Language is a natural part of human life

Language is a natural part of human life in society, it is used by humans to interact, to establish and maintain social relationships, also through language that humans store and convey the experience of natural life and social life. Linguistic research has undergone major road and destination are now focusing more attention to the language used in system implementations, consider the relationship of language to the system function it serves, not separated from the living language of its reality, not considered language as a subject in itself and as it as ever been through. The study of language as a system in itself and because it is not in vain, the main task was to help people discover the organizational structure is extremely complex and sophisticated language system. And that is the prerequisite for qualified language effectively serve the increasingly complex effect, increasing sophistication of man with man in the social development along with the language system language development, respectively. However, the study of language serve social interaction helps scientists understand more about the language of the language system and the capabilities of the system while it operates. This new step of language learning will contribute significantly to the general advancement of science and technology in the construction of communication between man and man machine simulation. This large shift of language learning also poses new problems and new difficulties. According to the analysis of discourse, the language is used in communicating with two functions: interpersonal functions and transaction functions. Functions associated with human setting, maintaining emotional ties between people with and interact with people trading functions impart experience, understanding each other. Modern linguistics is not only dedicated to the study of language code signing propositional content of the transaction in favor of formal logic, but also interested in both human development and implementation of the inter-relationship.

Language reflects people’s cognition of the world around, which is related to the cultural- psychological features of each nation. People who are the subjects cognizing the world can convey their thoughts, their ideas as well as their desires about the world via language. Therefore, it is no doubt to say that space exists in linguistics naturally through people’s cognitive lens. It is found that the sense of space is always the essential part of most word classes such as nouns, pronouns, prepositions and adjectives. Moreover, any entity in the material world always conceals a lot of attributes. Among them, the attribute of dimension is easily seen. This attribute exists mainly in some commonly used dimensional adjectives such as high-low, tall-short, long-short, deep-shallow, thick-thin, wide/ broad-narrow in English or cao-thấp, dài- ngắn, sâu-nông, dày-mỏng, rộng-hẹp in Vietnamese. However, DAs are not completely the same in English and in Vietnamese.

For example, in English, people say:

“The apple tree in our garden was seven meters tall. I didn’t think that it was so high” [9]

In the utterance above, tall and high are DAs used to indicate the vertical extent of the apple tree but their meanings are different. “Tall” means “in relation to what one expects of it” while “high” means “reaching a point above the normal level”. Unlike English, Vietnamese only has the adjective “cao” to denote these two senses.

That leads to some semantic difficulties for learners of English as well as translators. For example, students of English may write an incorrect sentence like "I didn’t know trees were so tall"; but it must be “I didn’t know trees were so high". Or Vietnamese students of English feel confused when translating the following utterances into Vietnamese:

That was a man with a high stomach. (Đó là một người đàn ông bụng phệ.)

The grass is ankle deep. (Cỏ cao đến mắt cá chân.)

The snow is very deep on the road. (Tuyết trên đường rất dày.)

Elephants ‘legs are thick. (Chân của những con voi to.)

His ears are wide. (Tai của ông ấy to.)

Regarding the syntactic aspect, Vietnamese students may pay no attention to the positions of DAs in a noun phrase or in a sentence. They tend to use “word by word translating” method. For example, they may translate the sentence “Chị ấy là một phụ nữ cao lớn” into English as “She is a woman tall”; in fact, it must be “She is a tall woman”.