Disagreeing in english and vietnamese
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- Bu səhifədəki naviqasiya:
- CHAPTER FIVE
- 5.1.2. Negotiation of Disagreements
- 5.1.2.1. Insertion sequences
- 5.1.2.2. Summons-answer sequences
- 5.1.2.4. Sequences in disagreeing
- 5.1.3. Some Frequently Used Devices in Disagreements
- 5.1.3.2. Person referring terms
4.3. Concluding RemarksThe empirical part of this chapter views the notion of markedness in relation to the notions of preference format and adjacency pair. In naturally occurring interactions, disagreeing, which is structurally marked and thus dispreferred because of its structural complexity and counter-productive effects, is often softened or hedged. However, disagreements to self-denigrations, which are structurally unmarked and thus preferred, are prone to be forthrightly proffered. The two kinds of disagreements seem to work in absolutely opposing directions so that they can minimize the negative effects of common disagreements and maximize the positive impacts of disagreement tokens to prior self-deprecations. The two groups of informants are inclined to express weak disagreements via ‘agreement plus disagreement’ or ‘downgrading’ constructions apart from requests for further clarity or pauses and silences. The significant difference is found in the Vietnamese preference for deployment of address terms and particles and English tendency to utilize repair-work, turn prefaces or back channels. In the next section, we have a look at the strategies utilized in English and Vietnamese conversational exchanges to adjust to the constraints systems of preference format and self-praise avoidance, and to negotiate disagreements. As aforementioned, native speakers of English and Vietnamese can create more or less impact in their disagreement attributes by using intensifiers including emphasizers, amplifiers, and downtoners. Possessing the elaborate system of address terms and a wide range of particles, the Vietnamese seem to express with ease both normatively and strategically polite disagreements. Therefore, the following chapter also takes into consideration the English system of intensifiers and Vietnamese system of person referring terms and particles. CHAPTER FIVESTRATEGIES FOR CONSTRAINT SYSTEMS AND NEGOTIATION OF DISAGREEMENTS5.1. Theoretical Preliminaries5.1.1. Constraint SystemsAccording to the organization of preference, compliments should be accepted or agreed with. In contrast, recent research into English shows that quite a large proportion of compliment responses are not performed as preferred seconds, and most of them are situated in the middle of a continuum ranging from acceptances/agreements to rejections/disagreements (Pomerantz 1975, 1978, 1984a; Levinson 1983; Heritage 2002 among others). In the following table, Pomerantz (1978: 88) presents the interrelatedness between acceptances/agreements and rejections/disagreements with respect to compliment responses.
Note: (P) indicates preferential selection. (S) indicates an affiliated though secondary selection. Table 5 48: Interrelatedness between acceptances/agreements and rejections/disagreements In her 1978 work on “Compliment Responses”, Pomerantz explains that the ‘in between-ness’ of compliment responses can be the result of conflicting effects brought by the correlation between preference organization and self-compliment avoidance. Agreeing with the prior compliments may tacitly mean praising self on the one hand, and disagreeing may lead to the use of dispreferred format on the other. To compromise with these constraint systems, Ss may disagree with initial complimentary assertions in a various ways that are examined in detail in the empirical study. They may, for instance, express appreciation first, and then qualify prior compliments as can be seen in the excerpt by Pomerantz (1978: 85) given below:
[ E: Well-
E: Thank- It’s juh- this is just the right (weight) 5.1.2. Negotiation of DisagreementsConversation is a joint-venture co-constructed by multiple Ss. To continue or start a new topic, the S has to carry out negotiations with other interactants. Once the initial proffering of evaluations is delivered, any difficulty in responding (e.g., delayed uptakes, hesitations, repair initiators etc.) is comprehended as signals of potential disagreements. Facing an imminent opposition, co-participants are seen to constantly negotiate their evaluations or assessments. Disagreements on the part of co-conversants may trigger and occasion first Ss’ qualification or modification of prior evaluative formulations. In some cases, they may adopt new positions different or even contrastive to prior stances, or they may retain first views and carry on reassertions to wait for agreements from interlocutors. The process of negotiation goes on and on until conversationalists find a common or middle ground, accept or acknowledge the co-existence of multiple views or start a new topic or end the talk (Mori 1999: 138). Profound conversation analysts like Pomerantz (1975, 1984a), Sacks (1987), Goodwin & Goodwin (1987, 1992) have taken notice of the ways in which native speakers of English negotiate their disagreements. Basing on the close investigation of naturally occurring fragments, their studies make clear the organization of sequences in pursuing the co-conversant’s response. Below are some of theoretical backgrounds concerning research into the organization of these sequences. 5.1.2.1. Insertion sequencesThe turn-by-turn sequential organization of interaction has been central to attention in the conversation analytic research, and adjacency pairs have been suggested a fundamental unit of this organization (Goffman 1976, Levinson 1983, Psathas 1995). However, in naturally occurring interactions, the operating of sequential organizations is much more complicated. Let us first consider the notion of ‘adjacency’, which should be understood as a relative concept. The question-answer sequences, for instance, may find themselves embedded within other sequences, as in Merritt’s excerpt (1976: 333):
B: Are you twenty one? ((q 2)) A: No. ((a 2)) B: No. ((a 1)) In a similar vein, a second pair part may be held, which creates a spatial and temporal distance within the pair, as in another example by Levinson (1983: 304):
A: Er I’ll just work that out for you= ((hold)) B: =thanks. ((accept)) A: Three pounds nineteen a tube sir. ((a 1)) Strict adjacency pairs, according to Levinson (Ibid.), are normally assumed to have strong effects or requirements in comparison to their embedded counterparts. Nonetheless, insertion sequences, which are pervasively employed in natural language usage to construct interesting interactions, are worth intensive studies. 5.1.2.2. Summons-answer sequencesSchegloff (1972a, 1979a) and Sacks (1975), considering telephone conversations, discover the uniqueness of opening exchanges, and call them summons-answer sequences. The ringing of the phone, in their view, should be treated as a summons, and the receiver’s first saying Hello or Hi is assumed the second interactional component. Obviously, the summons-answer sequences, which contain elements of three-turn (at least) sequences, are different from such prototypical adjacency pairs as greeting-greeting, assessment-agreement/ disagreement, or compliment-acceptance/ rejection in terms of turns, as exemplified below (Levinson 1983: 310-11).
B: Yeah? ((answer)) A: Pass the water woulddja? ((reason for summons))
R: Hello, C: Hi,
R: Oh hi:: As clearly seen from the above interactional excerpts, summons-answer sequences are commonly deployed not only in telephone talks, but in other everyday face-to-face conversations too. In (5), Schegloff (1979a) proposes to treat C’s ringing the phone as a summons/the first move in the interaction, R’s Hello - an answer and display of identity, C’s Hi – first greeting and recognition, and R’s Oh hi – second greeting and recognition. Thus, the process of identification and recognition (Schegloff ibid.), which seems potentially problematic in three-turn sequences, turns out to be immediately relevant in the environment of telephone interactions. 5.1.2.3. Pre-sequencesUtterances like ‘Hey’, ‘You know something?’, ‘What?’, ‘Excuse me’ etc. are usually deployed as prefaces or ‘precursors’ (Mey 2001: 144) to other utterances or sets of utterances. In other words, pre-sequences are those, which function as precursors to other utterances. There are different kinds of pre-sequences including summons, attention getters (some are listed above), pre-invitations, pre-requests, pre-announcements, pre-disagreements and many others. Before actual invitations, Ss may produce pre-invitations, as in the excerpt by Atkinson and Drew (1979: 253) given below:
B: Nothin’ A: Wanna drink? The requester can make use of a pre-request to check out if the co-conversant is available or willing to accept his request, as in Merritt’s example (1976: 324):
S: Yes. C: Okay. Can I have half a pint then? S: Sure. ((turns to get)) The pre-requests can be used to see if the grounds for refusal are present, otherwise the actual request sequences are immediately cancelled, as in (Ibid. 325):
S: Uh, no. We ran out. C: Okay. Thanks anyway. S: Sorry. Normally, it is not easy to announce bad news, and perhaps, that is the reason for Betty, who has to inform Fanny of Eva’s death, makes long stretches of pre-announcements, as in the excerpt by Maynard (2003: 132) cited below:
something (.) terrible t’tell you.= Betty: =So[u h: ] Fanny: [How t]errible[is it.] Betty: [.hhhhh] (.) Betty: Uh: ez worse it could be:. (0.7) Fanny: W’y’mean Eva? (.) Betty: Uh yah .hh= Fanny: =Wud she do die:?,= Betty: =Mm:hm, (.) Fanny: When did she die, (0.2) Betty: Abou:t uh:::(v) (.) four weeks ago. (.) Fanny: Oh how horrible. The above death announcement is full of pauses, delays, hesitations, sound stretching, and breathing. Instead of making a straightforward announcement, Betty just produces pre-announcements. By specifically designing her speech, Betty, step by step, invites guesses from Fanny. After quite a few pre-announcements, she succeeds in obtaining her interlocutor’s guess of Eva’s death, the very message she wants to transfer. Obviously, the special structure of pre-sequences seems to be effective in helping Ss obviate the need to perform undesirable actions at all. 5.1.2.4. Sequences in disagreeingExchanging evaluative opinions or assessments requires conversationalists to have available access to the same things, events or people being assessed. Given the assumption that recipients are responsive, they cannot incorporate with prior Ss without sufficient knowledge of the same referents mentioned in the on-going talk. Delays, hesitations, pauses or silences on the part of second Ss may signal their unstated disagreements or lack of knowledge necessary to make comments. It is very likely that profferers of first assessments attempt to figure out the reasons of getting no response, thus leading to their clarification, review, or modification of their stances. In Pomerantz’s view (1984b), they are prone to do so with the hope to get agreements from their interlocutors. To pursue agreements they can abandon their initial views and adopt new positions, as in her example given below (Ibid. 160):
them . hhhh uh a pound and a half for a dollar sixty five… M: Well I don’t know what’s the matter with them because fruitcake is not cheap and that’s not an awful lot of fruitcake. (1.0)
M: Course it is a little piece goes a long way. (.)
C: Well that’s right C’s customers complaint makes her decide to cut and sell the fruitcakes by halves, but M is not in agreement with C’s decision. M states that fruitcakes are not cheap, and they are not so big. However, C’s one-second silence makes M reconsider her position, and she rapidly reverses her prior view. By saying ‘a little piece goes a long way’, M enlarges the size of the cakes and insinuates her new stance. Only after a pause does C’s positive response come. And it is prefaced by ‘Well’. In another extract by Pomerantz (1984a: 87), the second S makes clear the view of the first S before criticizing it, adding more turns to the sequence:
J: (Are you-) ((high pitch)) J: Wha do ya mean you don’t have any da:tes. ((low pitch)) C: Well: I just don’t go out anymore that’s all. J: Oh: that’s ridiculous. As discussed earlier, disagreements seem to be overly stated in response to self-deprecations. After such attributes, the prior S may continue self-deprecating, resulting in a series of disagreements. In the following excerpt by Pomerantz (Ibid. 89), L disagrees with W and treats W’s action of self-deprecation as improper or unreasonable:
W: but, I’m still, drinking coffee, L: That’s not (drinking). W: You think so, L: No::.
W: It creates a nasty disposition. L: I don’t believe (that // at’all), W: it, makes you irritable L: (It does not) W: It doe:s, // (It ca:n.) L: You-er you-yuh-that’s a…//heh heh! hah! hah! hah! And I’m being irritable right now by telling you so, … As demonstrated, the negotiation of disagreeing in natural interpersonal interactions is interwoven, variously structured, and smooth flowing all over the turns in the sequences.
5.1.3.1. IntensifiersDisagreement tokens can be divided into strong or weak according to the force of the act. Very often, the force is enhanced or mitigated by means of intensification and modification. In most of the cases, disagreeing should be toned down by some form of elaboration to minimize imposition, as demonstrated in the following example by Finegan (2004: 311):
Frank: Yeah, it was pretty good. Intensifiers, in Brown & Levinson’s understanding (1987), act as overstaters and/or understaters, and adverbs like rather, quite, or just can play this twin role. Some authors view them as highlighters (van Dijk, 1979; Polanyi, 1985), or as maximizers (Held, 1989), whereas Zellermayer (1991) emphasizes their role in encoding information. In some cases, the S may use a more direct way to frame his/her disagreement by using intensifiers to strongly rebut the prior S’s assessment or opinion, as in the following interaction taken from Heritage (2002: 222):
I can’t say they’re old clunkers. He’s got two Cords and… Curt: Not original? Mike: Oh, yes, very original. Intensifiers are found to demonstrate quite frequently in the English corpus of the present study, as in the conversation given below between S, B and R:
B. Not an A. S. Right, not an A. R. It’s a B type. S. I really like that movie but I didn’t recommend anyone to see it.
B: Uhm, well, it’s it’s kinda scary. A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics by Crystal (2003: 237) defines intensifiers as ‘a class of adverbs which have a heightening or lowing effect on the meaning of another element in the sentence.’ Quirk et al. (1972: 438-453) divide intensifiers into three semantic classes, namely:
Dinh V. D. (1986: 218) takes notice of the frequent appearance of a class of words in Vietnamese which he calls ‘t×nh th¸i tõ’ and emphasizes their active usage in different types of acts depending on communicative purposes. Below is the list of these words: µ, ư, nhØ, nhÐ, (nh¸, nhí) a, ¹, Êy, víi, thÕ, nµo, ®©u, vËy, h¼n, ch¾c, ch¨ng, mµ, c¬, (kia), chø (chí) ®©u, th«i, ®·, ®i, h¶, hö (hë), ¬i, «i, sao, vËy , mµ th«i, thÕ/c¬ µ, c¬ mµ, etc… Investigating the different ways in which Vietnamese compliments are expressed Nguyen Q. (1998: 183-185) suggests a range of lexico-modal markers commonly deployed by Vietnamese Ss in giving compliments:
It is worth noting that intensifiers are not restricted to intensification. The scale that is shown by intensifiers fluctuates upwards and downwards. Emphasizers normally indicate a heightening level. Amplifiers upgrade the evaluative tokens compared to the commonly assumed norms, whereas downtoners carry a lowering effect. 5.1.3.2. Person referring termsThe abundance of lexical alternates and the multiplicity of pragmatic functions of the Vietnamese system of person reference terms, including terms of address and self-reference, make it central in a number of searches by Luong V. H. (1987, 1990), Nguyen D. H. (1995), Nguyen Q. (1998), Vu T. T. H. (1997, 2000), Nguyen T. T. B. (2000, 2001), to name just a few. The pervasive existence of person referring terms in Vietnamese, used to designate the S, the H and the third party, projects their significant importance in the Vietnamese system of socio-cultural beliefs and values, as Fowler (1985: 65) puts it, ‘Whatever is important to a culture is richly lexicalized.’ The amply source of alternates as well as the multiplicity of pragmatic functions (Luong V. H. 1990) has made the Vietnamese system of person reference the object of many studies. Among the three classes of person referring terms common nouns (including kinship, and status terms), proper nouns and personal pronouns, the most widely used is kinship terms (fictive and non-fictive usage) (Ibid.). In Vietnamese culture, the kinship hierarchy is rigidly observed in the family and patrilineage realm, regardless of age and status, but in other domains age and status are taken into consideration together with factors like the setting, speech style, intimacy, purpose of the talk etc. in the choice of appropriate person-referring terms (Bui M. Y. 1996, Vu T. T. H. 1997, Nguyen V. K. 2000 and Nguyen T. T. B. 2001). It is possible to say that in Vietnamese deictic categories of the S, addressee and other people are more complex and elaborated compared to those in English, as they involve the notions of age, status, relations (by marriage and by law) etc. The term ‘honorifics’ is used to denote expressions indicating people of a higher status than ego such as ‘quý «ng’, ‘quý bµ’, ‘ngµi’ and so on. According to Do H. C. (2003), personal pronouns (first and second person) in Vietnamese are: t«i, tí, ta, tao, (I), m×nh (I/you), mµy, bay (you), chóng t«i, chóng mµy, chóng ta, chóng m×nh, bän m×nh, bän ta (we) etc. The use of these pronouns depends on personal relations, emotional feelings and other factors, and probably, none of them can be as neutral as English ‘I’ and ‘you’. Thus, the S should be very careful in choosing the right pronoun for the right addressee and context. Vietnamese also makes use of proper nouns and kinship terms in certain cases. Kinships in Vietnamese can be divided into three groups:
Do H. C. (2003) assumes that first-group terms can be deployed as personal pronouns, third-group terms can be used for the description of relation, and second-group terms can act as pronouns and description devices. Professional terms like b¸c sÜ (doctor), thÇy (teacher), gi¸o sư (professor), chñ tÞch (chairman), gi¸m ®èc (director), bé trưëng (minister) etc. often play the part of pronouns.
Sometimes the old forms like ‘cô b¸, cô ch¸nh, «ng lý’ etc. involving the feudal times can be seen. The archaic forms such as ‘ngµi, trÉm, qu¶ nh©n, tiªn sinh, thÇn, khanh, ngu ®Ö, hiÒn ®Ö, ngu huynh, hiÒn huynh, t¹i h¹, tiªn sinh, bØ nh©n’ etc. have a very limited range of use. Wierzbicka (1996) asserts that all languages make a distinction between ‘I’ (the speaker) and ‘you’ (the addressee) although some may have just one word for ‘he’ and ‘she’. Many languages, especially those spoken in South-east Asia, possess a wide range of elaborate substitutes for ‘I’ and ‘you’ (Cook 1968, Wierzbicka 1996), and the basic forms of ‘I’ and ‘you’ do not seem as appropriate as their substitutes. The Vietnamese ‘mµy’ (I) and ‘tao’ (you), for example, may be interpreted as either very intimate or very rude depending on the context. Apart from personal pronouns (I, he/she/it, you, we, they), English also makes use of proper names, professional terms (professor, master, etc.) and titles (Mr., Mrs., Miss., etc.), which is similar to Vietnamese.
It is of interest to talk of multi-person pronouns in Vietnamese like ‘người ta’, and ‘m×nh’ used as first and second person pronouns. Proper names, most of kinship terms can be functioned as first, second and third person ones. To avoid confusion, particles ‘Êy’, ‘ta’ are often put in combination with second-group kinship terms when they are used as third person pronouns, eg. c« Êy, c« ta (she).
(I want you to do this exercise again)
(Aunt, help me with this work.)
(I don’t like her.) Third person forms which is by nature distal can replace second person ones for irony, humor, accusation or criticism as in:
Third person forms help to make the potential accusation less direct and aggressive, and the personal aspects seem impersonal. It is also the case in Vietnamese when third person forms are used in indirect criticisms and accusations:
(Son/Daughter, you have to take care of everyone.) 'mọi người’ (alluding to the S and/or his spouse) is used to avoid using the first person pronoun, which seems to be too direct in Vietnamese in this case. It is possible to use the first person plural ‘we’ to speak out the rules generally applied to people as in:
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