like you ?
(47) -Thế những hai sào mà ông bớt có năm xu? Bác trương Việt nộp có ba đồng xu một suất sưu thôi mà. - Người ta khác, anh khác, anh đừng láo!
(48) - Tất cả đều hoàn hảo, anh Hùng ạ. - Nói dới. Hoàn hảo mà mặt mũi
lại thế kia à?
2.2.2.2. The differences in syntactic features of rejection in English and Vietnamese.
In spite of some similarities mentioned above, the two languages have a few differences in syntactic features of rejection.
First of all, it is in English that speech act of rejection is normally expressed by
grammatical categories such as mood, modality, word forms whereas in Vietnamese that is taken over by a wide range of lexical categories.
Secondly, in declaratives, there are more specialized words, phrases and structures
used for rejecting in Vietnamese than in English. They do not have formal grammatical structures but they are used so frequently that they have gradually become popular for rejecting. We can find some as “P thì có, cịn P chán, P đấy chứ, P chứ, Ai lại … , …với, với
chả …” used for rejection in Vietnamese stories or in the daily communication. Besides,
the Vietnamese, with the lingual distinctiveness tend to use idiomatic expressions more frequently to show rejection. Some popular expressions can be listed as “Thề cá trê chui
ống, mỡ đó mà húp, lo bị trắng rang, oan cho Thị Mầu”,etc.
Thirdly, the negative forms for rejection are more plentiful in Vietnamese than in
English. Most of negative expressions of English are recognized with “no, not, never,
negative, nothing, nobody” whereas we can find out many other ways in Vietnamese
such as “không, không phải, chưa, chưa phải, chẳng, chẳng phải, chả, đâu, đâu có, nào,
gì, làm gì có, mà, bao giờ, ..”. However, it is only in English that negative affixes are
to the previous utterance.
Fourthly, although the two languages use interrogative structures for carrying out
rejection in some cases, the Vietnamese language seems to be more copious with different ways of making questions and it requires a good language competence that can apply a variety of interrogative structures in distinguished situations to get the best effect.
Fifthly, the two languages in many cases use different structures to express the same
meaning of rejection, in other words, they are not always analogous in the structures for rejection. Take the following examples as the illustration:
(49) - It is in the middle of the table. - Is that the middle of the table?
(Nó ở giữa bàn đấy. - Nó có ở giữa bàn đâu.)
(50) - What? To get more knocks? - Nonsense!
(- Thì sao ư? Để lại bị ăn đòn à? - Đòn là đòn thế nào?)
(51) - He’s scrupulous and honorable!
- But not too scrupulous and honorable to take aid and money from a woman.
(- Ashley là người cẩn trọng và đáng kính.