A Morphological Typology-Based Comparative Study of Word Formation in Vietnamese and Japanese

Abstract

This study investigates the contrasting word formation strategies in Vietnamese and Japanese through the lens of morphological typology. Vietnamese, an analytic language, relies heavily on compounding, reduplication, and syntactic particles to convey grammatical meaning, while Japanese, an agglutinative language, employs rich inflectional morphology and affixation to encode grammatical relationships within words. Using a corpus of 100 lexical items from each language across semantic domains such as kinship, verbs, and technology, the research applies morpheme segmentation and typological mapping to identify structural patterns and functional roles of morphemes. The findings reveal that Vietnamese favors semantic transparency and syntactic flexibility, whereas Japanese demonstrates morphological density and hierarchical encoding. These typological differences have significant implications for second-language acquisition, translation strategies, and linguistic pedagogy, particularly in addressing learner challenges and optimizing cross-linguistic instruction. The study contributes to a deeper understanding of how morphological structures reflect broader linguistic and cultural systems.