background of THE research This descriptive and comparative research into the Politeness markers including Strategies of language use (or Illocutionary Strategies) and Social Deixis (primarily consisting of Person-referring Forms and Formal Items) (Brown P. [11], Nguyen Duc Hoat [36, p. 325]) in the speech act of offering in English and Vietnamese is carried out because of the following reasons: 1. There have been so far a lot of contrastive studies into certain speech acts including Face- threatening Acts (FTAs) such as requests by Nguyen Duc Hoat [36], Ha Cam Tam [83], Mulken M.
[66], Tran Lan Phuong [124], complaints by Eslami - Rasekh Z. [22], refusals by Liao C.; and Face- enhancing Acts (FEAs) such as compliments by Nguyen Quang [125], Nguyen Minh Nguyet [65]. In spite of its frequent occurrences in various kinds of interpersonal communication there has been little research done on the speech act of offering which may be either a FTA or a FEA. If any, there still remain limitations in the study of this speech act.
The studies by Rabinowitz J. [69], Hoang Thi Thu Lan [52] mainly focus on the linguistic expressions of the offering. They do not base on the face notion to explain the Politeness Markers used in the speech behavior of offering. Chu Thi Bich [97] narrows down her study on the speech act of offering in Vietnamese.
Although Nguyen Thi Hong Ha [32] has a more expanded cross-cultural research on the speech acts of offering and responding in English and Vietnamese, her research centers round offering gifts, which is one part of the offering. In fact, according to Wierzbicka A. [69], the offering involves offering a service or an item. In other words, the offering to a full sense involves “the offerer’s showing or expressing the willingness or intention to do something for or to give something to the hearer” (Hornby A.
In this sense, the speech act of 1 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com offering has not been thoroughly studied by Chu Thi Bich and Nguyen Thi Hong Hµ either. Generally, the above-mentioned studies on the speech act of offering are restricted to the linguistic expressions rather than based on the face assumption which may be radically influenced by the cultural features to explain the use of the Politeness Markers in this speech act. Nonetheless there exist in all languages these interrelated elements to express politeness in speech acts including the offering. aims and Scope of the research Due to the time and resource constraints, this research is restricted to the descriptive and comparative study on the Politeness Markers in the offering in Australian English and Vietnamese.
As a result, the research is intended: 1. To describe the Politeness Markers used in the speech act of offering performed by the native Australian speakers. To describe the Politeness Markers used in the speech act of offering performed by the native Vietnamese speakers. To compare their use of the Politeness Markers in the speech act of offering along the directness/indirectness dimension in various social situational contexts studied.
To explain the underlying reasons for the similarities and/or dissimilarities in their use of these Politeness Markers. Theoretical and practical implications This research could offer the following theoretical and practical implications: 1. The findings of this research could provide the knowledge of the speech act of offering in Australian English and Vietnamese, which could be necessary for the researchers of pragmatic field and for those who use it as a means of intercultural communication to avoid “culture shock”. This research based on the face assumption which may be impacted by the cultural features to explain the use of the Politeness Markers in the speech act of offering in Australian English and Vietnamese could make a significant contribution 2 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com compared to the former researches restricted to the study of the linguistic expressions of speech acts including the offering.
Truly a speech act is a basic pragmatic unit of communication (Trosborg A. [85]), whose semantic structure is closely associated with the ideology and cultural features of the community employing that speech act. The ideology and cultural features of the community in their turns determine whether or not a speech act is of politeness in the on-going verbal interaction from the interlocutors’ perception of face. In other words, there must be an entwined relationship between the semantic structure and pragmatic sense of a speech act including the offering in association with linguistic politeness, which may not have been intensively studied by the previous studies on the speech act of offering.
This research could help the pragmatists and the learners of English or Vietnamese as a foreign language have a deeper insight into speech acts including the offering in Australian English as an Indo-European inflectional language and in Vietnamese as a typical tonic and non-inflectional Austro-Asiatic language. Especially the findings of this research is useful for Vietnamese learners of English and Australian learners of Vietnamese in that they could help these learners better learn English or Vietnamese as a foreign language in a scientific and systematic way and in this way could prevent them from committing unexpected pragmatic errors. research methods The methods used in this research are descriptive and comparative. - Descriptive: the Politeness Markers in the speech act of offering in Australian English and Vietnamese are described in relation to the semantic structure and pragmatic properties.
- Comparative: The coding system for the comparison of the strategies of offering in Australian English and Vietnamese used in this thesis are modified from the coding system of strategies developed by Blum-Kulka S. [69], which cover seven strategies within the three major Strategy Categories ranking in a decreasing level of directness. 3 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com The comparative method is preferred to the contrastive method because of the following reasons. The findings from the thesis based on this comparative method (to find out the similarities and differences) could offer not only the practical implications in a foreign language teaching method of a speech act (as the contrastive method [to find out the differences] could) but also the linguistically theoretical implications concerning the semantic, structural and pragmatic aspects of a speech act including the offering in the two languages compared.
structure of the thesis From the above-mentioned issues, this thesis could be organized into the following chapters: Chapter 1 introduces the background, the aims and scope, the theoretical and practical implications, the research methods and the structure of the thesis. Chapter 2 provides a review of different approaches to linguistic politeness study and discusses my viewpoint on the appropriate approach to study linguistic politeness in Vietnamese culture. Chapter 3 discusses the methodology issues including research questions, data approach and the research method, the data collection methods, the selection of subjects, the research procedure involving the procedure for the administration of the Pilot Questionnaires (PQs) and the Discourse Completion Tests (DCTs). Chapter 4 describes and discusses the identification of the speech act of offering in Australian English and Vietnamese to highlight its distinctive features.
A further analysis of the Politeness Markers used in the speech act of offering in Australian English and Vietnamese is then carried out as a coding framework. Chapter 5 presents and discusses the findings on the use of the Politeness Markers in the offering in Australian English and Vietnamese in relation to such social variables as the Relative Power (P), the Social Distance (D) and the Imposition Rank (R) in the situational contexts studied and the underlying reasons. Chapter 6 presents the conclusion of the thesis including the summary of the major findings, the implications and the suggestions for further research. 4 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com Chapter 2 speech act theory and linguistic politeness This chapter provides an overview of different approaches to linguistic politeness study and presents my viewpoint on the appropriate approach to study linguistic politeness in the context of Vietnamese culture.
speech acts and politeness Speech acts have been studied and defined by different theorists such as Austin J. Their common point of view is that a speech act is a unit of communication. Each of these units performs a certain function such as: complimenting, apologizing, offering etc. According to Austin J.
[1], stating is only one function of language. He notes that some ordinary declarative sentences are not just to say things or describe states of affairs but also used to do things. He distinguishes constatives - statements, assertions - from performatives which are used to perform actions. According to Austin, an utterance is perceived as having three basic senses and in performing a certain act, the speaker is said to perform simultaneously three kinds of acts: - Locutionary act: the uttering of a certain sentence with certain sense and reference.
This again is roughly equivalent to “meaning” in the traditional sense; - Illocutionary act: the making of a statement, an offering, etc. in uttering a sentence by the conventional force associated with it; and - Perlocutionary act: the effect on the hearer achieved by saying something. According to Austin, the term “speech act” is actually used exclusively to refer to the illocutionary act. He also suggests that different speech acts can be classified and compared basing on the classification of speech act verbs available in a language.
Yet, he fails to show systematically the relation between illocutionary force and the explicit and implicit performatives and their felicity conditions. [73] further expands on Austin’s work and basing on the felicity conditions for different speech acts, Searle J. [74, 75] comes up with the taxonomy of speech act types: 5 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com - Representatives or assertives which commit the speaker to the truth of a proposition, for example, asserting or stating; - Directives, the point of which is to get the hearer to do something, for example, ordering, requesting; - Commissives, which commit the speaker to some future action, for example, promising, offering; - Expressives, which express certain feelings and attitudes of the speaker, for example, thanking, apologizing; and - Declaratives, acts of announcing the emergence of an event, for example, declaring, christening. Searle’s taxonomy takes the illocutionary act as the starting point in identifying speech act types but not speech act verbs as proposed by Austin J.
[77] also makes a claim that “the basic unit of human communication is the illocutionary act” and that his taxonomy has universal application. According to Searle J. [76], in everyday interactions, it is often found that the speaker may utter a sentence and mean what s/he says and also mean another illocution with a different illocutionary content. For example, the utterance (2.1) ‚May I help you?‛ can be meant not as a question with the inversion of the Modal Auxiliary Verb (MAV) May and the First Personal Subject I but as an offering to help somebody.
Utterances of this type fall under what Searle J. [76] calls “indirect speech acts” or the cases in which “… one illocutionary act is performed indirectly by performing another”. The distinction between what is meant and what is said shows that a polite utterance reveals the speaker’s true intentions only indirectly. The speaker seeks ways to modify what s/he is planning to say, thus s/he could express his/her intention indirectly enough to avoid a social conflict.
Indirectness has been associated with the levels of politeness by many Western researchers. These researchers assert indirectness is the chief motivation for politeness and indirectness and the closely associated notion of politeness operate under universal principles (Searl J. Utterances of offering in English using Interrogative forms, e.2) 6 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com ‚Can I offer some help?‛ [DCT 5] are called Conventionally Indirect offering and are considered polite in that the form seems to give the hearer the option of refusal since the “yes” or “no” alternative question allows “no” as a possible answer.