A study of semantic and pragmatic features of the adverb “still” and its equivalent “vẫn” in Vietnamese

Abstract

In the age of globalization, there is a noticeable increase in the number of English-Vietnamese bilingual speakers. Accordingly, this article describes some of the semantic and pragmatic features of the adverb \"still\" in English and its most common equivalent in Vietnamese “vẫn”. The data consists of 150 English sentences containing the adverb \"still\" and 150 Vietnamese sentences having the function word \"vẫn\" which are extracted from articles, magazines, short stories, poems, novels as well as lyrics. Through qualitative and quantitative methods, a contrastive analysis of these two words can be performed with the hope of contributing to language proficiency.