1 VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY- HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST- GRADUATE STUDIES NGUYỄN THỊ HỒNG NHUNG A STUDY ON IMPLICATURE IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE FUNNY STORIES (Hàm ngôn trong truyện cười tiếng Anh và tiếng Việt) M.A Minor Programme Thesis Field: English Linguistics Code: 60.A Đào Thu Trang HANOI-2010 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com 2 VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY- HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST- GRADUATE STUDIES NGUYỄN THỊ HỒNG NHUNG A STUDY ON IMPLICATURE IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE FUNNY STORIES (Hàm ngôn trong truyện cười tiếng Anh và tiếng Việt) M.A Minor Programme Thesis Field: English Linguistics Code: 60.A Đào Thu Trang HANOI-2010 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com 6 TABLE OF CONTENTS STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP………. i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………………… ii ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………… iii LIST OF TABLE AND FIGURE…………………………………………………. vi PART A: INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………… 1 1. Aims of the Study……………………………………………………………….
Scope of the Study. Method of the Study. Organization of the Study. 4 CHAPTER 1: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND.
Overview of Discourse Analysis. Definition of Discourse. Discourse versus Text. Context in Discourse Analysis.
The Notion of Implicature. The Cooperative Principal and Maxims. The Maxim of Quantity. The Maxim of Quality.
The Maxim of Relation. The Maxim of Manner. 16 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail. Overview of Funny Stories.
17 CHAPTER 2: THE STUDY. Maxim of Quantity. Maxim of Quality. Maxim of Relation.
Maxim of Manner. Result and Discussion of the Result………………………………………. Implications to Language Teaching and Learning. Limitation of the Study and Suggestions for Further Study.
I APPENDIX 1: ENGLISH FUNNY STORIES. I APPENDIX 2: VIETNAMESE FUNNY STORIES. V TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com 8 LIST OF TABLE AND FIGURE Table 1: Breaking maxims in English and Vietnamese funny stories……………………34 Figure 1: Breaking maxims in English and Vietnamese funny stories…… TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com 9 PART A: INTRODUCTION 1. Rationale Language is one of the most important areas of human development.
It is the mechanism by which people communicate, and the means by which people convey their emotion. However, in our day-to-day conversational exchanges, for some reasons, people do not always directly express their ideas. As Jenny Thomas states in her book “Meaning in Interaction” that speaker frequently means much more than their words actually say (Thomas 1995: 1). The hearer interprets a meaning that is not clearly stated in the utterance of the speaker.
Utterances, standing alone out of context, make us confused in our communication. However, being put into the context, words and phrases can be interpreted in a way that makes people understand the intentional meaning of the utterances. The reason is that we as speakers and hearers, according to the American philosopher- linguistics Paul Grice, operate under the cooperative principal, which means that both speaker and hearer converse with good intentions. In other words, the speaker utters words and phrases in order to deliver a message to the hearer, who interprets a meaning with the knowledge that there is a message behind the utterance.
In order to show what goes on in conversation, Grice introduced four conversational maxims. A speaker might fall to observe a maxim but still get the intended meaning through to the hearer. Falling to observe a maxim is often referred to as “breaking a maxim”. In funny story, these maxims are constantly broken to create humor.
Funny stories are a crucial part of every culture and every society. From the past to now, it has been an entertaining form to make people feel cheerful and happy. Sometimes, it can be used as a means of weapon to fight against the negative things in the society. However, different types of humor are more appealing to different people based on their personal sense of humor and background.
And people from different countries have their own sense of humor, therefore understanding funny stories means that you have to uncover many things relating to their nations. Sometimes we wonder why some unfinished and meaningless sentences can make people laugh. To achieve this interpretation successfully, readers have to understand intended meaning from the characters and the authors. Being a teacher of English as a foreign language, I strongly believe that the use of humor in funny story would significantly improve second language learning.
However, to understand the meaning of implicature in English funny story is a challenging task. In order to create more interests in the English learning and build a deep understanding of inplicature TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com 10 mechanism to English learners, the study on “Implicature in English and Vietnamese funny stories” is inspired and carried out. Aims of the study The purposes of the research study could be clearly identified as followings: - To provide background knowledge of implicature - To uncover the implicature in terms of maxim conveyed in the English and Vietnamese funny stories under study - To point out implicature in some English and Vietnamese funny stories in terms of maxims. - To draw out the implication in English language teaching and learning.
Scope of the study This research is limited to analyze implicature in some selected English and Vietnamese funny stories. This research only touches a small aspect of implicature: maxim Within the scope of the study, no attention is paid to any other features of funny stories. Method of the study The main method of the study is qualitative one executed with descriptive and contrastive analysis with the following techniques: + Collecting data containing funny stories with mechanism of implicature + Basing on the data collected, we sort out the samples into categories in terms of maxims. + On the basis of the analysis of mechanism of implicatures in English and Vietnamese funny stories, we predict the difficulties that Vietnamese learners have to deal with.
Organization of the study The study consists of three parts. They are: Part A: Introduction. This part contains rationale, aims of the study, scope of the study, and methods of the study. This is the main part of the thesis and has two chapters.
Chapter 1: Literature review TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com 11 In this chapter, review on some field of semantics, pragmatics and discourse such are given in the first place. Later part deals with concept of implicature and a brief background knowledge about funny stories. Chapter 2: The study This part gives the detailed description of the study, which includes data collection, data analysis and presents the results and discussion Part C: Conclusion This is the last part of the thesis which summarizes the major points and gives the implication as well as giving suggestions for further study. TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com 12 PART B: DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 1: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND 1.
Overview of discourse analysis 1. Definition of discourse In the history of linguistics, different linguists use the term “discourse” in a number of different ways. According to Crystal (1992: 25) discourse is “a continuous stretch of (especially spoken) language larger than a sentence, often constituting a coherent unit, such as a sermon, an argument, joke or narrative” Cook (1989: 156) shares the similar idea with Crystal, he states discourse as “stretches of language perceived to be meaningful, unified and purposive”. Cook also suggests that “What matters is not its conformity to rules, but the fact that it communicates and is recognized by its receivers as coherent”.
Discourse is supposed to be meaningful and thus to be used to communicate with one person in a way that another person does not have the necessary knowledge to make sense of. In Nunan‟s opinion, discourse is considered “communicative event involving language in context” (1993:118) In general, discourse is defined differently but they have something in common. Discourse is understood as language in use, which can reflect people‟s point of view and value systems. Discourse versus text There has been a lot of confusion between the two terms discourse and text.
For some linguists, these two terms seem to be used almost interchangeably. As Halliday & Hasan (1976: 2) state in their book “Cohesion in English”. A text is a unit of language in use, it is not a grammatical unit, like a clause or a sentence… A text is best regarded as a semantic unit: a unit not of form but of meaning. Thus it is related to a clause or sentence not by size but by realization, the coding of one symbolic system in another.
A text does not consist of sentences; it is realized by, or encoded in, sentences. They use “text” to refer to “discourse”. They see text as a “semantic unit” characterized by cohesion. TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com 13 Some other linguists draw a clear distinction between them.
They argue that discourse is language in action while a text is the written record of that interaction. As Crystal‟s point of view, he states that discourse is “a continuous stretch of language larger than a sentence” whereas a text is “a piece of naturally occurring spoken, written or signed language identified for purpose of analysis”. Nunan (1993: 6) appears to share the same view when he uses “the term text to refer to any written record of a communicative event in context” and discourse refers to “interpretation of the communicative event in context” To sum up, it can be see that there is disagreement about the meaning of these two terms. However, all seem to agree that both text and discourse need to be defined in terms of meaning and the coherent texts/ pieces of discourse are those that form a meaningful whole.
Discourse analysis Discourse analysis is developed by different works of different scholars. One of the most prominent scholars is Yule (1997: 139), he states in his study of language that “In the study of language, some of the most interesting questions arise in connection with the way language is used, rather than what its components are…We were, in effect, asking how it is language –users interpret what other language-users intend to convey. When we carry this investigation further and ask how it is that we, as language users, make sense of what we read in texts, understand what speakers mean despite what they say, recognize connected as opposed to jumbled or incoherent discourse, and successfully take part in that complex activity called conversation, we are undertaking what is known discourse analysis”. It is understood that discourse analysis is concerned with the study of the relationship between language and the context in which it is used.
In summary, discourse analysis considers the ways that the use of language presents different views of the world and different understanding. It examines how the use of language is influenced by relationships between participants, as well as its effect on social relations. Context in discourse analysis Context is an important concept in discourse analysis. As Nunan (1993: 7) defines “context refers to the situation giving rise to the discourse, and within which the discourse is TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.
In his opinion, there are two different types of context. The first is linguistic context; it refers to the words, utterances and sentences surrounding a piece of text. The second is non-linguistic or experiential context, it refers to the real- world context in which the text occurs. Non-linguistic context includes the type of communicative event, the topic, the purpose of the event, the setting, the participants and the relationship between them.
Non-linguistics also includes background knowledge and assumptions underlying the communicative event. Background knowledge can be either cultural general knowledge that most people carry with them in their minds, about areas of life, or interpersonal knowledge, specific and possibly private knowledge about the history of the speakers themselves. In short, context plays a very important role in discourse analysis. A discourse and its context are in close relationship, discourse elaborates context and context helps interpret the meaning of utterances in discourse.
Word meaning According to Nguyen Hoa (2004: 67), words are regarded as the smallest indivisible meaningful units of a language which can operate independently.