Nowadays, in the era of science and technology, language as a means of
communication, has shown its great effects in many fields of our life. It takes part
in people’s activities, such as economy, education, society and so on. Thus,
language is also considered as a decisive factor for the development process of the
society. When a language is developed, its vocabulary is always in constant
development. At that time, the vocabulary is used to express new ideas, concepts to
reflect people’s activities, characters and mentalities.
However, in the grammatical system, there is a distinction which is called
language barrier. Especially, the important distinction is downtoners. During my
study time at University I have found that many students meet problems in usi ng
English downtoners and Vietnamese equivalence. They, maybe, don’t understand
clearly enough the types of downtoners, which lead to misunderstand the usages of
these words.