1. Full name: Nguyen Thi Hong Tuyen                                        2. Sex:  Female

3. Date of birth:  18th September, 1972                                      4. Place of birth: Ninh Binh, Viet Nam

5. Admission Decision number: 2331/QĐ - ĐHNN issued by the President of VNU University of Languages and International Studies, dated 23 December 2016.

6. Changes in academic process: No changes

7. Official thesis title: Transport construction engineering terminology in English and Vietnamese from Language planning perspective  

8. Major: English linguistics.                                                          9. Code: 9220201.01             

10. Supervisors:       

Supervisor 1: Associate Prof. Doctor. Lê Hùng Tiến

Supervisor 1:  Doctor. Huỳnh Anh Tuấn

11. Summary of the new findings of the thesis:

Theoretical implications

The Doctoral Thesis has contributed to Theories in Terminology Planning and Management (including Term Resource Development), Lexical Semantics, and EMI Training Theory.

Implications to the Theory of Terminology Planning: The greatest theoretical significance of the thesis is to Terminology Planning Theory. It is the first language planning - oriented terminology work conducted by a linguist in the field of TCE. This revolution in research and practice concerning TCE terminology planning brings Terminology and Linguistics close together. The principals and methods applied and discovered in the study are in marked difference from the ones in the traditional approach and form a different approach in TCE terminology planning. The research results imply that terminology management can only be fully effective with the coordination of linguists and specialists as terminologists.  This research postulates an interdisciplinary approach and theoretical premises to make the modeling of conceptual structure less subjective, i.e. not merely based on intuition of specialist experts. The thesis also reinstates the position that terms are living elements with their characteristics and relations in the communicative context. Also, any terminology research is aimed at terminology products for a specific kind of users, so their needs must be taken into considerations. Sociocognitive terminology can bring about the fullest affordances for term users.

Implications to Lexical Semantic Terminology: The thesis highlights that specialized language semantics is concerned with the mental representation of terminological units and their relations with other units in the same domain. Lexical Semantics can be successfully applied to terminology planning, which results in not only the conceptual structure and constellations of concepts in semantic networks but also the combinational potentials of terms of the specialized domain.  The theoretical values of the thesis lie in the identification of 32 HBD typical Lexical Relations with 19 Paradigmatic relations and 13 Syntagmatic ones. Many of the original LFs were simplified and renamed to facilitate easy understanding of non-linguistic EMI students and experts. These LRs were further analyzed and categorized from meaning perspective to see how they are multidimensionally linked to each other.              New paradigmatic and syntagmatic LRs emerged and quite a few term systems which are hierarchically, associatively and collocationally related were established.

Implications to EMI training theory: The thesis confirms the very important role of terminology planning as a     pedagogical tool to facilitate knowledge acquisition in the EMI training environment. EMI students need both conceptual lexical relations and collocational patterns in the knowledge-based term products for learning specialized subjects in English. However, term support has been hardly researched in EMI training, especially in Vietnam where the level of English proficiency is lower than in countries where English is an official or second language. Teaching methods for EMI students need to be established based on specific training conditions. In additions, the role of English language teachers in teaching English for     specific purposes has been questioned in the recent years, especially by specialist subject teachers even though the name of the subject is English. The ability of language teachers to teach disciplinary content embedded in ESP is suspected. The current research confirms English language teachers not only can teach ESP but also can play a prominent role in helping EMI students to acquire disciplinary content. This kind of research is impossible to be conducted by terminologists as specialist experts.    Language researchers and teachers not only can teach ESP but also can transfer epistemological knowledge to EMI students via knowledge-based terminology. The coordination of the researchers on both sides results in the beneficial term products for EMI students.

Methodological implications

The top-down approach: Terminologists as linguists don’t apply top-down terminology research because they cannot visualize the skeleton frames and sub-frames of the term system like specialist experts. This is time consuming and the resulting organization of terms is not much beneficial for translation as well as knowledge and language acquisition. The sources of data were collected in a different way. Rather than using terms taken from dictionaries or term bases composed by expert specialists, the Lexical Relations were extracted from a reliable text-book which is compacted with knowledge in HBD with multidimensional relations. The bottom-up           method involved studying terms in the real usage context in a specific textbook. Not only the typical Lexical Relations with their degree of typicality were identified but also the multidimensional relations of terms were investigated. Both the Paradigmatic and Syntagmatic Lexical Relations were investigated in depth. Moreover, students’ needs at the lowest level of terminology planning were surveyed, so the research was aimed at a certain product for specific users. The survey questionnaire was composed based on the typical TCE Paradigmatic and Syntagmatic Lexical Relations in HBD Event. Students are positioned at the lowest level of language planning model and term relations extracted from textbook are at grass-root level, too. This, therefore, features the bottom-up term planning method that is in contrast with the top-down approach, in which the state government issues policies in language planning and term lists are prepared subjectively by specialist experts. The linguist has made use of her strong points in applying linguistic models in terminology research. The HBD terms are investigated not as discrete units but in relations with other terms in the usage contexts. In other studies, terms are treated as discrete units without relations, orders, patterns, or other facets of languages.

Multi-disciplinary descriptive terminology research: The current terminology planning research is descriptive by nature, which is concerned with term analysis, description, and presentation rather than prescriptive, which is concerned with terminology standardization. The terminological descriptions are not superficial based on structural forms but get deep into the technical meanings of the HBD term system, which linguists have hardly attempted to do before. The research is interdisciplinary concerning English Linguistics, EMI Training, Terminology Research, and Disciplinary Knowledge. The overall approach of terminology planning is not only advanced in Transport Construction Engineering but also in Terminology in general.

A comprehensive Analytical Framework was developed and applied: The biggest methodological contribution of the thesis is the formation of the Analytical Framework for the study. Being well-aware of the needs for language planning-oriented terminology planning to satisfy EMI students’ needs and the affordances of Lexical Semantics in Terminology, the author tried to seek a linguistic modal to develop the Analytical Framework for TCE terminology planning and settled on Lexical Functions in Meaning Text Theory developed by Mel’čuk (1981, 1996). The Lexical Functions were adapted and supplemented to form the Framework for analysing and categorizing Lexical Relations in Highway Bridge Design Event. This enabled a description of both conceptual relations and term combinational potentials.

12. Practical implications

Whether Terminology is descriptive or prescriptive, it is always connected to a form of terminology products for specific term users. The result of the study will help TCE EMI students not only acquire epistemological knowledge but also learn English for Specific Purposes (ESP). The current terminological research has several remarkable practical implications. First, TCE EMI student’s needs as regards terminology resources as a tool to disciplinary access are found out so that TCE EMI students can be better supported with suitable terminology resources. Not only Vietnamese students but also non-native English-speaking students from other countries who are trying their best to acquire both English language and disciplinary literacy can benefit from the results of the study. The study results can be used as a source of references for higher education institutions to modify their language planning policies to provide pedagogical support for academic access and implement language-in-education planning research projects for the same purposes. Secondly, the language planning-oriented term resources as products have quite a few advantages over the traditional ones because terms are presented in relations with each other so they can simultaneously provide disciplinary and linguistic knowledge to students. It can also be used as a reference resource for other stakeholders including TCE students, technical writers, translators and TCE engineers who need a quick access to English terms with their Vietnamese equivalents and basic disciplinary knowledge. Representation of specialized concepts in networks with both vertical and horizontal relations is very important in terminological work. Non- hierarchical relations defining the cause, effect, action, attribute, associative, and result of HBD event are as important as hierarchical ones such as Type-of or Part-of, etc. Typical semantic roles of Agent, Patient, Result, Instrument, and Location, Means, Method/ Approach, etc. in HBD Event are identified, too. Term users can obtain knowledge of English collocational patterns, namely Nominal Collocations, Verbal Collocations and Prepositional Collocations. All the typical combinational patterns such as Adjective + Noun, Quantifier + Noun, Verb + Noun, Noun + Verbs, and Prepositional combinations with various paradigmatic lexical relations bring quite a lot benefit to term users. Furthermore, with the aid of computer science, in which tags as well as different forms of diagrams and mind maps link one term to others systematically, the multidimensionality of terms relations will be presented in computer environment to enrich information for the convenience of term users. This also sets the initial steps for research and application of artificial intelligence in TCE terminology management. And finally, the extracted terms, LRs, Vietnamese term equivalents discovered in the study can be used to develop specialized TCE dictionaries. The research results are useful for not only Vietnamese EMI students but students of different mother tongues who study TCE subjects in English.

13. Further research directions, if any:

- The meanings and potentials of        Lexical Functions for terminology analysis have not been completely exploited. There are Lexical Functions that have not fully revealed their usefulness for HBD term relation analysis, but the reasons for this have not been clearly articulated. Only the identified Lexical Relations were triangulated with specialist experts, but there remains unidentified Lexical Relations and the identified one have not been categorized exhaustively from different dimensions, therefore, they should be further refined and analyzed.

- The Verbal Collocations based on LRs are major findings of the thesis, however, much further investigation should be conducted as regards the meaning of auxiliaries and realization verbs. There remain some uninvestigated Lexical Relations in the category of Verbal Collocations. It may not be true that these kinds of relations do not exist in HBD text-book but because the researcher has not been able to identify and categorize them.

-  The students are non-linguistic majors and it was hard for them to understand precisely the ideas in the questionnaire, so their answers might have not reflected what they think because they may have interpreted the meaning of the questions wrongly. There should be interviews with EMI students and EMI university lecturers for in-depth understanding of what they thought to supplement the information collected from the survey questionnaire.

-  HBD is a part of TCE and the potentials of LRs  should be taken advantage of in further research in other sub-branches of TCE such as Highway design, Highway, Railway, and Tunnel Design and Construction, Material and Soil Mechanics, etc. and also in other disciplinary domains.

14. Thesis-related publications:

1. Looking into Transport Construction Engineering Terminology from language Planning Perspective, Kỷ yếu Hội thảo dành cho nghiên cứu sinh, Đại Học Ngoại ngữ - ĐH Quốc gia Hà Nội, 2017

2. Concept characteristics and concept systems of term systems in Transport construction engineering, Kỷ yếu Hội thảo dành cho nghiên cứu sinh, Đại Học Ngoại ngữ - ĐH Quốc gia Hà Nội, 2018

3. Transport construction terminology planning based on lexical relations and students' needs, Science journal of transportation - Special Issue No. 11 International cooperation Journals MADI - SWJTU - UTC, 2021

4. Codifying bridge terminology based on lexical functions in Meaning text theory - Science journal of transportation - Special Issue No. 12 International cooperation Journals MADI - SWJTU - UTC, 2022.