TTLV: Idioms expressing non-real cognitive modality in Vietnamese and equivalent means of expression in Italian

1. Student's name: Nguyen Minh Nguyet
2. Gender: Female
3. Date of birth: March 8, 1989
4. Place of birth: Hanoi
5. Decision on recognition of students No. 2705/2020/QD-XHNV Date: December 24, 2020 of the President of the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University, Hanoi.
6. Changes in training process: No
7. Thesis topic: Idioms expressing non-real cognitive modality in Vietnamese and equivalent means of expression in Italian
8. Major: Linguistics; Code: 8229020.01
9. Scientific instructors: Dr. Vo Thi Minh Ha, Dr. Doan Thi Thu Ha
10. Summary of the results of the thesis: Through the survey of the corpus, we obtained a list of 50 idioms expressing non-real cognitive modality (TTNT) in Vietnamese and 47 equivalent means of expression in Italian. After describing, analyzing and comparing these units, we basically came to some conclusions as follows:
- Regarding syntactic behavioral characteristics, Vietnamese non-realistic idioms and equivalent means of expression in Italian have similarities in terms of their dominant position in the sentence (beginning of the sentence) as well as in the relative stability of the combinatorial structure;
- Unlike Vietnamese, Italian is a type of agglutinative language, words that come into operation in sentences are subject to the rules of morphological change, so the equivalent means of idioms expressing TTNT in Italian do not have the flexibility in terms of their position in sentences like the non-existent TTNT idioms in Vietnamese;
- Regarding the type of elements that make up an idiom: if in Vietnamese, the elements that make up an idiom that is not real are usually structures in the form of a sub-clause, a verb structure and a prepositional structure and there are almost no units at the word level, then in Italian, there are quite a lot of elements at the word level (verbs, modal adverbs);
- Regarding the means of expressing non-real information: if Vietnamese has idioms which are lexical units used with high frequency in native speakers' communication, then in Italian there are not only lexical means but also grammatical means. This group of grammatical means can be classified according to the mood and tense of the verb, in which the subjunctive mood (congiuntivo) and future tense stand out.
11. Practical applicability: Application in teaching and learning Italian as a foreign language for Vietnamese learners and for Italian learners of Vietnamese; increasing the effectiveness of the translation and interpretation process between Vietnamese and Italian by providing additional knowledge about the meaning of non-real AI and corresponding means of expression in Vietnamese and Italian; application in building Vietnamese-Italian and Italian-Vietnamese dictionaries.
12. Further research directions: Expand the scope of Vietnamese idiom surveys on other cognitive modality expressions, compare with equivalent means in Italian; study the different scales of these means regarding the speaker's commitment to the truthfulness (certainty - uncertainty) of the content conveyed in the clause.
13. Published works related to the thesis:
- Nguyen Minh Nguyet (2022), Survey of means of expressing equivalents of non-real cognitive modality idioms in Vietnamese through Italian translations of Le Minh Khue's works, Proceedings of the Scientific Conference for Teachers of Italian Language Department, May 2022, pp. 31 - 44.