Cultural and language features in Vietnamese: general and special cases of classifiers: “con” and “cái”

Abstract

As far as cultural and language features in Vietnamese are concerned, I would like to touch upon the “règles d’exception” [rules of exceptions] “des sous-règles” [sub-rules] which account for a number of special cases that form a coherent and regular set. These rules of exceptions, limited in number, will be presented and classified by degrees of “exception” [degrés d’exceptionalité]. There are exceptions according to different degrees which are determined by a system more or less adapted to the language, in this case, the Vietnamese language. Vietnamese is a language with a system of classifiers. The complexity of the choice of classifiers is determined essentially by the form of the object and by the distinction between two worlds: animate and inanimate. I pay particular attention to the multifaceted usage of the two classifiers: “con” which generally represents the animate world, and “cái”, the inanimate one.