English inversion with spatial deixis adverbials and its Vietnamse equivalents

Tóm tắt

English inversion is really complicated for almost all Vietnamese learners of English because of differences between the two languages. Similarly, they find it very hard to produce appropriate sentences with inversion. For example, in “ YES/ NO” questions, English lexical verbs or auxiliary are placed before subjects. (Are you aware of how important it is to learn English inversion? or does she understand the English inversion?). By contrast, the word order in Vietnamese language is quite opposite. That is to say, the subject is used before the verb (Bạn có nhận thấy học đảo ngữ trong tiếng Anh quan trọng như thế nào không?” hoặc “Cô ấy có hiểu đảo ngữ trong tiếng Anh không?). Obviously, such a difference seems to cause problems for anyone who wants to acquire English as a foreign language.

Due to limitation of time and scale, the author would like to show an overview of English declaratives, spatial deixis, the definition of inversion, its distinguishing features and types which provides learners basic and relatively sufficient knowledge of this grammatical phenomenon used in English. Accordingly, a difference between English and  Vietnamese inversion in declaratives with deictic adverbs is pointed out; then some implications in teaching English inversion are suggested. Hopefully, the paper will be useful for those who are interested in English teaching and learning.