception, Position, and Location, within Vietnamese verb forms. It is based on the theoretical frameworks of renowned linguists, including Goldberg’s construction grammar, Jackendoff's semantic structures, and Talmy's lexicalization patterns. Through the use of a mixed-methods approach, the study extracts information from interviews with native speakers, elicitation tests, and corpus-based analysis. A thorough comprehension of the common conflation patterns and the cognitive processes that underlie them is made possible by the large corpus of data and empirical evidence from native speaker interactions. The results show a rich tapestry of internal conflation patterns, showing how different conceptual categories are conflated inside single verb forms. Further highlighting the persistent addition of more semantic aspects to verb structures are external conflation patterns, such as grammatical, construction, and category conflation. The results of the study advance our understanding of the cognitive mechanisms underpinning meaning construction as well as the cultural aspects affecting language use in Vietnamese contexts. Additionally, the knowledge acquired has useful applications in fields including language instruction, natural language processing, and cross-cultural communication.