Comparative Study On Personal Pronoun's Functions Of Pragmatics-Vietnamese And Chinese

As an overseas student from Vietnam, I discuss the differences between the Vietnamese and Chinese personal pronouns by comparative translation on the basis of my understanding of my mother tongue and my study of Chinese. I also explore the unique pragmatic features of the Vietnamese personal pronouns.By comparison, I find the Vietnamese personal pronouns have the following features:(1) They contain emotion and feelings. Different contexts and the positions, ages, and mood of the persons involved in the dialogue require the use of different personal pronouns.(2) There are a lot of Vietnamese personal pronouns with various forms. We have twenty-seven pure personal pronouns in singular and plural forms, and even more mixed personal pronouns. Besides, the plural forms are made in various ways, and most of the personal pronouns have gender differences.(3) They have complex categories. The frequent use of mixed personal pronouns is one of the distinctive features of the Vietnamese personal pronouns. Such pronouns have multi-functions because they can be use not only as personal pronouns, but also as address terms.The ways to express pragmatic functions of the Vietnamese personal pronouns in the discourse mainly include the followings:(1) All the Vietnamese personal pronouns, especially the mixed ones, contain feelings and reveal the relationships among the persons involved in the dialogue. So in daily communications, people usually use a lot of mixed personal pronouns to express then-feelings and reveal the interpersonal relationships.(2) The Vietnamese personal pronouns usually echo each other to express feelings and reveal the interpersonal relationships. From the linguistic perspective, it is a parallel structure; from the pragmatic perspective, it shows the higher or lower statuses of the persons and their feelings as well, complimentary or otherwise.(3) Like Chinese, the Vietnamese personal pronouns also have singular and plural forms and first, second, and third person forms. On top of that, they can also express strong feelings by changing the gender references, which is a special language feature of Vietnamese.