VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HA NOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES HOÀNG THỊ SÁU A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF MITIGATING CRITICISM: THE USE OF DISJUNCTS AS MITIGATING HEDGES IN VERBAL COMMUNICATION NGHIÊN CỨU ĐỐI CHIẾU VỀ SỰ GIẢM NHẸ Ý CHÊ BAI BẰNG VIỆC SỬ DỤNG TRẠNG NGỮ TÌNH THÁI LÀM PHƯƠNG TIỆN RÀO ĐÓN TRONG GIAO TIẾP BẰNG LỜI TIẾNG ANH VÀ TIẾNG VIỆT M. PROGRAMME 1 THESIS Field: ENGLISH LINGUISTICS Code: 60.15 HÀ NỘI - NĂM 2012 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HA NOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES HOÀNG THỊ SÁU A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF MITIGATING CRITICISM: THE USE OF DISJUNCTS AS MITIGATING HEDGES IN VERBAL COMMUNICATION NGHIÊN CỨU ĐỐI CHIẾU VỀ SỰ GIẢM NHẸ Ý CHÊ BAI BẰNG VIỆC SỬ DỤNG TRẠNG NGỮ TÌNH THÁI LÀM PHƯƠNG TIỆN RÀO ĐÓN TRONG GIAO TIẾP BẰNG LỜI TIẾNG ANH VÀ TIẾNG VIỆT M. PROGRAMME 1 THESIS Field: ENGLISH LINGUISTICS Code: 60.15 HÀ NỘI - NĂM 2012 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com TABLE OF CONTENTS LISTS OF FIGURES AND TABLES. Scope of the study.
Aims of the study. Objectives of the study. Design of the study. 4 PART II: DEVELOPMENT.
5 CHAPTER 1: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND. Notion and classification of speech acts. SPEECH ACT OF CRITICIZING. FACE AND POLITENESS.
What is FACE?. What is POLITENESS?. Hedging from the point of view of pragmatics. Hedging as both positive and negative politeness.
Types of disjuncts. 20 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW:. 23 PRE-CRITICIZING HEDGING. THE PREVIOUS STUDIES ON CRITICIZING.
PREVIOUS STUDIES ON DISJUNCTS AS HEDGES FROM PRAGMATIC PERSPECTIVE. RESEARCH APPROACH - CA. DATA COLLECTION METHOD: SURVEY QUESTIONNAIRE. DATA COLLECTION INSTRUMENT.
DATA COLLECTING PROCEDURES. DATA ANALYSIS UNITS/ PARAMETERS. 31 CHAPTER 4: DATA ANALYSIS AND FINDINGS. USE OF DISJUNCTS SEEN FROM COMMUNICATING PARAMETERS.
34 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail. USE OF DISJUNCTS SEEN FROM INFORMANTS’ PARAMETERS. 45 PART III: CONCLUSION. Review of the study.
Implications of the study. Limitations of the study. Suggestions for further study. 52 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com LISTS OF FIGURES AND TABLES Figure 1: Possible strategies for doing FTAs (Brown & Levinson, 1987: 69)………….
Theoretical CAs and Applied CAs …….27 Table 1: Classification of illocutionary acts…………………………………………….5 Table 2: Quality hedges …….15 Table 3: Quantity hedges ……………………………………………………………….16 Table 4: Relevance hedges ………………………………………………………………17 Table 5: Manner hedges …… …………………………………………………………. 17 Table 6: Types of disjuncts ……………………………………………………………. 21 Table 7: Distribution on informants’ status parameters………………………………33 APPENDIX A. Survey questionnaire………………………………………………53 - 58 APPENDIX B.
Examples of hedges………………………………………………. Table 1: Use of disjuncts seen from communicating parameters……. Table 2: Use of disjuncts seen from informants’parameters………….64- 68 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com PART I: INTRODUCTION 1. Rationale It can not be denied that language plays an important part not only in recording and understanding culture but also in communication among people who share or do not share the same nationality, social or ethnic origin, gender, age, and occupation.
Furthermore, “language not only has a great impact on our thinking and behaviors but also on others" (Karmic, 1998:79). Hence, understanding social conventions and attention to such important concepts as politeness, and face –threatening act, will certainly enable us to better comprehend the different ways of speaking by people from different cultures, thus helping eliminate culture-shocks, misunderstandings and communication-breakdown. Despite good awareness of the ultimate objective of learning a foreign language toward successful communication, many Vietnamese learners of English must concede that a good command of a foreign language or success in foreign language learning lies only in mastering grammar rules and accumulating as much vocabulary as possible. The importance of vocabulary and grammar has been proved in Laufer and Hulstijn (2001), Putri (2010), Aquilina (1988) and in many other researches.
In spite of different approaches to the matter, these authors state one thing in common that both vocabulary and grammar are vital aspects in language. However, it lies in the fact that even when language learners produce grammatically well-formed utterances, they may experience unwanted culture shock and communication breakdown when running into a real and particular context of situation. This unexpected incidence occurs due to their insufficient knowledge and awareness of social norms and values, roles and relationships between individuals, especially those from the target culture. Of the universal human speech acts, criticism is considered a high face-threatening act, and a high- demanding politeness in communication, especially in intercultural communication.
In addition, criticisms are socially complex even for native speakers. Furthermore, many local and foreign studies regarding the speech act of criticizing have been carried out in different languages and in interlanguage of English learners of different language backgrounds such as House and Kasper (1981), Tracy, Van Dusen, and Robison (1987), Tracy and Eisenberg (1990), Wajnryb (1993; 1995) and Toplak and Katz (2000), Minh (2005), Hoa (2007), and others. The findings of the previous studies were mainly LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com discussed in the light of cross-cultural perspective. Yet, hedging in criticizing from pragmatic perspective is still an area available for more exploration.
This research, therefore, has chosen hedging as a potential subject. The study is done not only to see the similarities and dissimilarities in the use of hedges to criticize between the two cultures. Another goal of this research is to raise the awareness of both teachers and learners of English about the necessity of hedging in language, and to give teachers several suggestions in teaching this language phenomenon to their students. Nevertheless, hedging is a very broad area, and within the limit of the study, it is impossible to discuss all aspects of hedging in language.
As criticism is an act yielding high risk of making hearers lose face, it requires different supplementary steps to reduce the weightiness of the utterance. This is where hedging can mostly be seen. In daily life, no-one likes to be criticized, and no-one wants to criticize others directly because there still exists the relationship between people, which is considered most important in every society. Hence, in forced situations, people still criticize but soften it by using such disjuncts as “frankly, from my point of view, seriously,…” right before the criticism.
That is the reason why the use of disjuncts as mitigating hedges in criticism is chosen for the project. Needless to say, disjuncts as hedging devices used in a certain context for specific communicative intents such as one strategy of politeness and mitigation have great effect on minimizing shocks in communication. Therefore, a desire to have a further insight into major similarities and differences in using disjuncts as hedges has inspired the writer to develop the research entitled “A contrastive analysis of moderating criticism: The use of disjuncts as mitigating hedges in verbal communication.” To sum up, it is hoped that this study can provide the increase of some socio- cultural knowledge and awareness of the importance of hedges before criticizing among both teachers and learners of English in order to avoid hurting their partners in every day communication. This also helps enhance better cross-cultural communication and foreign language learning and teaching in Vietnam.
Scope of the study - The study is confined to the verbal aspects of the act of criticism with the use of politeness and hedging. In addition, adjacency pairs are beyond the scope of this paper. LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com - The study strictly pertains to the perspective of pragmatics though the author realizes that syntactic theory and semantics apparently do explain the meaning of the verbal work - Northern Vietnamese learners of English and Southern English native speakers are chosen for contrastive analysis. - The data are collected by conducting survey questionnaires to examine the ways the Northern Vietnamese and Southern English native speakers use disjuncts as mitigating hedges.
(30 informants each) - Hedges under investigation are limited to a single utterance. Aims of the study - To find out the similarities and differences in the way the Northern Vietnamese learners of English and Southern English native speakers criticize using disjuncts as a politeness strategy in mitigating criticism. - To raise both teacher‟s and learner‟s awareness of the importance of hedges before criticizing in order to avoid hurting their partners. Objectives of the study In order to achieve the targeted aims, two objectives are put forward: - The data will be collected by conducting survey questionnaires for the chosen informants in Northern Vietnam and in Southern England.
- The data will be processed and analyzed quantitatively to see how the two groups use disjuncts as hedges in criticizing situations and to see if there are any distinct features that characterize the way Northern Vietnamese learners use hedges as compared to that of Southern native speakers, through which implications will be drawn out. Research questions What are the major similarities and differences in the ways Northern Vietnamese learners of English and Southern English native speakers use disjuncts as hedges in mitigating criticism? 6. Methodology - Quantitative method in the form of survey questionnaires is much resorted to. To collect data for analysis, Metapragmatic Questionnaire (MPQ) is designed.
The collected data will be analyzed using comparing and contrasting techniques to find out the similarities and LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com differences in the ways Northern Vietnamese learners of English and Southern English native speakers perform the act of criticizing using hedges as a politeness strategy. - The questionnaires are delivered directly to 30 Northern Vietnamese learners of English and to 30 English people via e-mails. Based on both Vietnamese and English informants‟ status parameters, the researcher looks for the Vietnamese subjects of similar parameters in order to have a symmetrical distribution of informants and data for the study. Design of the study The study is composed of three parts: Part I: Introduction: presents the rationale, scope, aims, research question, and methodology of the study Part II: Development: This part consists of four chapters: Chapter 1: Theoretical background and Literature review : - Theoretical background: discusses the notions of speech act theory, face, politeness, politeness strategies, hedges and disjuncts.
Chapter 2:: Hedging before criticizing: This chapter explores previous works of criticizing, hedging, hedging strategies and disjuncts from pragmatic perspective. Chapter 3: Methodology: This chapter states the chosen methods to carry out the study and to analyze the collected data such as contrastive analysis (CA), and survey questionnaires. It also deals with informants and procedures of the data collection. Chapter 4: Data analysis and findings: This chapter analyses collected data to find out major similarities and differences in the choice of hedging strategies in given situations by Vietnamese learners of English and native speakers of English.
Part III: Conclusion: This part summarizes the main findings of the study, provides some implications for TEFL, and offers suggestions for further research. LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com PART II: DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 1: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND This chapter reviews the theories relevant to the topic under investigation in the present study, namely speech acts, speech act of criticizing, face, politeness, politeness strategies, hedges and disjuncts. SPEECH ACTS According to Levinson (1983), speech act theory is one of the central issues in language use. In this section, the works by such pioneers in the field as Austin (1962), Searle (1974; 1979), and Bach and Harnish (1979) are briefly reviewed in order to provide theoretical frameworks for the study.
Notion and classification of speech acts The notion of speech acts originates from the British philosopher of language John Austin (1962). In his very influential work “How to do things with words” (1975), Austin defines speech acts as the actions performed in saying something or actions performed using language. In fact, when speaking, we perform certain linguistic actions such as giving reports, making statements, asking questions, giving warnings, making promises and so on.