Disagreeing in english and vietnamese

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY – HANOI

COLLEGE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES

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DISAGREEING

IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE:

A PRAGMATICS AND CONVERSATION ANALYSIS PERSPECTIVE

By


KIEU, THI THU HUONG

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements

for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Supervisors: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Hoang Van Van

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Phan Van Que

HANOI - 2006

CERTIFICATE OF ORIGINALITY
I certify my authority of the study project report submitted entitled

DISAGREEING IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE:

A PRAGMATICS AND CONVERSATION ANALYSIS PERSPECTIVE

In fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Except where the reference is indicated, no other person’s work has been used without due acknowledgment in the text of the thesis.

Hanoi - 2006

Kieu Thi Thu Huong

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am indebted to many people without whose help the present thesis could not have been completed. First of all, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisors Assoc. Prof. Dr. Hoang Van Van and Assoc. Prof. Dr. Phan Van Que for their invaluable guidance, insightful comments and endless support.

I wish to express my deep indebtedness to Prof. Dr. Luong Van Hy, the chair of the Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto, Canada for his brilliant scholarship, demanding teaching and supervision. His unending help greatly encouraged me before and during my one-year study at this university. I am most grateful to Assoc. Prof. Dr. Sidnell, who worked at UCLA for some time with Schegloff, one of the founders of conversation analysis, for his productive course of conversation analysis, his kindness and generosity in providing naturally occurring data and responding literature.

I am deeply thankful to Assoc. Prof. Dr. Nguyen Quang for his invaluable suggestions, and helpful advice. I have greatly benefited from his scholarship, encouragement and generosity. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Assoc. Prof. Dr. Nguyen Hoa for his discerning comments, knowledgeable suggestions and kind-heartedness. My sincere thanks go to all my teachers at CFL – VNU for their profound knowledge and outstanding teaching during my long study at the Department of Graduate Studies (DGS) from 1998 to 2005.

My special thanks are due to Ms Sandra Harrison, the country director of ELI Vietnam for her kind support and valuable correction of all this work in manuscript. But for her, I would not have had any access to ELI teachers working in Vietnam.

My thanks are also extended to all my informants in Hanoi and North America, my friends and students, my colleagues at Hanoi-Amsterdam High school, the school principal Mr. Do Lenh Dien, and all the people who have assisted my research work, especially Dr. Ngo Huu Hoang and the DGS staff. To Assoc. Prof. Dr. Le Hung Tien, the chair of the DGS, I extend my enormous gratitude for his scholarship and sincerity.

I sincerely thank Dr. Vu Thi Thanh Huong at the Institute of Linguistics for her efficient assistance, intellectual support and continual encouragement.

I especially express my heartfelt gratitude to Assoc. Prof. Dr. Tran Huu Manh, who supervised my MA thesis, which is considered the very first step to the present Ph.D. dissertation, for his distinctive guidance, constant encouragement and benevolence.

Finally, I owe the completion of this dissertation to my parents and my siblings, my husband and my two children, who have always given me their love, understanding and encouragement throughout my study.

To all mentioned, and to many more, my heart extends the warmest thanks.

ABSTRACT

This thesis takes as its main objective the description of the native perception and realization of the speech act of disagreeing in English and Vietnamese within the theoretical frameworks of pragmatics and conversation analysis and the help of SPSS, version 11.5, a software program for social sciences. It aims at yielding insights into such issues as politeness, its notions and relations with indirectness, strategies and linguistic devices used to express disagreement tokens in the English and Vietnamese languages and cultures. Linguistic politeness is carefully examined in its unity of discernment and volition on the basis of the data obtained from elicited written questionnaires, folk expressions, interviews and naturally occurring interactions. The meticulous and miraculous methods offered by conversation analysis are of great help in describing and exploring the structural organization of disagreement responses in preferred and dispreferred format, the relationships between disagreements and the constraint systems, and negotiation of disagreements by native speakers.

The findings exhibit that the differences in choosing politeness strategies to perform disagreements by speakers of English in North America and speakers of Vietnamese in Hanoi result from the differences in their assessment of socio-cultural parameters and social situations. Although indirectness might be used in some contexts as a means to express politeness, there is no absolute correlation between politeness and indirectness in the two languages and cultures under investigation. Despite the English general preference for direct strategies and the Vietnamese tendency to indirect strategies, the former may be indirect in some contexts and the latter are prone to be direct or even very direct from time to time. Consequently, the study of politeness should be conducted in close relation to the study of the speakers’ wider socio-cultural milieus with systems of local norms, beliefs and values. In proffering disagreements to the prior evaluations or ideas, native speakers not only deploy individually volitional strategies but also observe socially determined norms of behavior, especially in the choice of formulaic expressions, speech levels, address terms, deference markers etc. Therefore, the deployment of the normative-volitional approach to politeness study is appropriate and reasonable.

Conversation analysis sheds light on disagreements as dispreferred seconds to first assessments and opinions, and as preferred seconds to self-deprecations. English and Vietnamese speakers adopt the same strategies in regards to preference organization, compliment responses and negotiation of disagreements. On the whole, disagreements are inclined to be hedged or delayed by a variety of softeners and/or other devices. However, they tend to be overtly stated in responses to self-denigrations. It is of interest to explore the conflicting effects caused by the correlation between preference organization and self-compliment avoidance in responses to compliments. The English informants show a trend towards compliment acceptance and appreciation, while the Vietnamese prefer to refuse and negate prior complimentary tokens in spite of their similar strategies in adopting mid-positions. The accounts for this phenomenon can be found in the Vietnamese community-based solidarity and the Anglophone individualistic satisfaction. Conversation analytic tools help highlight the use of address terms (in Vietnamese), intensifiers (in English and Vietnamese) and other supportive means. By and large, the combined pragmatics and conversation analysis perspective is strongly recommended to speech act study as this integration maximizes the strengths and minimizes the weaknesses of each approach.