MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING QUY NHON UNIVERSITY NGUYỄN THỊ THANH THẢO A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF INTERPERSONAL MEANING IN AMERICAN AND VIETNAMESE SITCOMS MASTER THESIS IN ENGLISH LINGUISTICS Binh Dinh - 2019 e MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING QUY NHON UNIVERSITY NGUYỄN THỊ THANH THẢO A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF INTERPERSONAL MEANING IN AMERICAN AND VIETNAMESE SITCOMS Field: The English Linguistics Code: 8 22 02 01 Supervisor: Assoc. NGUYỄN THỊ THU HIỀN e BỘ GIÁO DỤC VÀ ĐÀO TẠO TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC QUY NHƠN NGUYỄN THỊ THANH THẢO PHÂN TÍCH ĐỐI CHIẾU NÉT NGHĨA LIÊN NHÂN TRONG CÁC BỘ PHIM HÀI KỊCH TÌNH HUỐNG MỸ VÀ VIỆT NAM CHUYÊN NGÀNH: NGÔN NGỮ ANH MÃ SỐ: 8 22 02 01 Người hướng dẫn: PGS. NGUYỄN THỊ THU HIỀN e I STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP I hereby certify that the thesis “A contrastive analysis of interpersonal meaning in American and Vietnamese sitcoms”, is entirely my original work. I have not used any sources other than those listed and identified as references.
I further declare that I have not submitted this thesis at any other institution in order to obtain a degree. Quy Nhon, July 2019 Signature Nguyễn Thị Thanh Thảo e II ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Foremost, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor Assoc. Nguyen Thi Thu Hien for her enthusiastic and continuous support of my thesis and for her patience, encouragement, and immense knowledge. Thankfully, it is her dedication that gives me motivation to fulfill this research.
I am also grateful to my friends for their constant encouragement and their help during the period of carrying out the research work. Last but not least, my thanks go to my family, my parents and my brother for their love, caring, preparing me for my future and supporting me spiritually throughout my life. e III ABSTRACT This study mainly concentrates on the contrastive analysis of interpersonal meaning in American and Vietnamese sitcoms based on the framework of systemic functional grammar by M. Based on eight sitcom episodes of American and Vietnamese, the present study aims at discussing the interpersonal resources realized by mood, modality, and grammatical interpersonal metaphor and identifying the similarities and dissimilarities of interpersonal features in American and Vietnamese sitcom conversations.
The quantitative and qualitative methods were also employed to determine the proportion of the linguistic resources used in American and Vietnamese sitcoms. The outcomes show that although there are differences in the ways of expressing mood, modality, and grammatical metaphor, the primary similarities between American and Vietnamese sitcoms are providing information in the communication, showing the attitude, opinion, and judgement, and expressing the implication of speakers in the interaction through the interpersonal realizations: Mood, modality, and grammatical metaphor. e IV TABLE OF CONTENTS STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP .III TABLE OF CONTENTS. IV LIST OF TABLES.
VI LIST OF FIGURES .VIII CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION. Aims and Objectives of the study. Aims of the study. Scope of the Study.
Significance of the Study. The Organization of the Study. 5 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW. Sitcom as a genre.
Overview of Systemic Functional Grammar. Interpersonal grammatical metaphor. Perspectives of interpersonal meaning in Vietnamese. Previous studies related to the research.
Reliability and Validity. 30 CHAPTER 4: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS. Mood in ASs and VSs. Mood in American sitcoms.
Mood in Vietnamese Sitcoms. A comparison of Mood in ASs and VSs. Modality in ASs and VSs. Modality in ASs.
Modality in VSs. A comparison of Modality in ASs and VSs. Interpersonal grammatical metaphor. Interpersonal grammatical metaphor of mood.
Interpersonal grammatical metaphor of modality. Limitations and suggestions for further study. Limitations of the study. Suggestions for further study.
XVII e VI LIST OF TABLES Table Name of Tables Page Number 2.1 Relation of Mood selection to Mood structure 12 2.2 Speech functions and commodities exchange 16 2.3 Speech function pairs 16 2.4 Speech functions and typical mood of clause 17 2.5 System of types of modality 19 2.6 Modal verbal operators 20 2.8 Examples of mood metaphor 21 2.9 Expressions of modality in Vietnamese 23 4.1 Mood in ASs 32 4.2 The occurrence of interrogative structures in Ass 36 4.3 Percentage of affirmative and negative imperative in 39 ASs 4.4 Proportion of Mood structure in VSs 41 4.5 Distribution of interrogative mood structures in VSs 45 4.6 Distribution of imperative structures in VSs 48 4.7 Modal operators used in ASs 54 4.8 Modal operators used in VSs 59 4.9 Frequency of metaphor of mood in Ass 66 4.10 Distribution of metaphor of mood in VSs 69 4.11 Frequency of values of metaphor of modality in Ass 74 4.12 Distribution of values of metaphorical modality in VSs 76 e VII LIST OF FIGURES Figure Name of Figures Page Number 2.1 Metafunctions in relation to field, mode and tenor 9 4.1 Distribution of full and elliptical declarative in ASs 35 4.2 Distribution of full and elliptical interrogative in ASs 38 4.3 Distribution of full and elliptical imperative in ASs 40 4.4 Proportion of full and elliptical declarative in VSs 44 4.5 Distribution of full and elliptical interrogative structures 47 in VSs 4.6 Proportion of full and elliptical imperative structures in 49 VSs 4.7 Frequency of mood in Ass and VSs 50 4.8 Frequency of modality in Ass 53 4.9 Distribution of modal adjunct in ASs 56 4.10 Frequency of modality in VSs 59 4.11 Proportion of modal adjuncts in VSs 62 4.12 Distribution of modality in Ass and VSs 64 4.13 Frequency of values of modal operators in Ass and VSs 65 4.14 Metaphorical mood in Ass and VSs 72 4.15 Distribution of value metaphor of modality in Ass and 79 VSs e VIII CONVENTIONS • VSs (1-4): Vietnamese sitcoms from 1 to 4 • ASs (1-4): American sitcoms from 1 to 4 e 1 CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION This chapter is to present all the preliminaries of the thesis. It starts with the rationale, followed by the aims and objectives of the study, research questions, scope of the study, significance of study and ends with the organization of the study. Rationale Movie is considered the reflection of the typical culture, customs and traditions of a country. Like other major art forms such as sculpture, painting, music, literature and so on, movie not only brings entertaining values but also portrays everyday life in contemporary perspectives revealed through the language characteristics.
It is undeniable that language used in movies depends on the evolution of language over time, thus movie is the most truthful art form reflecting the contemporary society. In all genres of movie, sitcom, which is a short term of “situation comedy” is regarded as the most noticeable genre. It has amusing simple plots arising in daily life and it contains real conversations existing in the form of spoken discourse which is an interactive speech between two or more people, occurs in real time and is conducted face-to face. Besides, this kind of comedy film depicts human life and society.
As a result, sitcom has attracted more scholars to carry out their researches in different fields simply because this kind of movie contains both humorous values of verbal language and cultural features in modern days. In reality, most researchers have carried out researches on comic discourses in different approaches such as anthropology, psychology, semiotic and socio-cultural exploration, etc. Each kind of these has explored language applied in comic genres in different ways. For e 2 instance, from the perspective of anthropology, Sciama (2016) examined the cognitive, social, and moral aspects of humor and its ability to make people understand one another.
Similarly, Martin (2007) focused on humor research concerning with the cognition, development of a sense of humor, and social interaction. Mulkay (1988) also made a contribution to psychology research on comedy genres by investigating the nature of humor in present-day British and North American society through examining the principles behind humorous situations. With respect to linguistic fields, some linguists have applied pragmatics, discourse analysis, and translation as useful approaches to investigate comic discourses in comedy movies. Šmilauerová (2012) conducted a study to find out the humor strategies based on the violation of Grice’s conversational maxims in TV Sitcom Friends.
From the perspective of the discourse analysis and the pragmatic cooperative principle, Mahdalíková (2014) examined what discursive devices contributed to the construction of the geek identity of characters of the American sitcom The Big Bang Theory. Another study by (Bosch Fàbregas, 2016) dealt with linguistic gender stereotypes in teen situation comedy named Liv and Maddie and its translation into Spanish. Similarly, other investigations related to sitcom genre have been done to explore many linguistic features revealed through real conversations of characters in movies. However, not many studies related to analyzing interpersonal meaning of comedy movies have been carried out in the light of systemic functional grammar despite the fact that interpersonal meaning has been conducted in the contrastive analysis between English and Vietnamese in various fields and genres such as literature, music, advertisement, etc.
e 3 For the reasons above, the study “A contrastive analysis of interpersonal meaning in American and Vietnamese sitcoms” has been chosen from the perspective of systemic functional grammar in order to identify the similarities and dissimilarities in interpersonal meaning between the two languages. Hopefully, findings from this study will be a practical application in language use, contributing to the teaching and learning English as a foreign language. Aims and Objectives of the study 1. Aims of the study This thesis aims at making a supplemental contribution to the knowledge and the comprehensive understanding of the interpersonal features in the genre of sitcoms as a whole, and in particular concentrating on identifying the similarities and dissimilarities of interpersonal features in dialogues of American and Vietnamese sitcoms in the light of functional grammar.
Objectives In order to achieve the stated aims, the thesis will focus on the following objectives: -To identify and analyze the interpersonal meaning conveyed in the dialogues of American and Vietnamese sitcoms in terms of mood, modality and interpersonal grammatical metaphor of mood and modality. -To compare and contrast to find out the similarities and differences of interpersonal meaning used in verbal resources between American and Vietnamese sitcoms. Research Questions Based on the aims of the study, the following questions are expected to be answered respectively: -What are the interpersonal features revealed by mood, modality, and grammatical metaphor used in American and Vietnamese sitcoms? -What are the possible similarities and differences between American and Vietnamese sitcoms in terms of interpersonal meaning? 1. Scope of the Study Due to the limited time, the paper particularly focuses on interpersonal meaning realized in mood, modality and interpersonal grammatical metaphor from the perspectives of functional grammar.
In addition, the realization of interpersonal meaning in both American and Vietnamese sitcoms will be compared and contrasted to show the similarities and dissimilarities in comic verbal resources. Moreover, my paper just focuses on the written text of conversations to make sure about the reliability of the resources. Significance of the Study It is obvious that sitcoms are the stories revolving around the life subjects; thus, their verbal resources are extremely practical. Owing to their dominance, this research is conducted as a supplemental contribution to the comprehensive knowledge of interpersonal features realized in sitcoms.
Moreover, the contrastive findings of the study also point out the similarities and differences in interpersonal features between American and Vietnamese conversations in life, so it helps language learners in the perception of language. The Organization of the Study The study is structured as follows: Chapter one, the introduction, consists of the rationale, aims and objectives, research questions, the significance of the study, scope of the study and the organization of the paper. Chapter two provides an overview about sitcoms. A general theoretical background related to systemic functional theory, especially the metafunctions of the language which concentrates on interpersonal meaning realized in different types of moods, modality and interpersonal grammatical metaphor.