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The conceptual metaphor theory states that poetic metaphors are in fact conventional metaphors but they are made novel via four techniques - elaboration, extending, questioning, and combination. Based on this sense, our paper focuses on examining and comparing poetic metaphors of romantic love in English to those in Vietnamese. Contrastive analysis is the main method applied in the study with the data for investigation coming from English and Vietnamese love poems. Also, the metaphor identifcation procedures by Pragglejaz Group and its extension are employed to minimize the risk of impulsiveness in metaphor collection process. Our fndings reveal that the novelty of love metaphors in poetry does not lie in concepts but in linguistic expressions thanks to the four above techniques, among which combination is employed much more than the others in both languages. Furthermore, both conceptual and linguistic metaphors of love are found to be similar between English and Vietnamese poetry, which is supposed to result from the universality of metaphor. However, variations of cultures, lifestyles, and thought bring about some differences of love metaphors between these two languages.

Clause as a grammatical category has been at the centre of attention throughout most of the history of linguistics in Vietnam and has caused a lot of troubles for analysis and interpretation. Great efforts have been made to shed light on this matter. There is, however, no consensus among Vietnamese linguists on clause analysis and interpretation because each of them seems to work on clause analysis in a variety of approaches using different frameworks. In this paper, we aim at investigating some major contemporary approaches to the analysis of the Vietnamese simple clause with our critical appraisals of each approach toprovide readers with an overview of Vietnamese clause studies. The study reveals that at present structuralapproaches influenced by European and American structuralists such as Saussure and Bloomfeld, andfunctional approaches influenced by Dik’s functional grammar and Halliday’s systemic functional grammarseem to be the dominant grammatical models for the analysis of the Vietnamese simple clause.