Abstract

The arrangement of attributives in Vietnamese noun phrases presents a significant challenge for foreign language learners, especially Chinese learners. The primary cause lies in the structural difference of the noun phrase: Vietnamese permits both pre-nominal and post-nominal attributives, whereas in modern Chinese, attributives are strictly pre-nominal. Although there are differences in position, attributives in both languages share many similarities in meaning and grammatical function.

According to structural linguistics theory, both Vietnamese and Chinese belong to the isolating language type with sentence components following the SVO (Subject-Verb-Object) structure. This creates an advantage for Chinese when learning Vietnamese grammar, particularly with simple sentences that strictly follow the SVO structure without too many complex supplementary components, such as: "Tôi ăn cơm." (我-吃-饭) 我吃饭; "Cô ấy rất tốt." (她-很-好) 她很好. With these sentences, teachers only need to provide sentence patterns and guide learners to look up meanings and identify parts of speech to create sentences that are grammatically and semantically accurate.

However, sentence-level similarities are insufficient to fully address the difficulties encountered by learners, as the divergences between the two languages become more pronounced at the phrasal level, particularly regarding the position and ordering of attributives. Based on a comparative analysis of the attributive characteristics in Vietnamese and modern Chinese noun phrases, this study offers referential suggestions aimed at helping Chinese learners of Vietnamese to correctly identify and arrange the positions of different attributive types in Vietnamese noun phrases.