Disagreeing in english and vietnamese

ABBREVIATIONS AND CONVENTIONS

# Number

& and

CA Conversation analysis

CCSARP Cross-cultural Speech Act Realization Project

CP Cooperative Principle

D Relative distance

DCT Discourse Completion Task

EFL English as a foreign language

FSA Face saving act

FTA Face threatening act

H Hearer

P Relative power

R Rating/Raking of imposition

S Speaker

SA Speech act

S/F Second or foreign

SA Speech act

SDCT Semi- Discourse Completion Task

Sig. Significance (a term used in SPSS)

SPSS Statistic Package for Social Sciences

VFL Vietnamese as foreign language

INTRODUCTION

1. Rationale

1.1. Necessity of the study

1.1.1. Problem statement

Humans are endowed with language, a very special gift, with the help of which they communicate their ideas, feelings and transmit information. However, successful communication requires not only pure linguistic competence but also knowledge of social norms, social values and relations between individuals known as communicative competence. Communicative competence presupposes ability to use the language correctly and appropriately. This pragmatic competence seems as crucial as linguistic competence. The lack of it may lead to impoliteness, misinterpretation, culture shocks or even communication breakdown.

In the past few decades, the rapid development of technology and communication systems has greatly shortened the distance between countries and offered more chance for inter-cultural interactions besides intra-cultural interactions. It is English that has become the most international and the most widely used language. Colleges and schools in Vietnam have witnessed a sharp increase in the number of people teaching and learning English. The evolving situation of Vietnamese economics and politics demands a change in how to teach and learn foreign languages in general, and English in particular. There is an urgent need to improve students’ communicative competence besides grammatical knowledge. Recently, verbal communicative competence has been taken into consideration in any English teaching program.

The emphasis on speaking, one of the early forms of man’s communication, has resulted in an awareness of developing a sense of socio-cultural factors in learners to help them become successful in interaction. Thus, this study is conducted with the hope of contributing to the socio-cultural aspects of spoken English-Vietnamese communication for the avoidance, or at least, the reduction of pragmatic failures.

The speech act of disagreeing has been chosen for investigation in this study as it is of great interest to the researcher and of great help to language teachers and learners. In everyday life, native speakers talk to each other, exchanging ideas, evaluations or assessments of things, events and other people. Their interlocutors may agree or disagree with them. The way second speakers express their disagreement with prior speakers is both language-specific and culture-specific. The differences in the ways in which native speakers of English and Vietnamese realize disagreements seem to make it problematic for cultural outsiders to say the right thing at the right time. Therefore, a comparison of the ways used to realize disagreeing by native speakers of English and Vietnamese is considered essential and valuable in the teaching and learning of English by Vietnamese learners and Vietnamese by native speakers of English.

1.1.2. Society, culture and language

Social acts or ‘speech acts’ (Austin, 1962) are thought to be performed via strategies which are mainly the same in all cultures (Fraser, 1985). However, this universalistic view is doubted and rejected by some researchers who contend that different cultures conceptualize speech acts differently according to differences in cultural norms and values as well as social constraints (Wierzbicka, 1990).

It has been said that language of a community is part or a manifestation of its culture, which is viewed as the system of ideas and beliefs shared by members of a community (Bentahila & Davies, 1989). Society, culture and language are closely related and interact between themselves. Their relationship and interaction have been researched into and focused on in prior papers. Sapir (1963: 166) states that language is ‘a cultural or social product’. Consequently, the interpretation of the social meaning of a certain linguistic expression should be done with reference to the bigger socio-cultural background of the speaker. Due consideration of the socio-cultural values and perceptions of the society and culture involved should be made to adequately understand the way to realize speech acts in general, and disagreeing in particular, for disagreeing is normal assumed an act that may cause negative reactions or feelings in interpersonal communication.

To eliminate and/or to limit pragmatic transferences and inferences, language learners should be provided with necessary knowledge of socio-cultural constraints and factors governing the choice of strategies used to perform disagreements. These problems call for a careful investigation of disagreeing and its related issues like politeness, constraint systems, preference organization and negotiation of disagreements on the basis of the analytic frameworks of pragmatics and conversation analysis.

1.2. Merits of the study

1.2.1. Academic merits

- To thoroughly study different dimensions of a specific speech act in light of pragmatics and conversation analysis (henceforth CA). The meticulous methods of CA carried out in excerpts of natural speech provide deep insight into the structural organization of disagreement tokens in English and Vietnamese.

- To suggest a new way to investigate the similarities and differences of a speech act across languages and cultures, using the combination of pragmatics and CA.

- To use SPSS (Statistic Package for Social Sciences) in data processing.

- To emphasize the importance of utilizing naturally occurring conversation in research papers involving oral speech.

- To highlight the role of the socio-cultural factors and socio-cultural milieu with its norms, values and beliefs in performing and interpreting verbal behaviors.

1.2.2. Practical merits

- To point out the similarities and differences in American/Canadian and Vietnamese communication in the perception and realization of the speech act of disagreeing.

- To contribute to the study of communication between native speakers of Vietnamese and American/Canadian English in light of cross-cultural pragmatics and CA.

2. Historical background

Conversing with each other, people frequently proffer evaluative assessments of things, events or people they know. These assessments may include opinions, praises, compliments, complaints, boasts or self-deprecations. Given that their interlocutors are co-operative, they may support or reject prior assessments by either agreeing or disagreeing.

Since the 1970s of the twentieth century, Pomerantz has paid attention to the way second assessments are made. Her 1975 Ph.D. dissertation can be considered her first step. In this paper, she carefully examines the major features of disagreeing and agreeing. Later on, she takes into consideration the construction of disagreement/agreement (Pomerantz, 1984a). The main features in preference organization like preferred and dispreferred turns used by second speakers to perform disagreeing/agreeing are looked at with great care.

Pomerantz is also interested in the relationship between responses to prior complimentary tokens and the system of constraints, in which disagreements are structurally dispreferred but agreements may implicitly mean self-praise. In her work on “Compliment Responses” (1978), Pomerantz finds out that native English speakers tend to make compliment responses located somewhere between agreeing and disagreeing. The ‘in between-ness’ of compliment responses, according to Pomerantz (Ibid.), can be the result of conflicting effects brought by the correlation between preference organization and self-compliment avoidance. Other searches by Pomerantz (1984), Levinson (1983) and Heritage (2002) come to the same conclusion.

Nguyen Q. 1998 Ph. D. dissertation is probably the most significant research into compliments that has ever been done in Vietnam. Compliments and such related issues as politeness and its strategies, lexico-modal markers and the addressing system are thoroughly discussed and empirically examined to bring out their cross-cultural similarities and differences. He has also brought out the safe/unsafe topics for giving compliments and underlined the most frequently used strategies in responses to prior complimentary attributes. It appears that while native speakers of English tend to utilize direct strategies, their Vietnamese counterparts seem to exploit indirect strategies.

Disagreeing has long been an appealing pursuit of the present writer. It has been described, and investigated in the framework of the theories of speech acts and politeness in her M. A. thesis (Kieu T. T. H. 2001). The data obtained from written questionnaires provide sufficient evidence for the hypotheses concerning perception and performance of evaluative disagreements by speakers of American English and Vietnamese. However, after a twelve-month study in the Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto, Canada as a full-time graduate student, where she took a course of CA, she herself has realized that it would be better to use the analytic framework of CA together with that of pragmatics to thoroughly investigate the perception and realization of disagreeing tokens, their structural organization, and bring out typical linguistic devices commonly utilized by native speakers of English and Vietnamese in their disagreements. The writer has been strongly impressed by the capacity of CA with its rigorous principle of using mundane casual speech in natural settings. It is hoped that the synthetic approach, in which CA and pragmatics are combined, will provide a multi-dimensional study of the issues under investigation.

3. Research question and hypotheses of the study

3.1. Research question

The present study focuses on the description of the perception and realization of the speech act of disagreeing in English and Vietnamese within the theoretical frameworks of the theories of speech acts (henceforward SA) and politeness and CA.

3.2. Grounds for research hypotheses

To find out the answer to this research question, a number of hypotheses are proposed on the basis of the assumptions and suggestions made by some prestigious pragmaticians and conversation analysts. Brown & Levinson (1987[1978]) and Leech (1986) propose that despite having the same strategies, cultures may differ in terms of priorities and values given to each strategy. Blum-Kulka & House (1989: 137) believe:

…members of different cultures might differ in their perceptions of social situations as well as in the relative importance attributed to any of the social parameters…. Differences on both dimensions, in turn, might be linked to differences in behavior.

Both Levinson (1983) and Pomerantz (1978, 1984) agree that disagreements as dispreferred seconds tend to be delayed while disagreements as preferred seconds to self-denigrations are immediate and outright. Pomerantz (1978) investigates how Americans reply to compliments and notices that many English compliment responses are placed somewhere between agreements and disagreements because of the constraint systems concerning preference organization and self-compliment avoidance. Agreeing with the prior compliments may implicitly mean praising self, but disagreeing may lead to the use of dispreferred format. Having compared the way native speakers of Japanese and English negotiate their disagreements, Mori (1999: 138) comes to a conclusion:

‘An opinion-negotiation sequence develops … until the participants find a middle ground, acknowledge co-existing multiple perspectives, or change the topic to terminate the discussion.

3.2. Research hypotheses

This study aims at testing the following hypotheses:

Hypothesis 1: Native speakers of Vietnamese and English tend to differ in their use of strategies to perform disagreements as a result of the differences in their assessment of socio-cultural factors and social situations.

Hypothesis 2: Politeness with its two constitutive elements volition and discernment in relation to disagreeing is differently perceived and interpreted across the English and Vietnamese languages and cultures, and there seems to be no absolute correlation between politeness and indirectness.

Hypothesis 3: In regards to preference organization English and Vietnamese native speakers are inclined to deploy the same set of strategies in order to hedge or delay disagreements as dispreferred seconds and provide immediate and outright disagreements as preferred seconds to self-deprecations.

Hypothesis 4: English and Vietnamese speakers seem to exploit similar strategies for the negotiations of disagreements and mid-positions in responses to compliments although the former may show a greater tendency to accept prior compliments while the latter appear to often negate them.

Hypothesis 5: Native speakers of English and Vietnamese seem to employ intensifiers to highlight or lower the effect of disagreeing tokens, but native Vietnamese speakers demonstrate a frequent usage of person referring terms and particles.

4. Scope of the study

There are a range of reasons for second speakers to disagree with first speakers’ assessment of people, things or events. The performance of disagreeing varies from individual to individual within a culture or a subculture and from culture to culture. It depends much on the speaker’s communicative intention, leading to his/her choice of strategies to verbally express disagreement tokens.

However, the realization of disagreeing in particular and of other acts in general is strongly affected and governed by indigenous socio-cultural norms, values and beliefs. Naturally, the present study comes to treat disagreeing in relation to the wider socio-cultural context of native speakers to provide an adequate description and perception of the act. Such issues as politeness, its perception and interpretation are of great concern.

Most disagreements are structurally complicated and delivered with delay elements, thus they are often dispreferred. On the contrary, disagreements with self-denigrations are preferred due to their simple structure, and consequently prone to overtly be voiced. Also, the doing of disagreeing is found to be influenced by the constraint systems in which preference organization interacts with self-compliment avoidance, resulting in the spreading of compliment responses all over the continuum ranging from acceptances/agreements to rejections/disagreements (Pomerantz 1975, 1978, 1984a; Levinson 1983; Heritage 2002). Therefore, the present study pays attention to the realization of disagreements as regards preference organization and constraint systems.

Although disagreeing is present in English and Vietnamese, each language deploys certain linguistic devices to realize it in conformity to locally accepted norms of behavior. While intensifiers are empirically used by native speakers of English and Vietnamese, person referring terms and particles seem to be pervasive in Vietnamese disagreements. English speakers are inclined to exploit prefaces, delay tokens, backchannels etc. to soften disagreements. The present study takes into consideration the above mentioned items to highlight the most frequently used devices.

The database of this study consists of elicited written questionnaires and audio-tapings of natural conversations. However, the investigation is mainly done on the basis of vocalized disagreement tokens, and prosodic features and paralinguistic factors are rarely referred to in spite of their importance.

This thesis is motivated and conducted within the frameworks of the theories of SA and politeness (Austin 1962; Grice 1975; Hymes 1964; Searle 1969, 1975, 1979; Lakoff 1973, 1977, 1989; Levinson 1983; Brown & Levinson 1987 [1978]; Leech 1983; Mey 1993, 2001; Thomas 1995; Yule [1996] 1997 etc.) and conversation analysis (Sacks 1963, 1972a-b, 1984; Schegloff 1972, 1979a-b; Jefferson 1974, 1978, 1979; Pomerantz 1978, 1984a-b; Levinson 1983; Psathas 1995; Cameron 2002 etc.). In addition, the empirical study in some chapters is carried out with the help of SPSS 11.5.

5. Methodology

5.1. Methods

Quantitative and qualitative methods are both used in this paper with priorities given to the quantitative. In other words, all the conclusions and considerations are based on the analysis of the empirical studies and statistics processed on SPSS 11.5, a software program commonly used in social sciences. In addition, such methods as descriptive, analytic, comparative and contrastive are also utilized to describe and analyze, to compare and contrast the database so as to bring out similarities and differences in expressing disagreements by English and Vietnamese speakers.

To collect data for the empirical study, the following methods are deployed:

- Written survey questionnaires

- Tape recording of naturally occurring talks

- Interviews with native speakers of English and Vietnamese

- Reference to publication

- Field notes and personal observations

5.2. Pragmatics and conversation analysis

5.2.1. Choice of conversation analysis

Conversation analytic approach has become most influential for its contributions to provide deep insights that can unravel many linguistic problems (Levinson 1983: 364). Its strictly data-centered principle may be the object of arguments among the researchers, but no one can deny the magnitude of what it offers language study. The helpful ‘microscope’ (Cameron 2002: 89) of conversation analytic research reveals the intricate patterns in the structural organization of mundane verbal exchanges. What ordinary people use every day to express themselves and exchange information turns out to be structurally complex and remarkable. The contingent nature and the continuously shaped and reshaped development of talk by participants draw much analytic attention.

The analytic studies of conversation seem to be quite relevant to the study of speech acts and other issues in pragmatics. The orderly properties of speech acts are normally unfolded in the process of meticulous analysis and conscientious observation offered by conversation analysis. Also, the intensive studies of the sequential structure of utterances can make significant contribution to the interpretation of utterance meaning. Thus, Levinson (1983: 284) proposes the use of CA to the study of pragmatics:

It is not hard to see why one should look to conversation for insight into pragmatic phenomena, for conversation is clearly the prototypical kind of language usage, the form in which we are all first exposed to language - the matrix for language acquisition.

5.2.2. Combination of pragmatics and conversation analysis

Conversation analysis, in its strict sense, takes very little notice of such socio-cultural parameters as age, gender, social status of co-conversants, or the relationship between them, which have influence on interactions (Brown & Levinson [1978]1987), Blum-Kulka et al. 1989, Yule 1996, Cameron 2002 among others). Its primary concern is the discovery, description, and analysis of how conversation is produced and understood.

One of the weaknesses of a strictly CA-oriented approach is that those societal aspects of conversation have no place to go in a framework that primarily studies co-text, and which allows for the context to appear only as a function of the conversational interaction.

Cited from Mey (2001: 135)

Meanwhile, the theories of SA and politeness take into consideration the socio-cultural parameters mentioned above, although they do not seem to pay enough attention to mundane interactions in natural settings. Thus, the synthetic approach which combines CA and theories of SA and politeness applied to the study of disagreeing helps to make use of the advantages and limit the disadvantages of each perspective. In addition, the use of more than one approach increases objectivity and reduces the risk of being simple in examining cultures as in Maynard’s 1997 warning:

Defining cultures in simple terms is a trap one must avoid. Careless descriptions of societies can and often do result in negative stereotyping. Overemphasizing differences may breed ethnocentrism; ignoring them may lead to cultural colonialism.

Cited in Mori (1999: 15)

5.2.3. Combination of pragmatics and CA in other studies

CA with its strength of using data from naturally occurring talk has long been deployed in combination with other theoretical perspectives. To investigate the realization of thanking by Americans and learners of English, Eisenstein and Bodman (1993) use a range of data types including written questionnaires and naturalistical exchanges, under the impact of which differences between native and nonnative expressions of thanking are set off. With the help of CA and pragmatics, Aston (1993) persuasively displays how native and nonnative speakers negotiate comity, set up and maintain friendly relationships in everyday mundane conversations. Impressed by the strength of interactional sociolinguistics, Kasper & Blum-Kulka (1993: 13) advise combining methods from this perspective with those from contrastive and interlanguage pragmatics to identify cross-cultural and cross-linguistic pragmatics differences and similarities as well as pragmatic failures.

Mundane everyday talk has been the database for research into the system of person reference in Vietnamese by Luong V. H. (1990), politeness in modern Vietnamese by Vu T. T. H. (1997) and language socialization by Nguyen T. T. B. (2001). In her study of politeness and face in Chinese culture, Lee-Wong (2000) uses both written and spoken data to identify the native strategies and conceptualization of politeness. Brown (2002) and Snow & Blum-Kulka (2002) are successful in deploying naturalistic corpora while examining the effect of context and culture on a child’s pragmatic development.

All in all, there are a number of linguistic investigations in which methods of CA are used in combination with those of pragmatics. The present paper is just different from the aforementioned works in the degree and size to which each approach is applied so as to sufficiently meet the requirements of the research question.

6. Creativity

6.1. Synthetic approach – pragmatics and conversation analysis

This is the first study of a speech act conducted on the basis of pragmatics and CA in English and Vietnamese. The combination of pragmatics and CA takes advantage of the strengths and reduces the limitations of each approach.

6.2. Data from questionnaires and naturally occurring conversation

For the first time, a comparative study of disagreeing has been conducted on the data collected from both written questionnaires and natural speech in English and Vietnamese. Elicited data and recorded excerpts of mundane everyday talks have been investigated and analyzed within the frameworks of pragmatic theories and CA.

6.3. Similarities and differences in disagreeing

Disagreeing has been examined, described, analyzed, compared and contrasted in English and Vietnamese. And, for the first time, the similarities and differences concerning its perception, performance, preference structure, and constraint systems have been shown.

7. Organization of the study

This dissertation consists of three main parts:

Part one is the introduction to the study.

Part two contains five chapters, each of which begins with the theoretical preliminaries, continues with the empirical study and ends with the concluding remarks. Chapter 1 concerns the descriptive account of disagreeing from the viewpoint of SA theories & CA and examines the evaluation of some social parameters and situations. Chapter 2 reckons with notions of politeness across cultures and languages and the synthetic approach to study politeness in its unity of volition and discernment.

Chapter 3 deals with strategies utilized to express polite disagreements and the correlation between politeness and indirectness. Chapter 4 thoroughly analyzes strategies deployed by native speakers of English and Vietnamese in terms of preference organization pertaining to disagreements as dispreferred seconds and preferred seconds. Chapter 5 investigates strategies in relation to the constraint systems and negotiation of disagreements. It also studies such devices as intensifiers and person referring terms. Part three, the conclusion, views major findings, puts forward pedagogy implications, the deployment of pragmatics and CA perspective in SA study, and suggestions for further study.