A pragmatics and conversation analysis perspective

A pragmatics and conversation analysis perspective

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY – HANOICOLLEGE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES

KIEU, THI THU HUONG

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirementsfor 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

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 usedwithout due acknowledgment in the text of the thesis.

Hanoi - 2006

Kieu Thi Thu Huong

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

I wish to express my deep indebtedness to Prof Dr Luong Van Hy, the chair of theDepartment of Anthropology, University of Toronto, Canada for his brilliant scholarship,demanding teaching and supervision His unending help greatly encouraged me beforeand 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 ofconversation analysis, for his productive course of conversation analysis, his kindnessand 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 andgenerosity I would like to take this opportunity to thank Assoc Prof Dr Nguyen Hoafor his discerning comments, knowledgeable suggestions and kind-heartedness Mysincere thanks go to all my teachers at CFL – VNU for their profound knowledge andoutstanding 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 Vietnamfor her kind support and valuable correction of all this work in manuscript But for her, Iwould 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, myfriends and students, my colleagues at Hanoi-Amsterdam High school, the schoolprincipal 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, thechair 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 efficientassistance, intellectual support and continual encouragement

I especially express my heartfelt gratitude to Assoc Prof Dr Tran Huu Manh, whosupervised 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, myhusband and my two children, who have always given me their love, understanding andencouragement throughout my study.

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

This thesis takes as its main objective the description of the native perception andrealization of the speech act of disagreeing in English and Vietnamese within thetheoretical 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 suchissues as politeness, its notions and relations with indirectness, strategies and linguisticdevices used to express disagreement tokens in the English and Vietnamese languagesand cultures Linguistic politeness is carefully examined in its unity of discernment andvolition on the basis of the data obtained from elicited written questionnaires, folkexpressions, interviews and naturally occurring interactions The meticulous andmiraculous methods offered by conversation analysis are of great help in describing andexploring the structural organization of disagreement responses in preferred anddispreferred 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 performdisagreements by speakers of English in North America and speakers of Vietnamese inHanoi result from the differences in their assessment of socio-cultural parameters andsocial situations Although indirectness might be used in some contexts as a means toexpress politeness, there is no absolute correlation between politeness and indirectness inthe two languages and cultures under investigation Despite the English generalpreference for direct strategies and the Vietnamese tendency to indirect strategies, theformer 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 inclose relation to the study of the speakers’ wider socio-cultural milieus with systems oflocal norms, beliefs and values In proffering disagreements to the prior evaluations orideas, native speakers not only deploy individually volitional strategies but also observesocially determined norms of behavior, especially in the choice of formulaic expressions,speech levels, address terms, deference markers etc Therefore, the deployment of thenormative-volitional approach to politeness study is appropriate and reasonable.

Conversation analysis sheds light on disagreements as dispreferred seconds to firstassessments and opinions, and as preferred seconds to self-deprecations English andVietnamese speakers adopt the same strategies in regards to preference organization,compliment responses and negotiation of disagreements On the whole, disagreements areinclined 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 explorethe conflicting effects caused by the correlation between preference organization andself-compliment avoidance in responses to compliments The English informants show atrend towards compliment acceptance and appreciation, while the Vietnamese prefer torefuse and negate prior complimentary tokens in spite of their similar strategies inadopting mid-positions The accounts for this phenomenon can be found in theVietnamese 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, thecombined pragmatics and conversation analysis perspective is strongly recommended to

speech act study as this integration maximizes the strengths and minimizes theweaknesses of each approach

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS IABSTRACT IIITABLE OF CONTENTS VLIST OF TABLES AND CHARTS XABBREVIATIONS AND CONVENTIONS XIII

1 RATIONALE 1

1.1 NECESSITY OF THE STUDY 1

1.1.1 Problem statement 1

1.1.2 Society, culture and language 2

1.2 MERITS OF THE STUDY 3

5.2 PRAGMATICS AND CONVERSATION ANALYSIS 10

5.2.1 Choice of conversation analysis 10

5.2.2 Combination of pragmatics and conversation analysis 10

5.2.3 Combination of pragmatics and CA in other studies 11

6 CREATIVITY 12

6.1 SYNTHETIC APPROACH – PRAGMATICS AND CONVERSATION ANALYSIS 12

6.2 DATA FROM QUESTIONNAIRES AND NATURALLY OCCURRING CONVERSATION.126.3 SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES IN DISAGREEING 12

7 ORGANIZATION OF THE STUDY 13

CHAPTER ONE 14

DISAGREEING – A COMMUNICATIVE ILLOCUTIONARY AND SOCIAL ACT 14

1.1 THEORETICAL PRELIMINARIES 14

1.1.1 Speech Act Theory 14

1.1.1.1 Speech acts and speech events 14

1.1.1.2 Three-dimension speech acts 15

1.1.1.3 Classification of speech acts 16

1.1.1.4 Disagreeing – a communicative illocutionary act 18

1.1.2 Conversation Analysis 20

1.1.2.1 Historical background 20

1.1.2.2 Co-text and context 22

1.1.2.3 Turn – turn taking and adjacency pairs 24

1.1.2.4 Disagreeing – a social act 27

1.1.3 Summary 29

1.2 EMPIRICAL STUDY 29

1.2.1 Aims and methodology 29

1.2.1.1 Aims 29

1.2.1.2 Data collection methods and respondents 30

1.2.2 Assessment of socio-cultural parameters by respondents 37

2.1.2.2 Lakoff’s rules and Leech’s maxims 56

2.1.2.3 Brown & Levinson’s model 58

2.1.4.1 Literature by Vietnamese researchers 64

2.1.4.2 Literature by other researchers 68

2.1.5 Summary 69

2.2 EMPIRICAL STUDY 70

2.2.1 Aims and Methodology 70

2.2.1.1 Aims 70

2.2.1.2 Data collection methods and respondents 70

2.2.2 Politeness Level Rated by Respondents 71

2.2.2.1 Data results 71

3.1.3.2 Factors governing indirectness 97

3.1.3.3 Indirectness and politeness 98

3.1.4 Summary 102

3.2 EMPIRICAL STUDY 103

3.2.1 Aims and Methodology 103

3.2.1.1 Aims 103

3.2.1.2 Data collection methods and respondents 103

3.2.2 Choice of Strategies by Respondents 104

4.2.1.2 Data collection methods and respondents 134

4.2.2 Strategies for Disagreements as Dispreferred Seconds 137

4.2.2.1 English corpus 137

4.2.2.2 Vietnamese corpus 141

5.2.1.2 Data collection methods and respondents 175

5.2.2 Strategies for Constraint Systems 176

1.1 POLITENESS STRATEGIES IN DISAGREEING 193

1.2 NORMATIVE-VOLITIONAL POLITENESS AND INDIRECTNESS 194

1.3 STRATEGIES CONCERNING PREFERENCE ORGANIZATION 195

1.4 STRATEGIES FOR NEGOTIATION OF DISAGREEMENTS AND CONSTRAINT SYSTEMS 196

2 IMPLICATIONS 197

2.1 EFL & VFL IMPLICATIONS 197

2.2 PRAGMATICS AND CA PERSPECTIVE IN SPEECH ACT STUDY 198

3 SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH 200APPENDIXES I

LIST OF TABLES AND CHARTS

Table 1-1: The five general functions of speech acts (Yule 1996: 55) 16

Table 1-2: Gender correlation between English and Vietnamese respondents 33

Table 1-3: Age group correlation between English and Vietnamese respondents 33

Table 1-4: Assessment of socio-cultural factors: Age of co-conversants 37

Table 1-5: Assessment of socio-cultural factors: Manner of communication 38

Table 1-6: Assessment of socio-cultural factors: Setting 39

Table 1-7: Assessment of socio-cultural factors: Gender of co-conversants 40

Table 1-8: Assessment of socio-cultural factors: Social status 41

Table 1-9: Assessment of socio-cultural factors: Length of time you know your conversants 42

co-Table 1-10: Assessment of Social Situations - Sit A1 Praise on Nice-looking Spouse .44Table 1-11: Assessment of Social Situations - Sit A2 Self-praise on New Hairstyle 45

Table 1-12: Assessment of Social Situations - Sit A3 Disparagement of New Italian Shoes 45

Table 1-13: Assessment of Social Situations - Sit A4 Miss X Is Getting Too Fat 45

Table 1-14: Assessment of Social Situations - Sit B2 Bigger Pensions 46

Table 1-15: Assessment of Social Situations - Sit C1 Mr Y's Promotion 46

Table 1-16: Assessment of Social Situations - Sit C4 Voting for Mr X 47

Table 1-17: Assessment of Social Situations - Sit D1 Car Expert 47

Table 1-18: Assessment of Social Situations - Sit D2 Favorite Team's Failure 48

Table 1-19: General Assessment of All Situations by Respondents 49

Table 2-1: Assessment of Politeness Level 4.1 'She's all right, I suppose.' 71

Table 2-2: Assessment of Politeness Level 4.3 'Fashions change, you know.' 72

Table 2-3: Assessment of Politeness Level 4.4 ‘We’re very much in agreement, but ….' 73

Table 2-4: Assessment of Politeness Level 4.5 'Not me, I totally disagree ' 74

Table 2-5: Assessment of Politeness Level 4.6 'That's pretty good.' 74

Table 2-6: Assessment of Politeness Level 4.7 'That may be so, but ' 76

Table 2-7: Assessment of Politeness Level 4.8 ‘Really?’ 77

Table 2-8: Assessment of Politeness Level 4.9 'No, grandpa, no, no, you're wrong.' 77

Table 2-9: Assessment of Politeness Level 4.10 'Boring people get bored.' 78

Table 2-10: Assessment of Politeness Level 4 11 'Do you really think so?' 78

Table 2-11: Assessment of Politeness Level 4.12 'Sorry, but I think it was interesting.' 79Table 3-1: Choice of Politeness Strategies to Disagree with Close Friend (Miss X is fat) 104

Table 3-2: Choice of Politeness Strategies to Disagree with Close Friend (Tax increase) 105

Table 3-3: Choice of Politeness Strategies to Disagree with Close Friend (Boring party) 106

Table 3-4: Choice of Politeness Strategies to Disagree with Someone You Dislike (Miss X is fat) 107

Table 3-5: Choice of Politeness Strategies to Disagree with Someone You Dislike (Tax increase) 107

Table 3-6: Choice of Politeness Strategies to Disagree with Someone You Dislike

Table 4-1: Correlations of content and format in adjacency pair second 121

Table 4-2: The preference ranking of the repair apparatus (Based on Levinson 1983: 341) 127

Table 5-1: Interrelatedness between acceptances/agreements and rejections/disagreements 160

Chart 2-1: Assessment of Politeness Level 4.1 'She's all right, I suppose.' 71

Chart 2-2: Assessment of Politeness Level 4.3 'Fashions change, you know.' 72

Chart 2-3: Assessment of Politeness Level 4.4 'We're very much in agreement, but '73

Chart 2-4: Assessment of Politeness Level 4.5 'Not me, I totally disagree.' 74

Chart 2-5: Assessment of Politeness Level 4.6 'That's pretty good.' 75

Chart 2-6: Assessment of Politeness Level 4.7 'That may be so, but ' 75

Chart 2-7: Assessment of Politeness Level 4.8 'Really?' 76

Chart 2-8: Assessment of Politeness Level 4.9 'No, grandpa, no, no, you're wrong.' 77

Chart 2-9: Assessment of Politeness Level 4.10 'Boring people get bored.’ 78

Chart 2-10: Assessment of Politeness Level 4.11 'Do you really think so?' 79

Chart 2-11: Assessment of Politeness Level 4.12 'Sorry, but I think it was interesting.' 80Chart 3-1: Possible strategies for doing FTAs 83

Chart 3-2: Choice of Politeness Strategies to Disagree with Close Friend (Miss X is fat) 104

Chart 3-3: Choice of Politeness Strategies to Disagree with Close Friend (Tax increase) 105

Chart 3-4: Choice of Politeness Strategies to Disagree with Close Friend (Boring party) 106

Chart 3-5: Choice of Politeness Strategies to Disagree with Someone You Dislike (Miss X is fat) 106Chart 3-6: Choice of Politeness Strategies to Disagree with Someone You Dislike (Tax

increase) 107Chart 3-7: Choice of Politeness Strategies to Disagree with Someone You Dislike

(Boring party) 108Chart 3-8: Choice of Politeness Strategies to Disagree with Colleague, same age &

gender (Miss X) 108Chart 3-9: Choice of Politeness Strategies to Disagree with Colleague, same age &

gender (Tax) 109Chart 3-10: Choice of Politeness to Disagree with Colleague, same age & gender (Party)

110Chart 3-11: Choice of Politeness Strategies to Disagree with Older Acquaintance (Miss Xis fat) 110Chart 3-12: Choice of Politeness Strategies to Disagree with Older Acquaintance (Tax

increase) 111Chart 3-13: Choice of Politeness Strategies to Disagree with Older Acquaintance (Boring party) 112Chart 3-14: Choice of Disagreeing Strategies to Disagree with Older Boss (Miss X is fat)

113Chart 3-15: Choice of Politeness Strategies to Disagree with Older Boss (Tax increase)

114Chart 3-16: Choice of Politeness Strategies to Disagree with Older Boss (Boring Party)

114

ABBREVIATIONS AND CONVENTIONS

In the past few decades, the rapid development of technology and communicationsystems has greatly shortened the distance between countries and offered more chancefor inter-cultural interactions besides intra-cultural interactions It is English that hasbecome the most international and the most widely used language Colleges andschools in Vietnam have witnessed a sharp increase in the number of people teachingand learning English The evolving situation of Vietnamese economics and politicsdemands a change in how to teach and learn foreign languages in general, and Englishin particular There is an urgent need to improve students’ communicative competencebesides grammatical knowledge Recently, verbal communicative competence has beentaken into consideration in any English teaching program

The emphasis on speaking, one of the early forms of man’s communication, hasresulted in an awareness of developing a sense of socio-cultural factors in learners tohelp them become successful in interaction Thus, this study is conducted with the hope

of contributing to the socio-cultural aspects of spoken English-Vietnamesecommunication 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 ofgreat interest to the researcher and of great help to language teachers and learners Ineveryday life, native speakers talk to each other, exchanging ideas, evaluations orassessments of things, events and other people Their interlocutors may agree ordisagree with them The way second speakers express their disagreement with priorspeakers is both language-specific and culture-specific The differences in the ways inwhich native speakers of English and Vietnamese realize disagreements seem to makeit problematic for cultural outsiders to say the right thing at the right time Therefore, acomparison of the ways used to realize disagreeing by native speakers of English andVietnamese is considered essential and valuable in the teaching and learning of Englishby 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 strategieswhich are mainly the same in all cultures (Fraser, 1985) However, this universalisticview is doubted and rejected by some researchers who contend that different culturesconceptualize speech acts differently according to differences in cultural norms andvalues 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 andinteract between themselves Their relationship and interaction have been researchedinto and focused on in prior papers Sapir (1963: 166) states that language is ‘a culturalor social product’ Consequently, the interpretation of the social meaning of a certain

linguistic expression should be done with reference to the bigger socio-culturalbackground of the speaker Due consideration of the socio-cultural values andperceptions of the society and culture involved should be made to adequatelyunderstand the way to realize speech acts in general, and disagreeing in particular, fordisagreeing is normal assumed an act that may cause negative reactions or feelings ininterpersonal communication.

To eliminate and/or to limit pragmatic transferences and inferences, language learnersshould be provided with necessary knowledge of socio-cultural constraints and factorsgoverning 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 ofpragmatics and conversation analysis (henceforth CA) The meticulous methods ofCA carried out in excerpts of natural speech provide deep insight into the structuralorganization of disagreement tokens in English and Vietnamese

- To suggest a new way to investigate the similarities and differences of a speech actacross 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 itsnorms, 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 Vietnamesecommunication 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 areco-operative, they may support or reject prior assessments by either agreeing ordisagreeing

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

Pomerantz is also interested in the relationship between responses to priorcomplimentary tokens and the system of constraints, in which disagreements arestructurally dispreferred but agreements may implicitly mean self-praise In her workon “Compliment Responses” (1978), Pomerantz finds out that native English speakerstend to make compliment responses located somewhere between agreeing anddisagreeing 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 intocompliments that has ever been done in Vietnam Compliments and such related issuesas politeness and its strategies, lexico-modal markers and the addressing system arethoroughly discussed and empirically examined to bring out their cross-culturalsimilarities and differences He has also brought out the safe/unsafe topics for givingcompliments and underlined the most frequently used strategies in responses to priorcomplimentary attributes It appears that while native speakers of English tend to utilizedirect strategies, their Vietnamese counterparts seem to exploit indirect strategies Disagreeing has long been an appealing pursuit of the present writer It has beendescribed, and investigated in the framework of the theories of speech acts andpoliteness in her M A thesis (Kieu T T H 2001) The data obtained from writtenquestionnaires provide sufficient evidence for the hypotheses concerning perceptionand performance of evaluative disagreements by speakers of American English andVietnamese 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 courseof CA, she herself has realized that it would be better to use the analytic framework ofCA together with that of pragmatics to thoroughly investigate the perception andrealization of disagreeing tokens, their structural organization, and bring out typicallinguistic devices commonly utilized by native speakers of English and Vietnamese intheir disagreements The writer has been strongly impressed by the capacity of CA withits rigorous principle of using mundane casual speech in natural settings It is hopedthat the synthetic approach, in which CA and pragmatics are combined, will provide amulti-dimensional study of the issues under investigation.

3 Research question and hypotheses of the study3.1 Research question

The present study focuses on the description of the perception and realization of thespeech act of disagreeing in English and Vietnamese within the theoretical frameworksof 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 proposedon the basis of the assumptions and suggestions made by some prestigiouspragmaticians and conversation analysts Brown & Levinson (1987[1978]) and Leech(1986) propose that despite having the same strategies, cultures may differ in terms ofpriorities and values given to each strategy Blum-Kulka & House (1989: 137) believe:

…members of different cultures might differ in their perceptions of social situations aswell 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 asdispreferred seconds tend to be delayed while disagreements as preferred seconds toself-denigrations are immediate and outright Pomerantz (1978) investigates howAmericans reply to compliments and notices that many English compliment responsesare placed somewhere between agreements and disagreements because of the constraintsystems concerning preference organization and self-compliment avoidance Agreeingwith the prior compliments may implicitly mean praising self, but disagreeing may leadto the use of dispreferred format Having compared the way native speakers of Japaneseand English negotiate their disagreements, Mori (1999: 138) comes to a conclusion:

‘An opinion-negotiation sequence develops … until the participants find a middleground, acknowledge co-existing multiple perspectives, or change the topic to terminatethe 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 useof strategies to perform disagreements as a result of the differences intheir assessment of socio-cultural factors and social situations

Hypothesis 2: Politeness with its two constitutive elements volition and discernmentin relation to disagreeing is differently perceived and interpretedacross the English and Vietnamese languages and cultures, and thereseems to be no absolute correlation between politeness andindirectness.

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

Hypothesis 4: English and Vietnamese speakers seem to exploit similar strategies forthe negotiations of disagreements and mid-positions in responses tocompliments although the former may show a greater tendency toaccept prior compliments while the latter appear to often negate them Hypothesis 5: Native speakers of English and Vietnamese seem to employintensifiers to highlight or lower the effect of disagreeing tokens, butnative Vietnamese speakers demonstrate a frequent usage of personreferring 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 Itdepends much on the speaker’s communicative intention, leading to his/her choice ofstrategies to verbally express disagreement tokens

However, the realization of disagreeing in particular and of other acts in general isstrongly 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 ofthe 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-denigrationsare 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 inwhich preference organization interacts with self-compliment avoidance, resulting inthe spreading of compliment responses all over the continuum ranging fromacceptances/agreements to rejections/disagreements (Pomerantz 1975, 1978, 1984a;Levinson 1983; Heritage 2002) Therefore, the present study pays attention to therealization of disagreements as regards preference organization and constraint systems.Although disagreeing is present in English and Vietnamese, each language deployscertain linguistic devices to realize it in conformity to locally accepted norms ofbehavior While intensifiers are empirically used by native speakers of English andVietnamese, person referring terms and particles seem to be pervasive in Vietnamesedisagreements English speakers are inclined to exploit prefaces, delay tokens,backchannels etc to soften disagreements The present study takes into considerationthe above mentioned items to highlight the most frequently used devices.

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

This thesis is motivated and conducted within the frameworks of the theories of SA andpoliteness (Austin 1962; Grice 1975; Hymes 1964; Searle 1969, 1975, 1979; Lakoff1973, 1977, 1989; Levinson 1983; Brown & Levinson 1987 [1978]; Leech 1983; Mey1993, 2001; Thomas 1995; Yule [1996] 1997 etc.) and conversation analysis (Sacks1963, 1972a-b, 1984; Schegloff 1972, 1979a-b; Jefferson 1974, 1978, 1979; Pomerantz1978, 1984a-b; Levinson 1983; Psathas 1995; Cameron 2002 etc.) In addition, theempirical study in some chapters is carried out with the help of SPSS 11.5.

5 Methodology5.1 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 theanalysis 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 inexpressing 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 toprovide deep insights that can unravel many linguistic problems (Levinson 1983: 364).Its strictly data-centered principle may be the object of arguments among theresearchers, but no one can deny the magnitude of what it offers language study Thehelpful ‘microscope’ (Cameron 2002: 89) of conversation analytic research reveals theintricate patterns in the structural organization of mundane verbal exchanges Whatordinary people use every day to express themselves and exchange information turnsout to be structurally complex and remarkable The contingent nature and thecontinuously shaped and reshaped development of talk by participants draw muchanalytic attention.

The analytic studies of conversation seem to be quite relevant to the study of speechacts and other issues in pragmatics The orderly properties of speech acts are normallyunfolded in the process of meticulous analysis and conscientious observation offered byconversation analysis Also, the intensive studies of the sequential structure ofutterances 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 pragmaticphenomena, for conversation is clearly the prototypical kind of language usage, the formin 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-culturalparameters as age, gender, social status of co-conversants, or the relationship betweenthem, 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 ofconversation have no place to go in a framework that primarily studies co-text, and whichallows 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-culturalparameters mentioned above, although they do not seem to pay enough attention tomundane interactions in natural settings Thus, the synthetic approach which combinesCA and theories of SA and politeness applied to the study of disagreeing helps to makeuse of the advantages and limit the disadvantages of each perspective In addition, theuse of more than one approach increases objectivity and reduces the risk of beingsimple in examining cultures as in Maynard’s 1997 warning:

Defining cultures in simple terms is a trap one must avoid Careless descriptions ofsocieties can and often do result in negative stereotyping Overemphasizing differencesmay 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 deployedin combination with other theoretical perspectives To investigate the realization ofthanking by Americans and learners of English, Eisenstein and Bodman (1993) use arange of data types including written questionnaires and naturalistical exchanges, underthe impact of which differences between native and nonnative expressions of thankingare set off With the help of CA and pragmatics, Aston (1993) persuasively displayshow native and nonnative speakers negotiate comity, set up and maintain friendlyrelationships in everyday mundane conversations Impressed by the strength ofinteractional sociolinguistics, Kasper & Blum-Kulka (1993: 13) advise combiningmethods from this perspective with those from contrastive and interlanguage

pragmatics to identify cross-cultural and cross-linguistic pragmatics differences andsimilarities as well as pragmatic failures.

Mundane everyday talk has been the database for research into the system of personreference in Vietnamese by Luong V H (1990), politeness in modern Vietnamese byVu T T H (1997) and language socialization by Nguyen T T B (2001) In her studyof politeness and face in Chinese culture, Lee-Wong (2000) uses both written andspoken data to identify the native strategies and conceptualization of politeness Brown(2002) and Snow & Blum-Kulka (2002) are successful in deploying naturalistic corporawhile 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 areused in combination with those of pragmatics The present paper is just different fromthe aforementioned works in the degree and size to which each approach is applied soas 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 inEnglish and Vietnamese The combination of pragmatics and CA takes advantage ofthe 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 datacollected from both written questionnaires and natural speech in English andVietnamese Elicited data and recorded excerpts of mundane everyday talks have beeninvestigated 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 inEnglish and Vietnamese And, for the first time, the similarities and differences

concerning its perception, performance, preference structure, and constraint systemshave 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 ofpreference 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.

CHAPTER ONE

DISAGREEING – A COMMUNICATIVEILLOCUTIONARY AND SOCIAL ACT

1.1 Theoretical Preliminaries

1.1.1 Speech Act Theory

1.1.1.1 Speech acts and speech events

Since its initiation by Austin a few decades ago, the notion of speech acts has becomeone of the most compelling notions in the study of language use Speech acts have beencentral to the works by many other philosophers and linguists like Grice (1957, 1975),Hymes (1964), Searle (1969, 1975, 1979), Levinson (1983), Brown & Yule (1983),Mey (1993, 2001), Thomas (1995) and Yule ([1996] 1997) Their common assumptionis that when conversing people use grammatical and lexical units not only to produce

utterances, but also to perform actions In saying something the speaker (S) does

something (Austin 1962) The utterance given below is more than a statement; it is apleasant and ear-pleasing compliment:

Generally, the actions that are produced via utterances to communicate are called

speech acts (Yule 1996: 47) These SAs, considered ‘the basic or minimal units of

linguistic communication.' (Searle 1969: 16), are performed in authentic situations of

language use In English, SAs are specifically labeled as compliment, apology, request,

disagreeing or promise These terms for SAs are used to name the S's communicative

intentions and the hearer (H) is expected to correctly interpret the S's intentions via theprocess of inferences The circumstances surrounding the utterances are of great help toboth the S and the H in successful communication These circumstances are known as

the speech events A speech event can be considered as an activity in which

conversational participants interact via language in a conventional way to achieve someoutcome (Yule, 1996: 57) SAs and speech events are said to be hierarchicalcomponents of speech situations (Hymes 1972), and for an utterance to have been madeand to be successful as an act of communication, it is necessary that the process ofintention-and-inference be done on the basis of due consideration of the speech event.

1.1.1.2 Three-dimension speech acts

The classic distinction between the different aspects (or 'forces') of a SA is due to

Austin (in his How to Do Things with Words 1962) There are three related acts in the

action of performing an utterance Let us consider the following example:(2) G: That’s fantastic.

B: Isn’t that good?

(Pomerantz 1978: 94)

In uttering (2) the S performs a number of SAs (Austin 1962, Searle 1969): a phonetic

act, a linguistic act, a referring act etc all of which together constitute a locutionaryact, an act of producing a meaningful linguistic expression On the other hand, the actof performing an utterance like (2) with a purpose is considered an illocutionary act It

is clear that each utterance in (2) contains a 'force' This force of the SA is known as its

illocutionary force The force of the SA is what it 'counts as' (Yule 1996: 49) In the

above fragment, G’s token can count as an evaluative assessment or a compliment,while B’s response is a scaled-down/weak disagreement with the prior evaluation In addition, the S normally intends to have an effect when producing an utterance with

a function This third dimension of the SA is called perlocutionary act Further effects

obtained by the S are termed perlocutionary effects of an utterance These ultimate

effects, according to Mey (1993: 112), are dependent on the context of the utterance

and unpredictable The H may correctly understand the S's intention and does what his/her interlocutor wants, or he/she may deliberately ignore the S's want or desire Of the

three acts the illocutionary act appears to be the most crucial and discussed The term

'speech act' is used to mean the same illocutionary act (Thomas 1995: 51), andillocutionary act is 'the basic unit of human linguistic communication' (Searle 1976: 1).In conclusion, an action created via an utterance is made of three acts or dimensions:

locution, illocution, and perlocution The speech act theory, in fact, has focused on

illocutionary acts to such an extent that the term speech act has predominantly come tomean illocutionary act, or communicative illocutionary act (Bach & Harnish 1979).

1.1.1.3 Classification of speech acts

Not being completely happy with Austin's original classification of illocutionary acts

into five basic categories of verdictive, expositive, exercitive, behavitive and

commissive, Searle (1976: 10-16) develops an alternative taxonomy of the fundamental

classes of illocutionary acts The taxonomy consists of five categories or five types of

general functions performed by speech acts: (1) Declarations: e g declaring,

christening, (2) Representatives: e g asserting, disagreeing (my emphasis), (3)

Expressives: e.g thanking, apologizing, (4) Directives: e.g ordering, requesting, and(5) Commissives: e g promising, offering Following Searle, Yule (1996: 55)

summarizes the five general functions of speech acts with their key features in a table:

Speech act type Direction of fit S = speaker X = situation Declarations

Commissives

words change the worldmake words fit the worldmake words fit the worldmake the world fit wordsmake the world fit words

S causes XS believes XS feels XS wants XS intends X

Table 1-1: The five general functions of speech acts (Yule 1996: 55)

Searle (1976), Hatch (1992), Mey (1993) and Yule (1996) point out that representativeSAs carry the true or false values, i.e they can be judged for truth or falsity In usingthem the S makes words fit the world of belief, as Hatch (1992: 127) suggests:

Representatives may vary in terms of how hedged or aggravated the assertion might be.'Darwin was partly correct' is, obviously, not as strong as 'Darwin was right' or 'Darwinwas wrong.'

It is the lexical hedges like a little, a little bit, maybe, kind of/kinda, just,

approximately, very, almost, extremely, seem, appear, etc that help strengthen or

weaken, qualify or soften the assertions, claims or statements Hatch (1992: 127)believes:

Hedges also serve as a ritual function They may act like disfluencies in smoothing

over a disagreement with a conversational partner (My emphasis)We can see this very clearly in his example (Ibid.) given below:

(3) Maybe she just feels kinda blue.

An act of disagreeing seems to be an almost exact opposite of an act of agreeing The

person who disagrees responds to somebody else's expressed opinion or assessment.Most of the time, an overtly expressed opinion or assessment can be considered as animplicit expectation/invitation to get the same opinion or assessment from theconversational partners The person who performs an act of disagreeing does not takecare of the earlier S's expectation, saying that his/her opinion is different or opposite.He/she may also say that he/she thinks the first S is wrong or that his/her opinion orassessment is neither good nor right.

In everyday interactions, the same utterance, the same linguistic act can expressdifferent illocutionary forces Let us consider the following example by Pomerantz(1978: 97):

(4) F: That’s beautiful.

disagreement In this case we have an indirect speech act Whenever there is a directrelationship between a structure and a function, we have a direct speech act In B’s

disagreement in the example given below (Pomerantz 1978: 99), the structure andfunction converge as a typical expression of a disagreement:

(5) A: Good shot.

B: Not very solid though.

In indirect SAs the S means more than or other than what is said Indirect SAs are saidto be more polite in SAs like requesting, commanding, refusing, disagreeing etc.(Brown & Levinson [1978]1987, Leech 1983 and Yule 1996 among others) Therelationship between structures and functions serves as another approach to dealingwith typology of SAs.

1.1.1.4 Disagreeing – a communicative illocutionary act

According to Wierzbicka (1987: 128) disagreeing can be defined as a dual act, an act

of saying 'what one thinks' and indicating 'that one doesn't think the same as the earlierspeaker' In the case of disagreeing, the act of showing that the second S does not thinkthe same or he/she has a different view or opinion seems to be much more importantthan the prior This can be seen in the utterance by Pomerantz (1978: 87) given below:

(6) H: Gee, Hon, you look nice in that dress.

→ W: Do you really think so? It’s just a rag my sister gave me

It is observable that the act of disagreeing, like any other SA, possesses bothillocutionary force and propositional content These two properties of SAs are realizedsyntactically, and the correct understanding of the intended illocutionary force isinevitably dependent upon the context In terms of syntax, there is no necessarycorrelation between structural forms and illocutionary forces Practically,disagreements can be performed in declarative, interrogative and imperative formsrespectively as in:

(8) Do you really think so? It’s just a rag my sister gave me (Ibid 87)

It is normally easier to agree with the prior S than to disagree with him/her Wierzbicka(1987: 128) assumes, 'Disagreeing is a fairly forceful and self-confident act, more thanagreeing' Let us consider the utterances below:

(10) J: T’s- tsuh beautiful day out isn’t it?

(11) C: Well we’ll haftuh frame that.

→ R: Yee- Uhghh it’s not worth fra(hh)mi(h)ng, (Ibid 98)

The recipient in (10) exhibits a strong display of agreeing with the proffered evaluation,whereas the recipient in (11) seems to delay his/her disagreeing response by starting itout with ‘Yee’ The use of agreement marker in (11) helps to frame the disagreementtoken as a ‘weak disagreement’ or partial disagreement (Pomerantz 1978, 1984a; Mori1999), and mitigate its disaffiliative force As a matter of fact, Ss need more staminaand more self-confidence to express their disagreement than to express their agreement.

Especially in the case of Anglo-American culture, Ss are expected to express theirdisagreement implicitly or tacitly, rather than to perform it explicitly or frankly, as theywould in the case of agreement It is advisable that one should hedge one'sdisagreement or avoid outright disagreement to maintain relationships with others Fraser (1990: 229) proposes that disagreeing is among those SAs (such as complaining,criticizing, etc.) named FTAs (face threatening acts), as they are inherently threateningto the H’s desire to be appreciated and approved of (Brown & Levinson 1987) Whenfaced with FTAs, Ss may choose between various strategies to reduce or eliminate theseriousness of the threat by either softening their communicative tokens or implicitlyexpressing them The choice of politeness strategies is said to be affected by threevariables relative power (P), social distance (D) and ranking of imposition (R) (Ibid.).By and large, from the view of SA theories, disagreeing which belongs torepresentatives that make the words fit the world of fallacy or truth, and which is anFTA that needs to be hedged to weaken the potential threat, is a communicativeillocutionary act

1.1.2 Conversation Analysis

1.1.2.1 Historical background

The study of social interaction, known as conversation analysis (CA) or study of in-interaction has long been a phenomenon of great interest for researchers of a widerange of fields It takes as one of its subjects the study of mundane social interaction innaturally occurring settings on the basis of rigorous and systematic methods Theassumption that social actions are meaningful, and are produced and interpreted assuch, leads to the desire to discover, describe and analyze their natural organization ororder, which constitutes and constructs this orderliness

talk-Drawing upon and growing out of developments in such domains as phenomenology,ethnomethodology (the study of ‘ethnic’, i.e participants’ own methods), and languagephilosophy, CA keeps on extending its fields of study, and has become interdisciplinaryinterests of social psychology, communication, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics,pragmatics and so on.

The early theoretical and methodological developments of this approach date back to1950s and 1960s of the 20th century with Bale’s Interaction Process Analysis (1950),Barker and Wright’s Midwest and its Children (1955), Pittenger, Hockett, andDanehy’s The First Five Minutes (1960), Soskin and John’s The Study of Spontaneous

Talk (1963), and Goffman’s Interactional Ritual: Essays on Face-to-face Behavior

(1967) Audiotape technologies utilized to record naturally occurring actions in world settings were combined with direct observation and notes by researchers in thefield to provide extensive analysis of the rules and orders of talk At the same time,such features of spontaneous speech like pronunciation, intonation, pace, volumes, thelocation and duration of pauses, and tone could be captured and contribute to theanalytic process.

real-New approaches to the study of language and communication with respect to culturefocusing on meanings-in-context, natural classification systems by members of aculture, their perceptions and conventions also brought about changes in CA With thenames of researchers like Gumperz and Hymes (1964), Goodenough (1957), Sturtevant(1964), Garfinkel (1967), Sudnow (1972), especially Sacks (1963, 1972a-b), Schegloff(1972, 1979a-b), and Jefferson (1974, 1978, 1979), CA has been shaped as a science ofexamining order as a social product constituted and achieved in and through variousempirical occurrences of interaction between ordinary members of society

The descriptive nature of the field reflects its interests in studying of interaction itself,discovering and depicting its structures and allowing occasional conceptualizations andgeneral theories CA, at the onset, with the works by Sacks, Schegloff, Jefferson,Pomerantz and others, tends to avoid preformulated theory construction It examinesthe details of the temporal organization and various contingencies of the unfoldingdevelopment of interaction Recurring patterns found by essentially inductive methodsare the results of many records of naturally occurring interactional exchanges Also,intuitive judgments, which are assumed unreliable guides, are unlikely to resort to,although it may be utilized in other fields of linguistics The main strength of CA, as

Levinson (1983: 287) states, is in its ability to provide ‘by far the most substantial

insight that has yet been gained into the organization of conversation’

As aforementioned in the introductory part, CA pays very little attention to thecontextual particulars commonly believed to have influence on interpersonalinteractions Such personal characteristics of the participants as age, gender, socialstatus, their relationship, or the formality/ informality of the settings etc are likely to beneglected (Levinson 1983: 295; Psathas 1995: 36, 49-50) Their primary concern, asmentioned, is the discovery, description, and analysis of how social conduct, includinginteractional practice, is accomplished and perceived.

1.1.2.2 Co-text and context

The mundane human conduct, in the view of conversation analysts, is meaningful, aswell as intelligibly produced and understood on shared rules and methods Theinterpretation of meaning depends on the contemporary context of its production This

immediate context, or co-text as it is often called in CA, is continually shaped by

individual contributions of the parties (Pomerantz 1997) In other words, the currentcontext is resulted from what the prior S does, and the current S’s action creates a new

context for the next action Thus, co-text is constantly shaped and renewed by partieswithin interactional activities (Heritage 1989) Co-text is significant in that it providesSs with a local resource upon which they draw to design their utterances, andcorrespondently, it gives Hs sufficient clues necessary to interpret what is said.However, the immediate local co-text in CA seems to be a restricted framework forsuch a wealth of data obtained from naturally occurring interactions To understandpeople’s linguistic behaviors, it is necessary to look further, and go beyond the co-textof the talk by extending the limited border of the conversational co-text, and taking intoaccount the whole societal environment, relevant and surrounded the languageproduction It is believed that the very desire to look at the SA of disagreeing from thepragmatics and CA perspective is found here CA ‘purist’ stance (Cameron 2002: 88),based on the data and nothing but the data seems to be insufficient in providingadequate grounds for the proper and all-sided interpretation of interactions Themeaning of a social action could not adequately be understood without consulting theon-going context within which the action takes place: who talks with whom, in whatsetting, when, in what language(s), on what topic, as well as the wider socio-culturalcontext of which interactional talk is considered and analyzed as part and parcel AsCameron (2002: 53) puts it:

Any given instance of language use is analysed as part of a whole social situation; moregenerally, ways of using and understanding language are analysed in relation to the widerculture in which they occur.

The wider cultural context in which mundane interactions occur involves a range ofcultural beliefs, practices, and values What is assumed to be good in one culture maynot count as such in other cultures As aforementioned, social parameters like socialstatus, gender, age etc of co-participants are generally of little interest in conversationanalytic studies Seldom do conversation analysts pay a close attention to them,