THE UNIVERSITY OF DANANG
UNIVERSITY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE STUDIES
SỸ THỊ THƠM
SEASON METAPHORS IN ENGLISH AND
VIETNAMESE SONGS: A COGNITIVE STUDY
DOCTORAL THESIS
IN SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES
DANANG - 2021
THE UNIVERSITY OF DANANG
UNIVERSITY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE STUDIES
SEASON METAPHORS IN ENGLISH AND
VIETNAMESE SONGS: A COGNITIVE STUDY
DOCTORAL THESIS
IN SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES
Major: ENGLISH LINGUISTICS
Code: 9220201
A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics
SUPERVISORS: 1. Assoc.Prof., Dr. Nguyễn Văn Long
2. Dr. Nguyễn Thị Minh Tâm
DANANG - 2021
i
STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP
Except where the reference is indicated, no other person’s work has been used
without due acknowledgement in the text of the dissertation.
This dissertation has not been submitted for the award of any degree of
diploma in any other tertiary institution.
Da Nang, December, 2021
ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost, I am greatly indebted to my supervisors for their
continuous support and conscientious supervision. Namely, I wish to express my
deep indebtedness to Assoc. Prof. Dr. Nguyễn Văn Long for his kindness of giving
me useful feedback, advice, and his constant encouragement to help me to
overcome obstacles. I am extremely thankful to Dr. Nguyễn Thị Minh Tâm for her
enlightening comments and discussions with our several-hour meetings for this
thesis. Thus, my supervisors fire up my confidence, determination in accomplishing
my dissertation.
I would like to express my great gratitude to Assoc. Prof. Dr. Phan Văn Hòa,
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Trần Hữu Phúc, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Nguyễn Thị Quỳnh Hoa, Assoc.
Prof. Dr. Lưu Quý Khương, Dr. Ngũ Thiện Hùng, Dr. Lê Thị Giao Chi, Dr. Võ Thị
Kim Anh for their precious comments and encouragement throughout my process of
writing this dissertation. I am also grateful to Assoc. Prof. Dr. Nguyễn Thị Thu Hiền,
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Nguyễn Ngọc Vũ, and Assoc. Prof. Dr. Ngô Hữu Hoàng for their
critical reviews, comments, advice in the version of manuscript at the faculty board of
doctoral dissertation examiners, leading to the revision for this version of current
manuscript. Besides, I deeply thank Dr. Lý Ngọc Toàn for his help, especially for
agreeing to code the subset of data as an intercoder to ensure the reliability of study.
I would like to thank the personnel departments, administrators in the Arm of
Special Forces in general, in Military University of Special Forces in particular for
their generosity in creating all favorable conditions including time, financial
supports, and permission for me to conduct the research. I also wish to express my
sincere gratitude to the leaders of the Faculty of Fundamental Science, and
colleagues who have encouraged me to finish this study.
Last but not least, I am very grateful to my family: my parents, my brothers
and sisters, my two children, and my husband. Especially, this dissertation could not
have been completed without the immense support of my husband, who kept on
encouraging me to never quit, even when things seemed hopeless.
iii
ABSTRACT
In the light of the conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), initiated by Lakoff
and Johnson (1980), this study aims at investigating the conceptualization of
season in English and Vietnamese songs. Accordingly, the study is intended to
identify the metaphors of SEASON in both languages. It is the viewpoint of
metaphors in pre-cognitive and cognitive periods that serves to build the
theoretical framework for this study.
Methodologically, the data are collected from English and Vietnamese song
lyrics written from the 20th century to present. Comparative method was mainly
employed in combination with descriptive method. Especially, the thesis employed the
procedure of the identifying of conceptual metaphors proposed by Steen (2007) and
Pragglejaz Group (2007). Thus, the two methods of metaphor analysis, namely
Metaphor Pattern Analysis (MPA, Stefanowitsch 2006) and the version of the
Metaphor Identification Procedure developed at Vrije Universiteit (MIPVU, Steen et
al. 2011) were used to characterize how conceptual metaphor of season is expressed.
This comparative analysis of the conceptual metaphors of season in English
and Vietnamese revealed that the two languages show a very similar
conceptualization of season-related expressions. In detail, the research findings
disclose 58 metaphors in total. Regarding SEASON as the target domain of a
metaphorical mapping, 40 metaphors are found in both English and Vietnamese.
The songs in two languages share 28 metaphors, and there are 12 metaphors which
are unique to one language but not the other. In terms of SEASON considered as the
source domain, 10 shared metaphors of SEASON are found in the both corpora.
Simultaneously, 6 metaphors are existent in Vietnamese, but not present in English.
In contrast, there are 2 cases found in English data only. It can be concluded that
there are both similarities and differences in metaphorizing the entity SEASON in
between English and Vietnamese. The factors related to the phenomenon are given
based on the physical and socio-cultural environment.
The dissertation, as briefly described above, is hoped to make significant
contribution to the teaching, learning and English-Vietnamese translating practice.
