A study of signal functions of reporting verbs in english and vietnamese

HOÀNG TÚ UYÊN 2016 – 2018 VIETNAM ACADEMY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES GRADUATE ACADEMY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES Hoàng Tú Uyên ENGLISH LANGUAGE A STUDY OF SIGNAL FUNCTIONS OF REPORTING VERBS IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE MA THESIS IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE COURSE: HANOI, 2018 VIETNAM ACADEMY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES GRADUATE ACADEMY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES Hoàng Tú Uyên A STUDY OF SIGNAL FUNCTIONS OF REPORTING VERBS IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE Field: English Language Code: 8220201 Supervisor: Assoc Prof Dr Hoàng Tuyết Minh HANOI, 2018 DECLARATION BY AUTHOR I hereby declare that this thesis was of my own composition except where proper use of quotes and references were indicated, and that this thesis has not been submitted for the award of any other degree Author’s Signature Hoàng Tú Uyên Approved by SUPERVISOR Assoc Prof Dr Hoàng Tuyết Minh Date:…………………………… i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I owe innumerable thanks to people who give me support and assistance in completing this research The first goes to my supervisor Associate Professor Doctor Hoàng Tuyết Minh, whose considerable encouragement and valuable feedback kept me from losing confidence when I got frustrated with my thesis My project could not have been completed without her great patience and sustained guidance I am deeply grateful to my family who always give me warmth and support Thanks also to my friends who helped me a lot with my data collection Thanks to all ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page number Declaration by Author i Acknowledgements ii Abstract vii List of Tables viii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1.1 Rationale 1.2 Aims of the Study 1.3 Research Questions 1.4 Scope of the Study 1.5 Significance of the Study 1.6 Research Methods 1.7 Structure of the Study CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1 Previous Studies 2.2 An Overview of Reporting 2.2.1 Definitions of Reporting 10 2.2.2 Functions of Reporting 10 2.2.3 Structures of Reporting 11 iii 2.2.3.1 Direct Quote Structures 11 2.2.3.2 Indirect Report Structures 14 2.3 An Overview of Reporting Verbs 15 2.3.1 Definitions of Reporting Verbs 15 2.3.2 Classification of Reporting Verbs 16 2.4 Signal Functions of Reporting Verbs 16 2.4.1 Neutral Reporting 17 2.4.2 Showing the Speaker’s Purpose 19 2.4.3 Showing the Manner of Speaking 21 2.4.4 Showing What was Said through the Reporting Verb 23 2.4.5 Indicating How the Message Fits in 24 2.4.6 Drawing Attention to the Speaker’s or Writer’s Words 25 2.4.7 Showing Your Attitude towards What You Report 26 2.4.8 Showing that You Do Not Accept Responsibility 27 2.4.9 Showing Your Attitude through Reporting Adjuncts 27 2.4.10 Showing the Effect of What is Said 28 2.4.11 Showing whether a Report is of Speech or of Writing 29 2.5 Summary 30 iv CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY 31 3.1 Data Collection 31 3.1.1 Setting of the Study 31 3.1.2 Data Collecting Procedures 32 3.2 Data Analysis 33 3.3 Summary 40 CHAPTER 4: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS 42 4.1 Signal Function of Neutral Reporting in English and Vietnamese 42 4.2 Signal Function of Showing Speaker’s Purpose in English and 45 Vietnamese 4.3 Signal Function of Showing the Manner of Speaking in English 49 and Vietnamese 4.3.1 Signal Function of Showing Speaker’s Volume in English 49 and Vietnamese 4.3.2 Signal Function of Showing Speaker’s Speed in English and 52 Vietnamese 4.3.3 Signal Function of Showing Speaker’s General Behaviour in 52 English and Vietnamese 4.3.4 Signal Function of Showing Speaker’s Manner in English and Vietnamese v 55 4.4 Signal Function of Indicating How Message Fits in in English 56 and Vietnamese 4.5 Summary 58 CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION 60 5.1 Recapitulation 60 5.2 Concluding Remarks 61 5.3 Implications 62 5.4 Limitations and Suggestions for Further Studies 63 REFERENCES 65 vi ABSTRACT This study investigates similarities and differences of using reporting verbs between an English novel “The Lost Symbol” and its Vietnamese translated version from four signal functions: neutral reporting, showing the speaker’s purpose, showing the manner of speaking and indicating how the message fits in The methods applied in the study are description and contrastive analysis 193 reporting verbs are collected from an English novel and Vietnamese version, among which 113 verbs are in Vietnamese corpus and 80 verbs are in English corpus Findings of this study can be used as a basis for investigating why Vietnamese learners of English use reporting language differently compared with native speaker of English, and also can shed light on pedagogical implication of teaching and learning translation to Vietnamese learners of English vii LIST OF TABLES Page number Table 3.1: Number of reporting verbs classified into signal functions 33 Table 3.2: List of the excerpted neutral reporting verbs from The Lost 35 Symbol Table 3.3: List of the excerpted reporting verbs which show the speaker’s purpose from The Lost Symbol 36 Table 3.4: List of the excerpted reporting verbs which show the manner of speaking from The Lost Symbol 38 Table 3.5: List of the excerpted reporting verbs which indicate how the message fits in from The Lost Symbol 39 Table 4.1: Number of occurrences of reporting verbs in English corpus and Vietnamese corpus to the extent of neutral reporting 42 Table 4.2: Number of occurrences of reporting verbs in English corpus and Vietnamese corpus to the extent of showing the speaker’s 45 purpose Table 4.3: Number of occurrences of reporting verbs in English corpus and Vietnamese corpus to the extent of showing the speaker’s 50 volume viii smile 42.9% cười 60 sigh 11 7.9% Total 140 100% 24 40% mỉm cười 36 60% thở dài 11 100% 140 42.9% 7.9% 100% According to the given table, the verb laugh and smile as well as their literal meanings in Vietnamese, cười/ mỉm cười, take up the largest proportion of the occurrences It can be seen clearly that there are more reporting verbs of this group in Vietnamese corpus because most of the English verbs have at least two Vietnamese translated version, except blush, chuckle, explode and sigh It can be said that this trend was clearly recognized from the previous signal functions and now is more strongly highlighted Here are some examples excerpted from the two corpora: English corpus Vietnamese corpus Her brother grinned, “Something Peter cười toe toét, “Đó thứ mà I’m hoping you’ll read some day.” anh hy vọng ngày em đọc.” “I knew your little boy, Zachary, in “Tôi quen Zachary, trai ông prison He told me where this key was tù Nó cho tơi biết chìa khóa giấu hidden.” The stranger held up an old đâu”, Kẻ lạ mặt giơ key and grinned like a beast “Right chìa khóa cũ cười before I bludgeoned him to death.” thú “Ngay trước tơi đập chết nó.” “Do not insult me I have not come “Đừng phỉ báng Tôi for money I have com tonight for khơng đến tiền Tối tơi đến Zachary’s other birthright.” He quyền thừa kê khác grinned “He told me about the Zachary.” Gã cười nhăn nhở “Nó kể 54 pyramid” cho tơi nghe kim tự tháp.” Solomon grinned, “My secret My Solomon cười, “Bí mật tơi tiết lộ rules.” nên phải tuân theo quy tắc tôi.” In the original novel, English corpus uses only the verb grin to describe the behaviour of the speaker; however, Vietnamese corpus seems to demonstrate more grades of a laughing to support the descriptions of the characters As a result, in Vietnamese data, more translated translated version of an English verb are found 4.3.4 Signal Functions of Showing the Speaker’s Manner in English and Vietnamese Table 4.6 points out the number of occurrences of reporting verbs which indicate the manner of the speaker in English corpus and Vietnamese corpus Table 4.6: Number of occurrences of reporting verbs in English corpus and Vietnamese corpus to the extent of showing the speaker’s manner Reporting verb Number of Reporting in occurrences verb Number of in occurrences English Vietnamese corpus corpus bark 28.5% gầm lên 100% 28.5% coo 14.3% thủ thỉ 100% 14.3% croak 14.3% rền rĩ 100% 14.3% growl 28.6% gầm gừ 100% 28.6% hiss 14.3% rít lên 100% 14.3% Total 100% 100% 55 This table presents the number of occurrences of five reporting verbs considered the speaker’s manner indicator The most noticeable similarity of English and Vietnamese corpus is that those are one of the least common reporting verbs recorded The significance revealed through this table is all the English reporting verbs used in the novel The Lost Symbol which belong to this group describe the noises made by an animal Additionally, the other remarkable point is that this table is the only one having the exactly same number of verbs in English and Vietnamese column It is reasonable because of the fact that each verb listed appears only once or twice in the whole text 4.4 Signal Functions of Indicating How Message Fits in in English and Vietnamese The table below clarifies the frequency of reporting verbs which indicate how message fits in the context in English corpus and Vietnamese corpus Table 4.7: Number of occurrences of reporting verbs in English corpus and Vietnamese corpus to the extent of indicating how message fits in Signal Reporting function of verb Number of Reporting in occurrences verb Number of in occurrences indicating English Vietnamese how corpus corpus message fits in Response agree 3.2% đồng ý 100% 3.2% answer 20 7.9% trả lời 10 50% 7.9% đáp 10 50% phản đối 66.7% 1.2% counter 1.2% 56 Repetition 33.3% disagree 0.4% phản đối 100% reply 76 30% đáp 20 26.3% 30% đáp lại 20 26.3% trả lời 36 47.4% vang vọng 29.2% 9.5% vọng lại 10 41.6% vọng 29.2% nhắc lại 57.1% 2.8% lặp lại 42.9% echo repeat Process bác bỏ 24 9.5% 2.8% 0.4% begin 1.2 mở lời 100% continue 22 8.7% tiếp tục 12 54.5% 8.7% nói tiếp 10 45.5% xen vào 75% xen ngang 25% ngắt lời 62.5% 3.2% cắt ngang 37.5% dự 72.7% 4.3% interject interrupt hesitate pause stop 11 14 52 1.6% 3.2% 4.3% 5.4% 20.6% 57 1.2 1.6% ngập ngừng 27.3% dừng lại 28.6% 5.4% ngừng lại 10 71.4% dừng lại 28 53.8% 20.6% ngừng lại 11 21.2% ngừng lời 13 25% Total 253 100% 253 100% According to this table, the group of reporting verbs indicating how the message fits in the context is separated into three sectors: response, repetition and progress At first glance, it can be seen from the table that there are more verbs in Vietnamese corpus than in English ones but in fact there are many synonyms among them For example, vang vọng, vọng lại, vọng can be considered one verb only The majority of verbs used in both corpora belong to the group indicating a response and a progress with verbs and verbs respectively It is reasonable because there are a lot of conversations, questions and answers in the novel in general and in The Lost Symbol in particular through which the characters’ personalities can be revealed The verb group which describe a repetition refers to something was said before comprises only two verbs echo and repeat These groups of verbs in both corpora share the least rate of being used 4.5 Summary To sum up, similarities and differences have been found in English and Vietnamese data in terms of four significant signal functions of reporting verbs They are namely neutral reporting, showing the speaker’s purpose, showing the manner of speaking and indicating how message fits in It is found that Vietnamese corpus use fewer neutral reporting verbs than native speakers of English In spite of the fact that the verb say and nói are mostly used in both corpora, the frequency of occurrence of nói accounts for half of it in English It is concluded that there is a prominent trend in Vietnamese which prefers using many other reporting verbs despite the fact that they are not 58 completely neutral to express a language event to using one neutral verb repetitively In terms of showing the speaker’s purpose, it is found that both English and Vietnamese corpus use a system of reporting verbs which can indicate the aim of the speaker or reporter apart from reporting exactly what was said However, Vietnamese corpus tends to use more reporting verbs classified in this group than English one It can be proved by the number of verbs used in Vietnamese data is nearly double the number of verbs in English Moreover, reporting verbs also show the manner of speaking Categories in terms of speaker’s volume, speaker’s speed, speaker’s general behaviors and speaker’s manner were compared in Vietnamese and English data As regards speaker’s volume and speaker’s behaviour, more reporting verbs were found in Vietnamese corpus than in English on the whole The number of reporting verbs which indicate the speaker’s speed and speaker’s manner is identified in either of the two corpora It is found that the reporting verbs which describe the noises made by animals or refer to various other aspects of the speaker’s manner of speaking are used least in both corpora There is an adequate system of the Vietnamese reporting verbs indicating how the message fits in as in English In both English and Vietnamese corpora, it is found that reporting verbs can be used to show how what is being reported fits in with the rest of the language event The reporting verbs are considered as signals of a response, repetition or describing a progress 59 CHAPTER CONCLUSION 5.1 Recapitulation This study examined similarities and differences of signal functions of reporting verbs between English and their Vietnamese translated version from four aspects: neutral reporting, speaker’s purpose indicator, manner-of-speaking indicator and message-fit-in indicator On the whole, English corpus shows more neutral reporting than Vietnamese one In all but one translation the percentage of nói is significantly lower than say – the difference is 417 times in Vietnamese corpus and 702 times in English corpus This was to be proved that Vietnamese translator does not try to stick to the original version and shows much wider range of verbs and other reporting elements used than the case of English data Vietnamese corpus also shows more shifts between semantic categories of verbs, which are more emotional and dramatic As to speaker’s purpose indicator, reveal- tiết lộ is used most frequently in both Vietnamese and English corpus Even though Vietnamese corpus indicates speaker’s purpose as sufficiently as English one, the frequency of reporting verbs’ occurrence in both corpora is not similar Vietnamese corpus tends to show more reporting verbs to describe the aim of the speaker than English one To the extent of showing the manner of speaking, it is found that reporting verbs which illustrate the speaker’s volume and the speaker’s general behaviour occur more frequently in both English and Vietnamese corpus than reporting verbs which demonstrate the speaker’s speed and manner Particularly, the reporting verbs indicating the speaker’s manner are found at the least proportion 60 in either of the two corpora They are almost used once or twice in the whole corpus In regard to indicating how the utterance fits in the context, there are the same counts of this kind of reporting verbs in English and Vietnamese corpus on the view of response Nonetheless, Vietnamese corpus shows the reporting verbs which show a progress at higher rate than English one In both Vietnamese and English corpora, the reporting verbs expressing a progress are used most frequently and the ones which express repetition is least used In conclusion, in spite of unequal frequency of occurrence of the reporting verbs used, it is proved that all the signal functions examined in English corpus are reflected sufficiently in Vietnamese 5.2 Concluding Remarks The research reported in this thesis has investigated the signal functions of reporting verbs in English and Vietnamese based on Thompson’s basis (1996) by exploiting the data from the novel The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown and its Vietnamese translated version by Nguyễn Xuân Hồng By analyzing the results taken, it comes to two concluding remarks Firstly, there is a trend in Vietnamese that people not prefer to use neutral reporting verbs as much as English It is clear that the high frequency of say in case of this novel is an outcome of the author’s tendency not to comment on the attitude of the character uttering a direct speech, to say nothing in advance about the quality of emotion they are experiencing, that is to say, the author tries to reduce his own interference to a minimum However, when looking at translations, the trend seems to be the other way round – to explain, to expand the number of verbs, to add some more details to that information of the author 61 as if the translators would not expect the Vietnamese readers to grasp the original idea Secondly, in most of signal functions analyzed in this paper, Vietnamese corpus shows a larger number of reporting verbs than English It is evidential to show the complexity and flexibility of the translated version in conveying the message of a language event accurately without simply translating word by word as the original version Vietnamese version seems to use verbs which describe things meticulously with more grades and levels than English 5.3 Implications The results of this study can be considered a new approach to teach translation more effectively In the past, teachers were likely to focus on the aspect of reported speech and take much care of how to teach grammatical rules to students in order that they could change a given direct speech into reported one grammatically correctly The Vietnamese learners paid little attention to other functions of a reporting beside the purpose of conveying a reported message exactly As Thompsons (1996) suggested, if the “language reports” are approached from a functional rather than structural angle, it will allow the analyst, language teachers, etc., to investigate the factors which influence the choice of any particular option in any particular context This research attempts to shed light on the signal functions of reporting verbs categorized by Thompson (1996) By acquiring the structural features of a reporting and the signal functions of reporting verbs, English teachers can provide more ways to translate a language event even it is a direct quote or an indirect speech On the other hand, the learners can take advantages of those theories and apply them to their translation learning to find out the most suitable way to translate a reporting 62 From the findings of this study, the learners should recognize the tendency of giving extra emotional point of view in Vietnamese even if the reporting is neutral because of being affected by cultural differences and contexts Thanks to that, the learners can consider it as a remarkable concern when translating Vietnamese into English and vice versa 5.4 Limitations and Suggestions for Further Studies Although this study provided a detailed quantitative analysis of reporting practices in novels, the limitations of this study are clear Firstly, this study focuses on some aspects of reporting verbs, some other important aspects such as reporting adjuncts (including reporting adverbs, prepositional phrases, subordinating finite clauses), reporting adjectives, and reporting nouns etc are not included in this paper Secondly, the four functions out of eleven ones are analyzed whereas there are several significant signal functions which have hardly been explored Lastly, this study is restricted to analysis of an American author’s novel; therefore it is not sure whether the findings of this study can apply to other genres of writing or not Due to the fact that this study compares signal functions of reporting verbs between English and Vietnamese by analyzing an English novel and its Vietnamese translated version there are some issues that need further investigation and exploration First of all, it is a fact that signal functions are also performed through reporting nouns, reporting adjectives and reporting adjuncts, not just by reporting verbs However, there have not been many studies conducted on these subjects Secondly, according to Thompson (1996), besides signal functions, a report conveys message functions as well Therefore, it is obvious that there are a number of problems coming about need to be solved 63 Last but not least, there are many kinds of writing such as academic research and journalism in which a large number of reporting verbs are used Thus, it is necessary that further studies exploit many other functions of reporting verbs In a nutshell, the present study is a preliminary investigation, and more comprehensive investigations and further explorations are needed 64 REFERENCES Becher, T (1989) Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Enquiry and the Cultures of Disciplines Milton Keynes: Society for Research into Higher Education & Open University Press Benson, C., Gollin, J & Trappes-Lomax, H (2005) ‘Reporting Strategies in Academic Writing: from Corpus to Materials’ In O Alexander ed 2007., Proceedings of BALEAP Conference 2005 Bevalas, J B (1978) The Social Psychology of Citations Canadian Psychological Review, 19, 158-163 Dubois, B L (1988) Citation in Biomedical Journal Articles English for Specific Purposes, 7, 181-193 Een, J A (1982) Tense Usage in the Reporting of Past Research in Geotechnical Writing Minnesota Working Papers in ESL Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Gilbert, N G (1977) Referencing as Persuasion Social Studies of Science, 7, 113-122 Granger, S (1993) New Insights into the Learner Lexicon: a Preliminary Report from the International Corpus of English In L Flowerdew, & K Tong, eds Entering text Hong Kong: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Gosden, H (1993) Discourse Functions of Subject in Scientific Research Articles Applied Linguistics, 1, 56-75 Groom, N (2000) Attribution and Averral Revisited: Three Perspectives on Manifest Intertextuality in Academic Writing In P Thompson, ed Patterns 65 and perspectives: Insights for EAP writing practice Reading, UK: CALS, The University of Reading, 15-26 Hanania, E & Akhtar, K (1985) Verb Forms and Rhetorical Function in Science Writing: A study of MS theses in Biology, Chemistry and Physics ESP Journal, 4(1), 45-58 Hyland, K (1999) Academic Attribution: Citation and the Construction of Disciplinary Knowledge Applied Linguistics, 20(3), 341-367 Hu, Z & Jiang, Y (2007) A Contrastive Study on Reporting Verbs in English M.A Theses Studies in Languages and Linguistics, 27(3), 123-126 He, C & Zhou, J (2001) A Corpus-based Study on Reporting Verbs in English Academic Writings Foreign Language Research, 107(4), 43-48 Jacoby, S (1987) References to Other Researchers in Literary Research Articles ELR Journal, 1, 33-75 Kolb, D A (1981) Learning Styles and Disciplinary Differences In A Chickering, ed The Modern American College San Francisco: Jossey Bass 232255 Lackstrom, J E., Selinker, L., & Trimble, L (1970) Grammar and Technical English In R C Lugton ed English as a Second Language Current issues Philadelphia: Center for Curriculum Development Malcolm, L (1987) What Rules govern Tense Usage in Scientific Articles? English for Specific Purposes, 6, 31-44 Myers, G (1990) Writing Biology: Texts in the Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge Madison: University of Wisconsin Press Odlin, T (1989) Language transfer: Cross-linguistic Influence in Language Learning Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 66 Oster, S (1981) The Use of Tenses in Reporting Past Literature In Selinker, Tarone, & Hanzeli, eds English for academic and technical purposes: Studies in honour of Louis Trimble Newburgh House Pickard, V (1995) Citing Previous Writers: what can we say instead of ‘say’? Hongkong Papers in Linguistics and Language Teaching, 18, 89-102 Shaw, P (1992) Reasons for the Correlation of Voice, Tense, and Sentence Function in Reporting Verbs Applied Linguistics, 13(3), 302-19 Swales, J (1981) Aspects of Articles Introductions Birmingham: University of Aston Swales, J (1986) Citation Analysis and Discourse Analysis Applied Linguistics, 7(1), 39-56 Swales, J (1990) Genre Analysis Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Swales, J & Feak, C B (2004) Academic Writing for Graduate Students: Essential Tasked and Skills 2nd ed Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press Thomas, S & Hawes, T (1996) Reporting Verbs in Medical JournalA Englishfor Specific Purposes, 13(2), 129-148 Thompson, G (1996) Collins Cobuild English Guides 5: Reporting 3rd ed London: Harper Collins Publishers Thompson, G & Ye, Y (1991) Evaluation in the Reporting Verbs used in Academic Papers Applied Linguistics, 12(4), 365-382 Thompson, G (1996) Voices in the Text: Discourse Perspectives on Language Reports Applied Linguistics, 17, 501-530 67 Thompson, P (2000) Citation Practices in Ph D theses In L Burnard & T McEnery, eds Rethinking language pedagogy from a corpus perspective: papers from the Third International Conference on Teaching and Language Corpora Frankfurt: Peter Lang 91-101 Thompson, P & Tribble, C (2001) Looking at Citations: Using Corpus in English for Academic Purpose Language Learning & Technology, (3), 91105 Weissberg, R., & Buker, S (1990) Writing up Research: Experimental Research Report Writing for Students of English Prentice Hall Yamashita, T (1998) Contrastive Analysis of Discourse Representation in Japanese and American Newspaper Reports Intercultural Communication Studies, (8), 177-191 68 ... mistakes made in language teaching and learning procedures as well as determine the stereotype of translating English into Vietnamese in general and English reporting verbs into Vietnamese ones in. .. 113 verbs are in Vietnamese corpus and 80 verbs are in English corpus Findings of this study can be used as a basis for investigating why Vietnamese learners of English use reporting language... and 45 Vietnamese 4.3 Signal Function of Showing the Manner of Speaking in English 49 and Vietnamese 4.3.1 Signal Function of Showing Speaker’s Volume in English 49 and Vietnamese 4.3.2 Signal