MAJOR CONTEMPORARY APPROACHES TO THE ANALYSIS OF THE VIETNAMESE SIMPLE CLAUSE

Abstract

Clause as a grammatical category has been at the centre of attention throughout most of the history of linguistics in Vietnam and has caused a lot of troubles for analysis and interpretation. Great efforts have been made to shed light on this matter. There is, however, no consensus among Vietnamese linguists on clause analysis and interpretation because each of them seems to work on clause analysis in a variety
of approaches using different frameworks. In this paper, we aim at investigating some major contemporary approaches to the analysis of the Vietnamese simple clause with our critical appraisals of each approach to provide readers with an overview of Vietnamese clause studies. The study reveals that at present structural approaches influenced by European and American structuralists such as Saussure and Bloomfield, and functional approaches influenced by Dik’s functional grammar and Halliday’s systemic functional grammar seem to be the dominant grammatical models for the analysis of the Vietnamese simple clause.