A cross-cultural study of pauses and time-fillers in some american and vietnamese films

A cross-cultural study of pauses and time-fillers in some american and vietnamese films Nguyễn Thị Hồng Nhung Trường Đại học Ngoại ngữ Luận văn Thạc sĩ ngành: Ngôn ngữ học Anh; Mã số:

A cross-cultural study of pauses and time-fillers in some american and vietnamese films

Nguyễn Thị Hồng Nhung

Trường Đại học Ngoại ngữ Luận văn Thạc sĩ ngành: Ngôn ngữ học Anh; Mã số: 60 22 15

Người hướng dẫn: GS.TS Nguyễn Quang

Năm bảo vệ: 2012

Abstract: The present study is a comparative and exploratory study of the use of

silence/pauses and time-fillers in American and Vietnamese films Its aims are to investigate: (i) How the Vietnamese characters perform silence/pauses and time-fillers

in the contexts studied, (ii) How the American characters perform silence/pauses and time-fillers in the contexts studied, and (iii) What the major differences between American and Vietnamese characters in performing silence/pauses and time-fillers are Data are collected from four Vietnamese and four American films They are analyzed against the three reference points of availability, proportionality and manifestability to find out major similarities and differences between American and Vietnamese characters (and hopefully, the American and the Vietnamese) in using silence/pauses and time-fillers The results show that American and Vietnamese characters have different preferences for using silence/pauses and time-fillers in the films under investigation They are significantly different not only in the number of pause and time-filler occurrences, but also in the duration and location Moreover, the variables

of power such as „high-to-low‟, „low-to-high‟, or „equal‟ tend to have a significant influence on the occurrence, the duration and the location of silence/pauses and

time-fillers for both groups

Keywords: Giao văn hóa; Tiếng Anh; Ngôn ngữ học

Content

PART A INTRODUCTION

I RATIONALE

Silence/Pauses and time-fillers exist in all social interactions in any culture They are used to show respect, anger, hostility, disinterest, or any other emotions However, when and how to use time-fillers or silence/pauses are not the same in different languages and cultures Therefore, the study of similarities and differences of using silence/pauses and time-fillers in interaction would help not only for the success of American-Vietnamese cross-cultural communication but also in communicative language teaching/learning

II SCOPE OF THE STUDY

Although intralinguistic (vocabulary, grammatical rules, phonetic rules ) and extralinguistic (facial expressions, postures, proximity ) factors, to a great extent, play a vitally important role in communication, they are beyond the scope of this study This study only focuses on pauses and time-fillers in some American and Vietnamese films for the discovery of major similarities and differences between the two groups

This research is confined to studying only the factor of power [colleague to colleague (equal); boss to employee (high to low); and employee to boss (low to high)] that are readily manageable and lend themselves to quantitative analyses

Similar plots, characters and scenes that involve similar communicative events/ situations are intentionally chosen for contrastive analysis

III AIMS OF THE STUDY

The aims of the study are:

- To investigate the use of silence/pauses and time-fillers under the variables of power in chosen situations in some American and Vietnamese films

- To find out major American- Vietnamese cross-cultural differences and similarities in using silence/pauses and time-fillers in the situations under investigation

IV METHODOLOGY

The main method of this study is the quantitative one All the considerations, remarks, interpretations, comments and assumptions given in the study are largely based on data analysis with due reference to publications

The data were collected from four American and four Vietnamese socio-psychological films The instrument to construct validation is used to tap individual assessment of social power (SP)

V DESIGN OF THE STUDY

The study consists of three parts:

Part I Introduction, which provides the rationale, scope, aims and methods of the sudy

Part II Development, which consists of three chapters

Chapter 1 Theoretical preliminaries This chapter covers the relationship between

language and culture, language and communication, cross-cultural communication, high-context and low-high-context culture, non-verbal communication and paralanguage

Chapter 2 Silence/pauses and Time-fillers This chapter reviews the issues relevant to

the study including silence/ pauses and time-fillers Then the notions of silence/ pause and time-filler definitions and usages are discussed

Chapter 3 Findings and Discussions The strategies of using silence/pauses and

time-fillers are identified and major cross-cultural differences and similarities discussed

Part III Conclusion, in which the main findings are reviewed, the implications for cross-culture interactions, the limitations of the study pointed out and suggestions for further research offered

PART B DEVELOPMENT Chapter 1 Theoretical preliminaries 1.1 Language, culture and communication

1.1.1 Language and communication

By age four, most humans have developed an ability to communicate through oral language By age six or seven, most humans can comprehend, as well as express, written thoughts These unique abilities of communicating through a native language clearly separate humans from all animals

In 1994, in Time magazine, an article appeared titled ‘How man began’ Within that

article was the following bold assertion:

‚No single, essential difference separates human beings from other animals”

Yet, in what is obviously a contradiction to such a statement, all evolutionists admit that communication via speech is uniquely human - so that it often is used as the singular, and most important, dividing line between humans and animals

Language is the development of the basic form of communication between human beings, and

in a society And just as it is the basic form, it is also the most developed We can not communicate in any real sense without language, other than through gestures; we do communicate through some non-verbal forms like the visual arts - painting and sculpture - and through dance, but the culmination of true, articulate, communication is through language It could naturally take a number of forms It could be unvarnished, workaday prose, it could be poetry, it could be drama; but all of these are forms of language, written, spoken and read The way in which the language is being used is making it pretty Thus, a successful communicator must own a good command of language at first

1.1.2 Language and culture

Culture (from the Latin cultura stemming from colere, meaning ‚to cultivate‛) is a

term that has different meanings And, the word ‚culture‛ is most commonly used in three

basic senses:

 excellence of taste in the fine arts and humanities, also known as high culture

 an integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for symbolic thought and social learning

 the set of shared attitudes, values, goals and practices that characterizes an institution, organization or group

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture#cite_note-1) The notion of communicative competence is one of the theories that underlies the communicative approach to foreign language teaching Canale and Swain (1980: 1-47) define

communicative competence in terms of four components:

1 Grammatical competence: including vocabulary, word formation, sentence

formation, pronunciation, spelling and linguistic semantics;

2 Sociolinguistic competence: addressing the extent to which utterances are produced

and understood appropriately in different sociolinguistic contexts depending on contextual factors such as status of participants, purposes of the interaction, and norms or conventions of interaction;

3 Discourse competence: concerning mastery of how to combine grammatical forms

and meanings to achieve a unified spoken or written text in different genres

4 Strategic competence: composed of mastery of verbal and non-verbal

communication strategies that may be called into actual situations or to sufficient competence

in one or more of the other areas of communicative competence and to enhance the effectiveness of communication

A more recent survey of communicative competence by Bachman (1990) divides it into the broad headings of "organizational competence," which includes both grammatical and discourse (or textual) competence, and pragmatic competence, which includes both sociolinguistic and illocutionary competence Through the influence of communicative language teaching, it has become widely accepted that communicative competence should be the goal of language education, central to good classroom practice The understanding of communicative competence has been influenced by the field of pragmatics and the philosophy

of language concerning speech acts

Research results from contrastive analysis of discourse and acts such as compliment, apology indicate that appropriateness in a particular situation in one culture may not become the same in another culture So acquiring sociolinguistic norms is actually acquiring the culture in which the language is used

Savignon (1997) adds that there exists the interrelation among the four components in increasing communicative competence

1 Linguistic knowledge (verbal and non-verbal elements, patterns of elements in

particular speech event, range of possible variants, meaning of variants in particular situations)

2 Interacting skills (perception of salient features in communicative situations;

selection and interpretation of forms appropriate to specific situations, role and relationship; norms of interaction and interpretation; strategies for achieving goals)

3 Cultural knowledge (social structure, values and attitudes, cognitive map/schema,

enculturation processes)

Nguyen Quang (2001: 68) states that communicative competence is the shared part of the three components mentioned above

Despite the disagreement among scholars about its components, all researchers postulate the existence of communicative competence

A popular cultural framework was proposed by Hall (1973, 1990), in which he states that all cultures can be situated in relation to one another through the styles in which they communicate In some cultures, such as those of North America and much of Western Europe, communication occurs predominantly through explicit statements in text and speech, and they are thus categorized as low-context cultures In other cultures, such as Asia, much of the Middle East, Africa, and South America, messages include other communicative cues such as body language and the use of silence, and thus, known as high-context cultures Essentially, high-context communication involves implying a message through that which is not uttered This includes the situation, behavior, and para-verbal cues as integral parts of the communicated message These terms such as “high-context and low-context culture”, “non-verbal communication” and “paralanguage” will be investigated in the following sections

1.2 High-context culture vs Low-context culture

1.2.1 Definitions and differences

High-context (HC) culture and the contrasting low-context (LC) culture are terms

presented by Hall in his book Beyond Culture (1976) Hall states that HC transactions feature

pre-programmed information that is in the receiver and in the setting, with only minimal information in the transmitted message LC transactions are the reverse Most of the information must be in the transmitted message in order to make up for what is missing in the context

High-context culture refers to a culture's tendency to use high-context messages over low-context messages in routine communication This choice of communication styles translates into a culture that will cater towards in-groups; an in-group being a group that has

similar experiences and expectations, from which inferences are drawn In a high-context culture, many things are left unsaid, letting the culture explain Words and word choice become very important in higher context communication, since a few words can communicate

a complex message very effectively to an in-group (but less effectively outside that group), while in a lower context culture, the communicator needs to be much more explicit and the value of a single word is less important

LC culture refers to a culture’s tendency to cater towards in-groups Low context cultures, such as Germany or the United States make much less extensive use of such similar experiences and expectations to communicate Much more is explained through words or verbalization, instead of the context

Viet Nam and most Asian countries are classified as HC cultures The U.S.A and Canada, along with Northern European countries, are classified as LC This is, of course, an oversimplification Within a LC culture, we'll find ourselves in high-context situations and vice-versa For example, within a LC American culture, communications among family members are generally HC because of the high level of shared experience For our purposes, though, we will rely on the broad-brush definition

While these terms are sometimes useful in describing some aspects of a culture, one can never say a culture is "high" or "low" because societies all contain both modes "High" and "low" are therefore less relevant as a description of a whole people, and more useful to describe and understand particular situations and environments

1.2.2 High and low context situations

Every culture and every situation has its high and low aspects Often one situation will contain an inner HC core and an outer LC ring for those who are less involved

For instance, a PTA (parent-teacher association) is usually a low-context situation: any parent can join, the dates of the meetings, who is president, what will be discussed, etc are all explicitly available information, and it is usually fairly clear how to participate in the meetings However, if this is a small town, perhaps the people who run the PTA all know each other very well and have many overlapping interests They may "agree" on what should

be discussed or what should happen without ever really talking about it, they have unconscious, unexpressed values that influence their decisions Other parents from outside may not understand how decisions are actually being made So the PTA is still low-context, but it has a high-context subgroup that is in turn part of a high-context small town society

When we enter a HC situation, it does not immediately become a LC culture just because we came in the door It is still a high-context culture and we are just ignorant Also,

even low context cultures can be difficult to learn: religious dietary laws, medical training, written language all take years to understand The point is that that information has been made conscious, systematic, and available to those who have the resources to learn it

High contexts can be difficult to enter if we are an outsider (because we do not carry the context information internally, and because we can not instantly create close relationships) Low contexts are relatively easy to enter if we are an outsider (because the environment contains much of the information we need to participate, and because we can form relationships fairly soon, and because the important thing is accomplishing a task rather than feeling our way into a relationship)

Many researchers have found that people in high-context cultures tend to be more implicit in verbal codes, perceive highly verbal persons less attractive, tend to be more reliant

on and tuned into non-verbal communication, and expect to have more non-verbal codes in communication

1.3 Non-verbal communication

Communication is the transfer of information, ideas and emotions from one person to another Most of us spend about 75 percent of our waking hours communicating our knowledge, thoughts, and ideas to others However, most of us fail to realize that a great deal

of our communication is of a non-verbal form as opposed to the oral and written forms

The last decades have seen a tremendous upsurge in research and popular interest in the phenomena of nonverbal communication In its narrow and accurate sense, nonverbal behavior refers to actions as distinct from speech It thus includes facial expressions, hand and arm gestures, postures, positions, and various movements of the body or the legs and feet It may also include the way we wear our clothes or the silence we keep Therefore, we can say that silence/pauses are considered as one of non-verbal behaviors

In his book, Nonverbal communication, Albert Mehrabian (1972) states that nonverbal

communication (NVC) is the act of imparting or interchanging thoughts, opinions, or information without the use of spoken words Nonverbal communication is used as a key variable to determine people's attitudes, values, and beliefs For example, an observer watching a focus group will pay special attention to the nonverbal cues of group interaction, such as body language, facial expressions, and eye contact, to identify group members' true feelings about an issue

In The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, nonverbal communication is defined as

communication without the use of spoken language

Many scholars indicate that NVC is usually understood as the process of communication through sending and receiving wordless messages NVC can be communicated through gestures and touch, by body language or posture, by facial expressions and eye contact NVC can be communicated through object communication such as clothing, hairstyles or even architecture, symbols and inforgraphics Speech contains nonverbal elements known as paralanguage, including voice quality, emotion and speaking style, as well

as prosodic features such as rhythm, intonation and stress Dance is also regarded as a nonverbal communication Likewise, written texts have nonverbal elements such as handwriting style, spatial arrangement of words, or the use of emoticons

1.4 Paralanguage

Paralanguage refers to the vocal and nonverbal elements of communication used to modify meaning and convey emotion Paralanguage may be expressed consciously or unconsciously, and it includes the pitch, volume, and, in some cases, intonation of speech Sometimes the definition is restricted to vocally-produced sounds The study of paralanguage is known as paralinguistics

The term ‘paralanguage’ is sometimes used as a cover term for body language, which is not necessarily tied to speech, and paralinguistic phenomena in speech The latter are phenomena that can be observed in speech but that do not belong to the arbitrary conventional code of language

Paralanguage is part of the nonverbal communication and convey emotions and attitudes

It may not only be expressed consciously or unconsciously but also include vocalizations such

as hissing, hushing, and whistling, as well as speech modifications such as quality of voice or hesitations and speed in talking Some examples of paralanguage are laughing, crying, whispering, snoring, sucking, sneezing, sighing, etc Tone of voice plays a fundamental role in telephone interactions

According to Robbins and Langton (2001), Paralanguage is communication that goes beyond the specific spoken words It includes pitch, amplitude, rate, and voice quality of

speech Paralanguage reminds us that people convey their feelings not only in what they say, but also in how they say it

Literature has shown that it is possible to convey the full gamut of emotions in text The real problem is that it takes a long time and a lot of talent to do this Consequently, it is not

that text does not have emotional clues, but it is so difficult to put them in To that end, with

text, paralinguistic clues are:

 Explicit: Emoticons, cartoons, call-out descriptions

 Style: Typography, layout, color, location

 Implicit: Rhetoric, rhythm, sound, flex, vocabulary

The paralinguistic properties of speech play an important role in human speech communication There are no utterances or speech signals that lack paralinguistic properties, since speech requires the presence of a voice that can be modulated This voice must have some properties, and all the properties of a voice as such are paralinguistic However, the distinction ‚linguistic vs paralinguistic‛ applies not only to speech but to writing and sign language as well, and it is not bound to any sensory modality Even vocal language has some paralinguistic as well as linguistic properties that can be seen and even felt

In text-only communication such as email, chatrooms and instant massaging, paralinguistic elements can be displayed by emoticons, font and color choices, capitalization and the use of non-alphabetic or abstract characters Nonetheless, paralanguage in written communication is limited in comparison with face-to-face conversation, sometimes leading to misunderstandings

CHAPTER II SILENCE/PAUSES AND TIME-FILLERS 2.1 Silence/ Pauses

According to Clark (1996), pauses are powerful cues for what is happening in a conversation To use them as a basis for analyzing culture-specific behavior, we first have to check carefully what purposes pauses may serve in conversations and how the usage differs across cultures As we want to build a computational model for American English and Vietnamese, those two cultures are of special interest

In the book of Conversational organization ” Interaction between speakers and hearers,

Charles Goodwin (1981) describes his research on gaze behavior and manipulation According to him, gaze is used to manage turn taking and to signal understanding or attentiveness If attention signals of the listener are missing, pauses are used by the speaker to regain attention In this case the duration of the silence is dependent from the nonverbal

signals of the hearer

2.2 Time-fillers

Time-fillers (TFs) are prevalent in Vietnamese and English spontaneous speech and pose a major problem in Vietnamese and English speech recognition

TFs are parts of speech which are not generally recognized as purposeful or containing

formal meaning, usually expressed as pauses such as uh, like and er, but also extending to repair ("He was buying a black uh, I mean a blue, a blue shirt"), and articulation problems

such as stuttering This is normally frowned upon in mass media such as news reports or films, but they occur regularly in everyday conversations, sometimes representing upwards of 20%

of "words" in conversation TFs can also be used as a pause for thought, for example: ‚I need

four um oranges and mm three apples‛

In linguistics, a TF is a sound or word that is spoken in conversations by one participant to signal to others that he/she has paused to think but is not yet finished speaking Different languages have different characteristics of TFs; in English, the most common TFs

are uh /u/, er /ə/ and um /əm/, "Like", "you know", "actually", and "basically" are more prevalent among youths; in Vietnamese we can find: ừm, anh/chị biết đấy, thực ra thì, kiểu

như, đại loại là, nói thế nào nhỉ? (Nguyen Quang, 2001)

A TF occurs most often when a speaker is thinking It is a time-filler in that the speaker actually breaks off speech while continuing to articulate However, the articulation is neither a word, nor part of a word

There are some of the common TFs that are found in most conversations Even though

it is quite alright to use these TFs once in a while during informal conversations, over a period

of time they become a habit and finally are a part and parcel of our speaking style and diction

In formal situations, especially, they can become quite annoying to the listener, and the speaker could unknowingly become more and more conscious and use these TFs to make up for the awkwardness he or she feels

CHAPTER III FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION

Much work has been devoted to the treatment of hesitations in particular time-fillers The way in which people hesitate may to some extent be language-specific This study will not only concentrate on silence/pauses and time-fillers but also on their actual operations in some

Vietnamese and American films, in which TFs such as well, er (ừ, ờ); you see (anh/chị thấy

không); you know (anh/ chị biết không); oh/ er/ um let me see (ờ/ ừ/ ừm để tôi xem) appear

3.1 Research methods

3.1.1 Subjects

There are three social factors: relative power, social distance and the ranking of imposition that relate to the data analysis procedure But only the second one is focussed on in the present study

The subjects chosen for this study includes conversations in which silence/ pauses and time-fillers are used by characters in 4 Vietnamese and 4 American films The characters use silence/pauses and time-fillers in similar settings and with similar conversational topics Besides, all the chosen subjects are American in American settings and Vietnamese in Vietnamese settings Relationships between subjects are chosen with the factor of power in