Đề tài Disagreeing in english and vietnamese: a pragmatics and conversation analysis perspective - Kiều Thị Thu Hương
Tài liệu Đề tài Disagreeing in english and vietnamese: a pragmatics and conversation analysis perspective - Kiều Thị Thu Hương: VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY – HANOI COLLEGE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES DISAGREEING IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE: A PRAGMATICS AND CONVERSATION ANALYSIS PERSPECTIVE By KIEU, THI THU HUONG A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for 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 DISAGREEING IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE: 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 used without due acknowledgment in the text of the thesis. Hanoi - 2006 Kieu Thi Thu Huong ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am indebted to many people without whose help the present thesis could not have been completed. First of all, I would like to express my sincer...
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VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY – HANOI
COLLEGE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES
DISAGREEING
IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE:
A PRAGMATICS AND CONVERSATION ANALYSIS PERSPECTIVE
By
KIEU, THI THU HUONG
A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements
for 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
DISAGREEING IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE:
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 used without due acknowledgment in the text of the thesis.
Hanoi - 2006
Kieu Thi Thu Huong
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am indebted to many people without whose help the present thesis could not have been completed. First of all, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisors Assoc. Prof. Dr. Hoang Van Van and Assoc. Prof. Dr. Phan Van Que for their invaluable guidance, insightful comments and endless support.
I wish to express my deep indebtedness to Prof. Dr. Luong Van Hy, the chair of the Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto, Canada for his brilliant scholarship, demanding teaching and supervision. His unending help greatly encouraged me before and 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 of conversation analysis, for his productive course of conversation analysis, his kindness and 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 and generosity. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Assoc. Prof. Dr. Nguyen Hoa for his discerning comments, knowledgeable suggestions and kind-heartedness. My sincere thanks go to all my teachers at CFL – VNU for their profound knowledge and outstanding 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 Vietnam for her kind support and valuable correction of all this work in manuscript. But for her, I would 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, my friends and students, my colleagues at Hanoi-Amsterdam High school, the school principal 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, the chair 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 efficient assistance, intellectual support and continual encouragement.
I especially express my heartfelt gratitude to Assoc. Prof. Dr. Tran Huu Manh, who supervised 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, my husband and my two children, who have always given me their love, understanding and encouragement throughout my study.
To all mentioned, and to many more, my heart extends the warmest thanks.
ABSTRACT
This thesis takes as its main objective the description of the native perception and realization of the speech act of disagreeing in English and Vietnamese within the theoretical 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 such issues as politeness, its notions and relations with indirectness, strategies and linguistic devices used to express disagreement tokens in the English and Vietnamese languages and cultures. Linguistic politeness is carefully examined in its unity of discernment and volition on the basis of the data obtained from elicited written questionnaires, folk expressions, interviews and naturally occurring interactions. The meticulous and miraculous methods offered by conversation analysis are of great help in describing and exploring the structural organization of disagreement responses in preferred and dispreferred 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 perform disagreements by speakers of English in North America and speakers of Vietnamese in Hanoi result from the differences in their assessment of socio-cultural parameters and social situations. Although indirectness might be used in some contexts as a means to express politeness, there is no absolute correlation between politeness and indirectness in the two languages and cultures under investigation. Despite the English general preference for direct strategies and the Vietnamese tendency to indirect strategies, the former 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 in close relation to the study of the speakers’ wider socio-cultural milieus with systems of local norms, beliefs and values. In proffering disagreements to the prior evaluations or ideas, native speakers not only deploy individually volitional strategies but also observe socially determined norms of behavior, especially in the choice of formulaic expressions, speech levels, address terms, deference markers etc. Therefore, the deployment of the normative-volitional approach to politeness study is appropriate and reasonable.
Conversation analysis sheds light on disagreements as dispreferred seconds to first assessments and opinions, and as preferred seconds to self-deprecations. English and Vietnamese speakers adopt the same strategies in regards to preference organization, compliment responses and negotiation of disagreements. On the whole, disagreements are inclined 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 explore the conflicting effects caused by the correlation between preference organization and self-compliment avoidance in responses to compliments. The English informants show a trend towards compliment acceptance and appreciation, while the Vietnamese prefer to refuse and negate prior complimentary tokens in spite of their similar strategies in adopting mid-positions. The accounts for this phenomenon can be found in the Vietnamese 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, the combined pragmatics and conversation analysis perspective is strongly recommended to speech act study as this integration maximizes the strengths and minimizes the weaknesses of each approach.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
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 co-conversants 42
Table 1 10: Assessment of Social Situations - Sit. A1. Praise on Nice-looking Spouse 44
Table 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.' 79
Table 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 (Boring party) 108
Table 3 7: Choice of Politeness Strategies to Disagree with Colleague, same age & gender (Miss X) 109
Table 3 8: Choice of Politeness Strategies to Disagree with Colleague, same age & gender (Tax) 109
Table 3 9: Choice of Politeness Strategies to Disagree with Colleague, same age & gender (Party) 109
Table 3 10: Choice of Politeness Strategies to Disagree with Older Acquaintance (Miss X is fat) 111
Table 3 11: Choice of Politeness Strategies to Disagree with Older Acquaintance (Tax increase) 111
Table 3 12: Choice of Politeness Strategies to Disagree with Older Acquaintance (Boring party) 112
Table 3 13: Choice of Politeness Strategies to Disagree with Older Boss (Miss X is fat) 112
Table 3 14: Choice of Politeness Strategies to Disagree with Older Boss (Tax increase) 113
Table 3 15: Choice of Politeness Strategies to Disagree with Older Boss (Boring Party) 114
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.' 80
Chart 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) 106
Chart 3 6: Choice of Politeness Strategies to Disagree with Someone You Dislike (Tax increase) 107
Chart 3 7: Choice of Politeness Strategies to Disagree with Someone You Dislike (Boring party) 108
Chart 3 8: Choice of Politeness Strategies to Disagree with Colleague, same age & gender (Miss X) 108
Chart 3 9: Choice of Politeness Strategies to Disagree with Colleague, same age & gender (Tax) 109
Chart 3 10: Choice of Politeness to Disagree with Colleague, same age & gender (Party) 110
Chart 3 11: Choice of Politeness Strategies to Disagree with Older Acquaintance (Miss X is fat) 110
Chart 3 12: Choice of Politeness Strategies to Disagree with Older Acquaintance (Tax increase) 111
Chart 3 13: Choice of Politeness Strategies to Disagree with Older Acquaintance (Boring party) 112
Chart 3 14: Choice of Disagreeing Strategies to Disagree with Older Boss (Miss X is fat) 113
Chart 3 15: Choice of Politeness Strategies to Disagree with Older Boss (Tax increase) 114
Chart 3 16: Choice of Politeness Strategies to Disagree with Older Boss (Boring Party) 114
ABBREVIATIONS AND CONVENTIONS
# Number
& and
CA Conversation analysis
CCSARP Cross-cultural Speech Act Realization Project
CP Cooperative Principle
D Relative distance
DCT Discourse Completion Task
EFL English as a foreign language
FSA Face saving act
FTA Face threatening act
H Hearer
P Relative power
R Rating/Raking of imposition
S Speaker
SA Speech act
S/F Second or foreign
SA Speech act
SDCT Semi- Discourse Completion Task
Sig. Significance (a term used in SPSS)
SPSS Statistic Package for Social Sciences
VFL Vietnamese as foreign language
INTRODUCTION
1. Rationale
1.1. Necessity of the study
1.1.1. Problem statement
Humans are endowed with language, a very special gift, with the help of which they communicate their ideas, feelings and transmit information. However, successful communication requires not only pure linguistic competence but also knowledge of social norms, social values and relations between individuals known as communicative competence. Communicative competence presupposes ability to use the language correctly and appropriately. This pragmatic competence seems as crucial as linguistic competence. The lack of it may lead to impoliteness, misinterpretation, culture shocks or even communication breakdown.
In the past few decades, the rapid development of technology and communication systems has greatly shortened the distance between countries and offered more chance for inter-cultural interactions besides intra-cultural interactions. It is English that has become the most international and the most widely used language. Colleges and schools in Vietnam have witnessed a sharp increase in the number of people teaching and learning English. The evolving situation of Vietnamese economics and politics demands a change in how to teach and learn foreign languages in general, and English in particular. There is an urgent need to improve students’ communicative competence besides grammatical knowledge. Recently, verbal communicative competence has been taken into consideration in any English teaching program.
The emphasis on speaking, one of the early forms of man’s communication, has resulted in an awareness of developing a sense of socio-cultural factors in learners to help them become successful in interaction. Thus, this study is conducted with the hope of contributing to the socio-cultural aspects of spoken English-Vietnamese communication 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 of great interest to the researcher and of great help to language teachers and learners. In everyday life, native speakers talk to each other, exchanging ideas, evaluations or assessments of things, events and other people. Their interlocutors may agree or disagree with them. The way second speakers express their disagreement with prior speakers is both language-specific and culture-specific. The differences in the ways in which native speakers of English and Vietnamese realize disagreements seem to make it problematic for cultural outsiders to say the right thing at the right time. Therefore, a comparison of the ways used to realize disagreeing by native speakers of English and Vietnamese is considered essential and valuable in the teaching and learning of English by 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 strategies which are mainly the same in all cultures (Fraser, 1985). However, this universalistic view is doubted and rejected by some researchers who contend that different cultures conceptualize speech acts differently according to differences in cultural norms and values 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 and interact between themselves. Their relationship and interaction have been researched into and focused on in prior papers. Sapir (1963: 166) states that language is ‘a cultural or social product’. Consequently, the interpretation of the social meaning of a certain linguistic expression should be done with reference to the bigger socio-cultural background of the speaker. Due consideration of the socio-cultural values and perceptions of the society and culture involved should be made to adequately understand the way to realize speech acts in general, and disagreeing in particular, for disagreeing is normal assumed an act that may cause negative reactions or feelings in interpersonal communication.
To eliminate and/or to limit pragmatic transferences and inferences, language learners should be provided with necessary knowledge of socio-cultural constraints and factors governing 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 of pragmatics and conversation analysis (henceforth CA). The meticulous methods of CA carried out in excerpts of natural speech provide deep insight into the structural organization of disagreement tokens in English and Vietnamese.
- To suggest a new way to investigate the similarities and differences of a speech act across 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 its norms, 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 Vietnamese communication 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 are co-operative, they may support or reject prior assessments by either agreeing or disagreeing.
Since the 1970s of the twentieth century, Pomerantz has paid attention to the way second assessments are made. Her 1975 Ph.D. dissertation can be considered her first step. In this paper, she carefully examines the major features of disagreeing and agreeing. Later on, she takes into consideration the construction of disagreement/agreement (Pomerantz, 1984a). The main features in preference organization like preferred and dispreferred turns used by second speakers to perform disagreeing/agreeing are looked at with great care.
Pomerantz is also interested in the relationship between responses to prior complimentary tokens and the system of constraints, in which disagreements are structurally dispreferred but agreements may implicitly mean self-praise. In her work on “Compliment Responses” (1978), Pomerantz finds out that native English speakers tend to make compliment responses located somewhere between agreeing and disagreeing. 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 into compliments that has ever been done in Vietnam. Compliments and such related issues as politeness and its strategies, lexico-modal markers and the addressing system are thoroughly discussed and empirically examined to bring out their cross-cultural similarities and differences. He has also brought out the safe/unsafe topics for giving compliments and underlined the most frequently used strategies in responses to prior complimentary attributes. It appears that while native speakers of English tend to utilize direct strategies, their Vietnamese counterparts seem to exploit indirect strategies.
Disagreeing has long been an appealing pursuit of the present writer. It has been described, and investigated in the framework of the theories of speech acts and politeness in her M. A. thesis (Kieu T. T. H. 2001). The data obtained from written questionnaires provide sufficient evidence for the hypotheses concerning perception and performance of evaluative disagreements by speakers of American English and Vietnamese. 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 course of CA, she herself has realized that it would be better to use the analytic framework of CA together with that of pragmatics to thoroughly investigate the perception and realization of disagreeing tokens, their structural organization, and bring out typical linguistic devices commonly utilized by native speakers of English and Vietnamese in their disagreements. The writer has been strongly impressed by the capacity of CA with its rigorous principle of using mundane casual speech in natural settings. It is hoped that the synthetic approach, in which CA and pragmatics are combined, will provide a multi-dimensional study of the issues under investigation.
3. Research question and hypotheses of the study
3.1. Research question
The present study focuses on the description of the perception and realization of the speech act of disagreeing in English and Vietnamese within the theoretical frameworks of 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 proposed on the basis of the assumptions and suggestions made by some prestigious pragmaticians and conversation analysts. Brown & Levinson (1987[1978]) and Leech (1986) propose that despite having the same strategies, cultures may differ in terms of priorities and values given to each strategy. Blum-Kulka & House (1989: 137) believe:
…members of different cultures might differ in their perceptions of social situations as well 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 as dispreferred seconds tend to be delayed while disagreements as preferred seconds to self-denigrations are immediate and outright. Pomerantz (1978) investigates how Americans reply to compliments and notices that many English compliment responses are placed somewhere between agreements and disagreements because of the constraint systems concerning preference organization and self-compliment avoidance. Agreeing with the prior compliments may implicitly mean praising self, but disagreeing may lead to the use of dispreferred format. Having compared the way native speakers of Japanese and English negotiate their disagreements, Mori (1999: 138) comes to a conclusion:
‘An opinion-negotiation sequence develops … until the participants find a middle ground, acknowledge co-existing multiple perspectives, or change the topic to terminate the 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 use of strategies to perform disagreements as a result of the differences in their assessment of socio-cultural factors and social situations.
Hypothesis 2: Politeness with its two constitutive elements volition and discernment in relation to disagreeing is differently perceived and interpreted across the English and Vietnamese languages and cultures, and there seems to be no absolute correlation between politeness and indirectness.
Hypothesis 3: In regards to preference organization English and Vietnamese native speakers are inclined to deploy the same set of strategies in order to hedge or delay disagreements as dispreferred seconds and provide immediate and outright disagreements as preferred seconds to self-deprecations.
Hypothesis 4: English and Vietnamese speakers seem to exploit similar strategies for the negotiations of disagreements and mid-positions in responses to compliments although the former may show a greater tendency to accept prior compliments while the latter appear to often negate them.
Hypothesis 5: Native speakers of English and Vietnamese seem to employ intensifiers to highlight or lower the effect of disagreeing tokens, but native Vietnamese speakers demonstrate a frequent usage of person referring 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. It depends much on the speaker’s communicative intention, leading to his/her choice of strategies to verbally express disagreement tokens.
However, the realization of disagreeing in particular and of other acts in general is strongly 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 of the 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-denigrations are 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 in which preference organization interacts with self-compliment avoidance, resulting in the spreading of compliment responses all over the continuum ranging from acceptances/agreements to rejections/disagreements (Pomerantz 1975, 1978, 1984a; Levinson 1983; Heritage 2002). Therefore, the present study pays attention to the realization of disagreements as regards preference organization and constraint systems.
Although disagreeing is present in English and Vietnamese, each language deploys certain linguistic devices to realize it in conformity to locally accepted norms of behavior. While intensifiers are empirically used by native speakers of English and Vietnamese, person referring terms and particles seem to be pervasive in Vietnamese disagreements. English speakers are inclined to exploit prefaces, delay tokens, backchannels etc. to soften disagreements. The present study takes into consideration the above mentioned items to highlight the most frequently used devices.
The database of this study consists of elicited written questionnaires and audio-tapings of natural conversations. However, the investigation is mainly done on the basis of vocalized disagreement tokens, and prosodic features and paralinguistic factors are rarely referred to in spite of their importance.
This thesis is motivated and conducted within the frameworks of the theories of SA and politeness (Austin 1962; Grice 1975; Hymes 1964; Searle 1969, 1975, 1979; Lakoff 1973, 1977, 1989; Levinson 1983; Brown & Levinson 1987 [1978]; Leech 1983; Mey 1993, 2001; Thomas 1995; Yule [1996] 1997 etc.) and conversation analysis (Sacks 1963, 1972a-b, 1984; Schegloff 1972, 1979a-b; Jefferson 1974, 1978, 1979; Pomerantz 1978, 1984a-b; Levinson 1983; Psathas 1995; Cameron 2002 etc.). In addition, the empirical study in some chapters is carried out with the help of SPSS 11.5.
5. Methodology
5.1. 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 the analysis 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 in expressing 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 to provide deep insights that can unravel many linguistic problems (Levinson 1983: 364). Its strictly data-centered principle may be the object of arguments among the researchers, but no one can deny the magnitude of what it offers language study. The helpful ‘microscope’ (Cameron 2002: 89) of conversation analytic research reveals the intricate patterns in the structural organization of mundane verbal exchanges. What ordinary people use every day to express themselves and exchange information turns out to be structurally complex and remarkable. The contingent nature and the continuously shaped and reshaped development of talk by participants draw much analytic attention.
The analytic studies of conversation seem to be quite relevant to the study of speech acts and other issues in pragmatics. The orderly properties of speech acts are normally unfolded in the process of meticulous analysis and conscientious observation offered by conversation analysis. Also, the intensive studies of the sequential structure of utterances 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 pragmatic phenomena, for conversation is clearly the prototypical kind of language usage, the form in 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-cultural parameters as age, gender, social status of co-conversants, or the relationship between them, 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 of conversation have no place to go in a framework that primarily studies co-text, and which allows 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-cultural parameters mentioned above, although they do not seem to pay enough attention to mundane interactions in natural settings. Thus, the synthetic approach which combines CA and theories of SA and politeness applied to the study of disagreeing helps to make use of the advantages and limit the disadvantages of each perspective. In addition, the use of more than one approach increases objectivity and reduces the risk of being simple in examining cultures as in Maynard’s 1997 warning:
Defining cultures in simple terms is a trap one must avoid. Careless descriptions of societies can and often do result in negative stereotyping. Overemphasizing differences may 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 deployed in combination with other theoretical perspectives. To investigate the realization of thanking by Americans and learners of English, Eisenstein and Bodman (1993) use a range of data types including written questionnaires and naturalistical exchanges, under the impact of which differences between native and nonnative expressions of thanking are set off. With the help of CA and pragmatics, Aston (1993) persuasively displays how native and nonnative speakers negotiate comity, set up and maintain friendly relationships in everyday mundane conversations. Impressed by the strength of interactional sociolinguistics, Kasper & Blum-Kulka (1993: 13) advise combining methods from this perspective with those from contrastive and interlanguage pragmatics to identify cross-cultural and cross-linguistic pragmatics differences and similarities as well as pragmatic failures.
Mundane everyday talk has been the database for research into the system of person reference in Vietnamese by Luong V. H. (1990), politeness in modern Vietnamese by Vu T. T. H. (1997) and language socialization by Nguyen T. T. B. (2001). In her study of politeness and face in Chinese culture, Lee-Wong (2000) uses both written and spoken data to identify the native strategies and conceptualization of politeness. Brown (2002) and Snow & Blum-Kulka (2002) are successful in deploying naturalistic corpora while 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 are used in combination with those of pragmatics. The present paper is just different from the aforementioned works in the degree and size to which each approach is applied so as 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 in English and Vietnamese. The combination of pragmatics and CA takes advantage of the 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 data collected from both written questionnaires and natural speech in English and Vietnamese. Elicited data and recorded excerpts of mundane everyday talks have been investigated 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 in English and Vietnamese. And, for the first time, the similarities and differences concerning its perception, performance, preference structure, and constraint systems have 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 of preference 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 COMMUNICATIVE ILLOCUTIONARY AND SOCIAL ACT
Theoretical Preliminaries
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 become one of the most compelling notions in the study of language use. Speech acts have been central 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 assumption is 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 a pleasant and ear-pleasing compliment:
You look so nice. (Pomerantz 1978: 84)
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 the process of inferences. The circumstances surrounding the utterances are of great help to both 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 some outcome (Yule, 1996: 57). SAs and speech events are said to be hierarchical components of speech situations (Hymes 1972), and for an utterance to have been made and to be successful as an act of communication, it is necessary that the process of intention-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:
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 locutionary act, an act of producing a meaningful linguistic expression. On the other hand, the act of 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), and illocutionary 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 to mean 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
Representatives
Expressives
Directives
Commissives
words change the world
make words fit the world
make words fit the world
make the world fit words
make the world fit words
S causes X
S believes X
S feels X
S wants X
S 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 representative SAs carry the true or false values, i.e. they can be judged for truth or falsity. In using them 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 'Darwin was 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:
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 an implicit expectation/invitation to get the same opinion or assessment from the conversational partners. The person who performs an act of disagreeing does not take care 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 or assessment is neither good nor right.
In everyday interactions, the same utterance, the same linguistic act can express different illocutionary forces. Let us consider the following example by Pomerantz (1978: 97):
F: That’s beautiful.
K: Is’n it pretty?
Judging from the structure, K’s reply is an interrogative, but is interpreted as a disagreement token that is usually expressed in declarative form. In English there is a recognizable relationship between the three structural forms (declarative, interrogative and imperative) and the three communication functions (statement, question and command/request). Actually, in K’s performing an act of disagreeing the relationship between the structure and the function is indirect. A declarative is normally utilized to make a disagreeing statement, but here, an interrogative is deployed to produce a weak disagreement. In this case we have an indirect speech act. Whenever there is a direct relationship 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 and function converge as a typical expression of a disagreement:
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 said to be more polite in SAs like requesting, commanding, refusing, disagreeing etc. (Brown & Levinson [1978]1987, Leech 1983 and Yule 1996 among others). The relationship between structures and functions serves as another approach to dealing with 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 earlier speaker'. In the case of disagreeing, the act of showing that the second S does not think the same or he/she has a different view or opinion seems to be much more important than the prior. This can be seen in the utterance by Pomerantz (1978: 87) given below:
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 both illocutionary force and propositional content. These two properties of SAs are realized syntactically, and the correct understanding of the intended illocutionary force is inevitably dependent upon the context. In terms of syntax, there is no necessary correlation between structural forms and illocutionary forces. Practically, disagreements can be performed in declarative, interrogative and imperative forms respectively as in:
Not very solid though. (Pomerantz 1978: 99)
Do you really think so? It’s just a rag my sister gave me. (Ibid. 87)
No way! (Blundell et al. 1996: 192)
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 than agreeing'. Let us consider the utterances below:
J: T’s- tsuh beautiful day out isn’t it?
→ L: Yeh it’s just gorgeous … (Pomerantz 1978: 93)
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 it out with ‘Yee’. The use of agreement marker in (11) helps to frame the disagreement token as a ‘weak disagreement’ or partial disagreement (Pomerantz 1978, 1984a; Mori 1999), and mitigate its disaffiliative force. As a matter of fact, Ss need more stamina and 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 their disagreement implicitly or tacitly, rather than to perform it explicitly or frankly, as they would in the case of agreement. It is advisable that one should hedge one's disagreement 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 threatening to the H’s desire to be appreciated and approved of (Brown & Levinson 1987). When faced with FTAs, Ss may choose between various strategies to reduce or eliminate the seriousness of the threat by either softening their communicative tokens or implicitly expressing them. The choice of politeness strategies is said to be affected by three variables relative power (P), social distance (D) and ranking of imposition (R) (Ibid.).
By and large, from the view of SA theories, disagreeing which belongs to representatives that make the words fit the world of fallacy or truth, and which is an FTA that needs to be hedged to weaken the potential threat, is a communicative illocutionary act.
Conversation Analysis
1.1.2.1. Historical background
The study of social interaction, known as conversation analysis (CA) or study of talk-in-interaction has long been a phenomenon of great interest for researchers of a wide range of fields. It takes as one of its subjects the study of mundane social interaction in naturally occurring settings on the basis of rigorous and systematic methods. The assumption that social actions are meaningful, and are produced and interpreted as such, leads to the desire to discover, describe and analyze their natural organization or order, which constitutes and constructs this orderliness.
Drawing upon and growing out of developments in such domains as phenomenology, ethnomethodology (the study of ‘ethnic’, i.e. participants’ own methods), and language philosophy, CA keeps on extending its fields of study, and has become interdisciplinary interests of social psychology, communication, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, pragmatics and so on.
The early theoretical and methodological developments of this approach date back to 1950s and 1960s of the 20th century with Bale’s Interaction Process Analysis (1950), Barker and Wright’s Midwest and its Children (1955), Pittenger, Hockett, and Danehy’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 real-world settings were combined with direct observation and notes by researchers in the field 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, the location and duration of pauses, and tone could be captured and contribute to the analytic process.
New approaches to the study of language and communication with respect to culture focusing on meanings-in-context, natural classification systems by members of a culture, their perceptions and conventions also brought about changes in CA. With the names 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 of examining order as a social product constituted and achieved in and through various empirical 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 and general theories. CA, at the onset, with the works by Sacks, Schegloff, Jefferson, Pomerantz and others, tends to avoid preformulated theory construction. It examines the details of the temporal organization and various contingencies of the unfolding development of interaction. Recurring patterns found by essentially inductive methods are 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 the contextual particulars commonly believed to have influence on interpersonal interactions. Such personal characteristics of the participants as age, gender, social status, their relationship, or the formality/ informality of the settings etc. are likely to be neglected (Levinson 1983: 295; Psathas 1995: 36, 49-50). Their primary concern, as mentioned, is the discovery, description, and analysis of how social conduct, including interactional 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, as well as intelligibly produced and understood on shared rules and methods. The interpretation 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 current context 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 parties within interactional activities (Heritage 1989). Co-text is significant in that it provides Ss with a local resource upon which they draw to design their utterances, and correspondently, 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 for such a wealth of data obtained from naturally occurring interactions. To understand people’s linguistic behaviors, it is necessary to look further, and go beyond the co-text of the talk by extending the limited border of the conversational co-text, and taking into account the whole societal environment, relevant and surrounded the language production. It is believed that the very desire to look at the SA of disagreeing from the pragmatics 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 providing adequate grounds for the proper and all-sided interpretation of interactions. The meaning of a social action could not adequately be understood without consulting the on-going context within which the action takes place: who talks with whom, in what setting, when, in what language(s), on what topic, as well as the wider socio-cultural context of which interactional talk is considered and analyzed as part and parcel. As Cameron (2002: 53) puts it:
Any given instance of language use is analysed as part of a whole social situation; more generally, ways of using and understanding language are analysed in relation to the wider culture in which they occur.
The wider cultural context in which mundane interactions occur involves a range of cultural beliefs, practices, and values. What is assumed to be good in one culture may not count as such in other cultures. As aforementioned, social parameters like social status, gender, age etc. of co-participants are generally of little interest in conversation analytic studies. Seldom do conversation analysts pay a close attention to them, providing they are made explicit issues by participants in the data (Ibid. 88). Some analysts, however, argue that cultural factors affect natural interaction. Zimmerman & West (1975) and Fishman (1983), for instance, suggest that men seem to dominate talk involving both genders.
All in all, it is high time CA adopted an interdisciplinary approach, and went beyond its traditionally strict border by considering social actions in relation to the wider socio-cultural environment in which they take place. This is suggested as a way of refining conversation analytic processes to compensate their having no place for societal factors to go in the framework that primarily study co-text (Mey 2001: 135).
1.1.2.3. Turn – turn taking and adjacency pairs
In everyday life, people use language to converse with their interlocutors, and this is a typically social way of ‘doing things with words’. They talk, exchange information, or express their ideas. The kind of talk is various in terms of contents and contexts where it is produced. The structural organization, however, is always the same: ‘I speak – you speak – I speak – you speak’. As Crystal (2003: 477) puts it:
… [C]onversation is seen as a sequence of conversational turns, in which the contribution of each participant is seen as part of a co-ordinated and RULE-governed behavioural interaction. (My emphasis)
The finding of turn, considered the basic unit of conversation (Sacks 1995), is one of the important discoveries in the development of this analytic approach. Interactive talk is assumed ‘prototypically a joint enterprise’ that involves more than one S (Cameron 2002: 87). Studying recorded interchanges, Sacks (1995: II, 223) recognizes that in normal, civilized interactions, conversationalists follow a certain kind of rules: they take turns to speak rather than speak in overlap. ‘A central … feature [of conversation] is that exactly one person – at lease one and no more than one – talks at a time’ (Sacks 1995: II, 223).
Simultaneous speaking (two or more speakers speak at the same time) is calculated as little as five per cent, and there is very little gap between one co-conversant talking and another starting (Ervin-Tripp 1979, Levinson 1983). Speaker changes occur normally at certain points called ‘transition relevant places’ (TRPs). The initiation and completion of a TPR can syntactically, semantically and intonationally be projected or predicted. Consequently, the conversant that currently has the right to speak, or the ‘floor’, may choose the next S, as well as self-select or any other party may self-select (Sacks, Schefloff, and Jefferson 1974, 1978; Levinson 1983).
In some cases, a S may ignore an upcoming TRP and hurry past it, leaving no space for other parties to jump in. Herein, overlap and interruption may take place as in excerpts by Sacks et al. (1978: 16) given below:
A: Uh you been down here before // havenche.
B: Yeah.
C: We:ll I wrote what I thought was a a-a
rea:s’n//ble explanatio:n
F: I: think it was a very rude le :tter
Detailed study reveals it is a prevalent fact that turn taking is structurally organized (Sacks et al. 1974, 1978). And in most cases, one party speaks at a time, although the turn order and turn size vary, and speakership transfer as well as overlap occur. Also, the turn-taking organization is assumed to be both context-free and context-sensitive (Sacks et al. 1978: 10). It may remain unaffected by variations parties bring into talk on the one hand, and partly and locally changed under the influence of social facets on the other. The ‘one party talking’ rule, for example, may be invariant in almost all contexts, and the ‘speaker change’ rule could relatively be sensitive with some social aspects of contexts.
The existence of turn-taking phenomenon is obvious, although there are still controversial arguments about the mechanism organizing it. Levinson (1983: 301), for instance, mentions the hierarchical pre-allocation of turn taking of the Burundi, the African people, in which high-status persons have preference over the others. He indicates that in such settings as classrooms and courtrooms in Anglo-American culture turns follow the pre-allocated principle too. In addition to this, some psychologists and conversation analysts (Duncan 1974; Duncan & Fiske 1977; Goodwin 1981, 1984) show that the turn taking works on the basis of signals like gazes. This view appears to be implausible when applied to telephone talks, which go quite smoothly with very little gap and overlap in spite of the absence of visual contact. The projectability and repair work, as proposed by Sacks et al. (1974, 1978) seem ‘to be wrong’ in Levinson’s critical analysis. Consequently, the present problem leads to more searches to discover an adequate mechanism for the organization of turn taking within and across languages and cultures.
Interactional exchanges, often composed of two subsequent utterances, are called pairs or adjacency pairs. The production of the first-turn action provides the relevance for the appearance of the second-turn action. And the second cannot exist without the first. They recur in pairs. Everyday casual conversations are full of such pairs as invitation-acceptance, greeting-greeting, assessment-agreement and assessment-disagreement. Below is one example of assessment-disagreement by (Pomerantz 1984a: 74):
R: … well never mind. It’s not important.
D: Well, it is important.
Paired utterances, viz., adjacency pairs are pervasive in natural language use. On the basis of the adjacency pair assumption, a second pair part is relevant and necessary, once the first pair part is produced. The delay or absence (in case of silences) of a second part may lead to the repetition of the first part by the prior S (Schegloff 1972a). ‘The painful silence’, as it is in Mey’s wording (2001: 158), on the part of the sequential S may sometimes make the prior feel totally embarrassed. A question raised here is that the so-called ‘painful silence’ would differently be interpreted in intra-cultural and across-cultural interactions by different identities. As a result, first Ss would have a variety of subtle nuances of feelings when facing second Ss’ silences, not just embarrassment.
1.1.2.4. Disagreeing – a social act
Conversation that is considered ‘the prototypical kind of language usage’ (Levinson 1983: 284) is normally assumed the first language form that every human being engages in. Conversationalists actually ‘do things’ (Austin 1962) with their words by informing each other of news, telling stories, making requests, invitations, offers to do things, expressing evaluations or assessments, and their co-participants respond to them, either accept/agree or reject/disagree. These acts are not only linguistic acts, but they are social acts as well. Naturally, CA, which explicates how social conduct is produced, recognized as intelligible and sensible, pays close attention to all acts of this kind.
All initial assessments or evaluative tokens of people, things or events are produced in first turns of adjacency pairs. The proffering of assessments by the first Ss makes relevant the recipients’ assessments in response. As a rule, second assessments by the responders should be subsequent to the prior and made in the second turns. The first assessments act as invitations for the second to come, especially if they are given in interrogatives or interrogative tags, as in the excerpt by Pomerantz (1984a: 68):
E: e-that Pa:t isn’she a do://:ll?
M: iYeh isn’t she pretty,
The first Ss’ evaluative comments, which are considered their claims of certain knowledge about the referents, can trigger and engender second assessments by the recipients who may want to demonstrate their access to the same referents, as below:
A: God izn it dreary.
(0.6)
A: //Y’know I don’t think-
B: .hh- It’s warm though, (Pomerantz 1978: 100)
B: I think everyone enjoyed just sitting around talking.
A: I do too. (Pomerantz 1984a: 67)
CA practitioners like Pomerantz (1978, 1984a) and Sacks (1987) point out that second assessments subsequent to the first in form of agreements tend to immediately be delivered, as in (17), and sometimes, in some overlap with the prior. On the contrary, disagreements seem to be withheld, delayed or mitigated by pauses, hedges, prefaces and other non-linguistic devices to downplay the seriousness of the opposing stance, as in (16). In this extract, B’s withholding an answer leads to A’s self-selecting to continue the turn. B’s in-breathing before speaking and her using ‘though’ downgrade the contrast between the two assessments, making hers sound like a weak disagreement.
In most cases, the producers of the initial assessments probably want their evaluations or opinions to be approved of. Disagreements on the part of the recipients would upset them. In addition, it might not be easy for the second Ss to forthrightly disclose their opposition. Hence, the softening or hedging of disagreements becomes a matter of common experience. A quick and outright answer might make the disagreement token too explicit and unpleasant, causing undesired tensions. Thereby, the first Ss wish to be indirect by prefacing their disagreements with agreement tokens or/and downgrading them as in excerpt (15) given above, or they may choose to tacitly imply their different ideas, or be silent altogether. However, when it comes to responding to self-deprecations, disagreements are likely to be direct and explicit. Conversely, agreements seem to be variously softened or muted, as they may sound critical. Pomerantz clearly illustrates this point in her 1984a work. Below is one of her examples (Ibid. 74):
L: … I’m so dumb I don’t even know it hhh! – heh!
W: Y-no, y-you’re not du:mb, …
In short, most disagreement turns tend to be structured so as to minimize occurrences of overtly stated disagreements, but the organization of turns seems to work in the opposite direction in self-denigrations so as to maximize immediate and explicit disagreements.
1.1.3. Summary
Disagreeing as a communicative illocutionary and social act is theoretically examined within the speech act theories and CA in this part. The key notions of each approach are re-examined, applied to and highlighted by disagreeing tokens. In socio-communicative interactions, disagreements are often seen to be softened by means of hedges to qualify the negative force of the act on the one hand, and tend to be strengthened to intensify overt disagreements with prior self-deprecation tokens on the other.
The assessment of socio-cultural parameters and some social situations by the English and Vietnamese informants is investigated in the following part.
1.2. Empirical Study
1.2.1. Aims and methodology
1.2.1.1. Aims
This empirical study aims at getting the sufficient proof for the following hypotheses:
Native speakers of English and Vietnamese may differ in assessing such socio-cultural parameters as age, length of time (familiarity), manner, occupation, setting, gender, and social status, which affect interactive talk.
Speakers of English and Vietnamese may have different assessments of social situations.
1.2.1.2. Data collection methods and respondents
Sampling
To guarantee the validity and reliability of the research results, it is of great importance to strictly follow the sampling procedures and select an appropriate sample. According to Dửrnyei (2003), each sample is actually a subset of the population and the sampling should be carried out in such a way so as to ensure this representativity. After giving a detailed description of sampling procedures that consist of (1) defining the sampling universe, (2) constructing sample stratification, and (3) fixing the sample size, Sankoff (1974: 22) clarifies Hymes’ notion of ‘speech community’ as regards the sample size:
A speech community sample need not include the large number of individuals usually required for other kinds of behavioral surveys. If people within a speech community indeed understand each other with a high degree of efficiency, this tends to place a limit on the extent of possible variation, and imposes a regularity (necessary for effective communication) not found to the same extent in other kinds of social behavior…. even for quite complex speech communities, samples of more than about 150 individuals tend to be redundant, bringing increasing data handling problems with diminishing analytical returns.
In the same vein, Dửrnyei (2003: 74) suggests:
From a purely statistical point of view, a basic requirement is that the sample should have a normal distribution … the sample should include 30 or more people…. From the perspective of statistical significance… certain multivariate statistical procedures require more than 50 participants; for factor analysis, for example, we need a minimum of 100 but preferably more subjects.
Selection of regions
The empirical data were selected in two places: North America and Vietnam. These two places were deliberately chosen due to the present researcher’s ability to access the respondents, which saved her a considerable amount of time, energy and expenses.
North America is internationally known as a region with rapid development in the domains of economy, science and technology. It includes Canada and Northern States of the USA. Although English and French are legitimated official languages of Canada, the Canadian respondents are native speakers of English, either living in Toronto or coming there for their research or study. Toronto is the biggest city in Canada and belongs to Anglophone cultures. Some respondents of English are from other cities of Canada and US Northern states. North America is assumed a complex speech community that belongs to ‘less hierarchical societies’ where ‘status is allegedly far less marked in verbal and non-verbal interaction’ (Bargiela-Chiappini 2003: 1463) and ‘where individualism is assumed to be the basis of all interaction’ (Ide 1989: 241).
Hanoi, the political, economic and cultural center of Vietnam, situated in the North of Vietnam, has been famous for its historical and cultural traditions. From the socio-cultural point of view, Hanoi with its one thousand years of history, feudalist dynasties followed by communist regime, and the present ‘open-door’ policy offers abundant corpora for any researcher who attempts to go further afield the pure linguistic boundary to examine linguistic issues in relation to the wider socio-cultural context. Having undergone great socio-cultural and economic changes, the social structure of the Vietnamese has still been vertically hierarchical with emphasis on moral conduct and community-oriented solidarity (Nguyen D. H. 1995, Vu T. T. H. 1997, among others). As the home for many people coming from different parts of the country, Hanoi can be considered a conjunction of or meeting place for cultures and sub-cultures, and an ideal place to obtain data in terms of socio-linguistic representativeness.
Selection of respondents
The respondents, native speakers of English and Vietnamese, either indigenous inhabitants or permanent/life-time residents, are assumed to share the same sets of local socio-cultural norms, values and beliefs. They all have tertiary education and are ranked as middle-class citizens in regards to socio-economic conditions. This study takes as its chief objectives the perception and realization of disagreeing by native speakers of English and Vietnamese in their speech communities, therefore, the sample should be balanced and comparable in terms of age, gender and level of education, as Bauman & Sherzer (1974: 17) insist,
Linguistic descriptions must achieve both psychological and sociological validity. They must reflect the perspective not only of single individuals but also of social groups, networks or communities.
Individualism and privacy seem fundamental in Anglophone cultures, and native speakers are in favor of freedom from imposition and of actions. Thus, gaining assess to them appears to be problematic, let alone asking them to complete written questionnaires or recording their mundane casual conversation. To collect sufficient data for this study, the researcher spent ample time wandering around Toronto, especially the spacious campus of University of Toronto, its libraries and athletic centers meeting people. Among the respondents were ELI (English Language Institute) teachers coming from some US Northern States to Vietnam for their teaching. There was less complexity and trouble in administering the questionnaires among the Vietnamese respondents, interviewing them and recording their real-life interaction thanks to friendly or/and kinship networks.
Sample size
The elicited data were obtained from 100 English respondents (40 male and 60 female) and 100 Vietnamese respondents (50 male and 50 female). The respondents are supposed to belong to two homogeneous speech communities and possess the same sets of shared social norms, beliefs and values (Hymes 1974a-b, 1995), and be comparable and balanced in terms of education, economic condition, age, and gender. All of them have tertiary education or higher, MA or PhD, and they are ranked as middle-class citizens, aged from 18 to 72.
GENDER
Total
First Language
Male
Female
English Count
40
60
100
English %
40.0%
60.0%
100.0%
Vietnamese Count
50
50
100
Vietnamese %
50.0%
50.0%
100.0%
Table 1 2: Gender correlation between English and Vietnamese respondents
The age groups were divided into two: Less than 30 and 30 or above, with the former consisted of 62 English and 50 Vietnamese, and the latter contained 38 English and 50 Vietnamese. The audio-taping data were gained from 8 tapes by 30 speakers of Vietnamese, and 6 tapes by 16 speakers of English. In addition, a number of English excerpts of mundane everyday speech used in this study are taken from the second source available in the literature owing to their availability and convenience.
AGE GROUP
Total
First Language
Less than 30
30 or above
English Count
62
38
100
English %
62.0%
38.0%
100.0%
Vietnamese Count
50
50
100
Vietnamese %
50.0%
50.0%
100.0%
Table 1 3: Age group correlation between English and Vietnamese respondents
Even though the researcher is aware of the ideal balance as for gender and age group among the two groups of respondents, she should be satisfied with the present sample as after all it has offered a set of valid and reliable corpora for the empirical studies.
Written questionnaires
Written questionnaires have effectively been used in linguistic research by researchers like Ervin-Tripp (1969), Blum-Kulka (1982, 1989), Bayraktaroglu & Sifianou (2001), Bharuthram (2003) etc. as they help to collect a significant amount of data of controlled manner in rather a short time. The questionnaire in the form of Discourse Completion Task (DCT) used in the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP) has been chosen and modified (called Semi-Discourse Completion Task - SDCT) to adjust the purpose and limitation of the paper. The present author also makes use of the written questionnaire developed by Nguyen Q. in his 1998 Ph.D. dissertation (in Vietnamese). The English elicited data were obtained in Toronto, Canada in 2003, and the Vietnamese data were collected in Hanoi, Vietnam in 2003-4.
Like any other kind of written questionnaires, DCTs have the disadvantage of being unable to capture variables like hesitation, pauses, fillers, etc., which are typical features of spoken discourse responses. In addition, the respondents have more time to consider and reconsider their replies in writing than in spontaneous speaking, and they may provide more elaborate responses than those made in natural speech. Last but not least, it does not always seem to be an easy task to check the accuracy of elicited data, for people may wish to be seen and judged in a good light (Ackroyd & Hughes 1981: 83). Audio-taping data are used to make up for the drawbacks of written questionnaires.
Audio-taping
Some researchers tend to overestimate the advantages and underestimate the disadvantages of approaches or methods to explain their preference for the one, which they believe the most appropriate. However, the present researcher proposes to deploy more than one approach, i.e., to combine several approaches and methods so as to make good use of the advantages and minimize the disadvantages (Nguyen D. H. 1995, Cohen 1996, Gass 1996, Vu T. T. H. 1997, Lee-Wong 2000). By so doing the database used in this research can be considered quite sufficient for the empirical studies. It consists of the data collected from SDCTs, audio-taping of natural interactions by native speakers of English and Vietnamese, and excerpts from the recorded data deployed in the works by Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson (1974, 1978); Schegloff, Jefferson, and Sacks (1977); Sacks & Schegloff (1979), Heritage & Drew (1979), Pomerantz (1975, 1978, 1984a-b), Levinson (1983), Goodwin & Goodwin (1987), Heritage (1997, 2002, forth.), Maynard (2003) and others. When necessary, the field notes taken by the researcher on the spot are referred to in order to make up for the inability to use videotaping.
One of the advantages of CA is that conversation analysts can use data from any available source to describe and analyze social actions provided that they are naturally occurring data. Analysts can deploy other researchers’ recordings together with their original for specific purposes of study. Psathas (1995: 53) asserts:
Because the researchers must make available, in transcripts and published extracts, the data on which their studies are based, other researchers may then examine the same, as well as additional, materials, and either replicate or extend the analyses first presented.
Confidentiality
The database used in CA is recordings, whether audio or video, and may be collected from any available source, provided that they should be mundane everyday talks occurring in natural settings. Protection of privacy and participants identities is essential, and as a result, permissions for recording should be obtained, and conversationalists anonymized (Psathas 1995, Dửrnyei 2003). Aware of confidentiality as an important criterion in audio-taping and questionnaire administration, the researcher has used a different name or a letter to replace the S’s real name to anonymize all the respondents and coded the excerpts chose from the recorded data.
Data analysis
Central to this research is the speech act of disagreeing, its perception and linguistic realization. Hence, the data analysis methods are chosen to highlight issues involving disagreeing and its construct of form, function and meaning. The data analysis focuses on: (i) the structure of disagreeing and the use of honorifics, address terms, and other particles (form); (ii) the use of strategies in correlation with politeness (function); and (iii) (combination of (i) & (ii) in essence) contextual interpretation of disagreeing in relation to social variables and local cultures (meaning). As aforementioned, two theoretical frameworks have been adopted: pragmatics and CA. The extent to which each framework is utilized varies according to the purpose and size of the immediate issue under investigation. Generally speaking, the recorded data is examined on the basis of CA to clarify (i); (ii) is investigated on the basis of Brown & Levinson’s model concerning politeness strategies, theories of politeness as regards indirectness and elicited data processed on SPSS; and (iii) is studied within volition-discernment integration and SPSS outputs. CA has long been proved to be of great help in discovering, describing and analyzing organizational structure of conversation. It focuses on the expression of disagreements in preference organization. To provide intelligible information of what and how co-interactants speak in everyday occasions, the excerpts from transcripts in this study are given on the basis of the transcription-notation system originally suggested and evolved by Jefferson, and later elaborated by Maynard (2003). Emphasis, for instance, is displayed by underscoring, and sound stretching/latching is marked by colon (::::). A question mark (?) expresses rising intonation while a comma (,) indicates continuing intonation. The system in full detail is given in Appendix 1.
The database for the assessment of socio-cultural parameters by English and Vietnamese informants in this chapter is from mini-questionnaire #1, and the data for the assessment of social situations are obtained from mini-questionnaire #2. All the questionnaires are given in Appendix 2.
The English corpus is examined and processed on SPSS 11.5 in comparison to and contrast with the Vietnamese. The outputs of data-processing are carefully investigated and only those, whose significance of chi-square results (sig. henceforth) is below 0.05, i.e. they are statistically worth noting, are selected and taken into further consideration.
1.2.2. Assessment of socio-cultural parameters by respondents
1.2.2.1. Data results
The informants were asked to rank 7 socio-cultural parameters age, length of time, manner, occupation, setting, gender and status in order according to their importance on a scale of 7, which represents the continuum of importance, where 01 is the most important and 07 is the least important. Below are the most significant cases.
Assessment of Socio-cultural Factors: Age
Greatest Importance Least
7.00
6.00
5.00
4.00
3.00
2.00
1.00
Count
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
First Language
English
Vietnamese
Chart 1 1: Assessment of Socio-cultural factors: Age of Co-conversants
Importance
Greatest Least
Total
First language
1.00
2.00
3.00
4.00
5.00
6.00
7.00
English - Count
11
16
24
12
12
7
1
83
English - %
13.3%
19.3%
28.9%
14.5%
14.5%
8.4%
1.2%
100.0%
Vietnamese - Count
49
12
10
4
1
2
0
78
Vietnamese - %
62.8%
15.4%
12.8%
5.1%
1.3%
2.6%
.0%
100.0%
Table 1 4: Assessment of socio-cultural factors: Age of co-conversants
Age: A close look at chart 1-1 and table 1-4 reveals the striking difference between the respondents of the two languages and cultures under study. Among 78 Vietnamese respondents who consider Age as a factor having influence on conversation, 49 (constituting 62.8%) rate it the most important. The rest also attach much weight to this factor: 12 rank it second, 10 rank it third and 4 rank it fourth. On the contrary, only 11 native Ss of English, accounting for 13.3%, give Age the greatest importance, 16 informants rank it second, 24 rank it third and 12 rank it fourth.
The very high percentage among the Vietnamese informants reflects their socio-cultural perception of Age as a substantial value in social communication: old-aged people are respected and properly addressed to. In addition, Age is essential in choosing the right form of address terms in conformity to social norms of interactions, where the wrong use of person reference might be the potential source of misunderstanding or conflicts.
Assessment of Socio-cultural Factors:
Manner of Communication
Greatest Importance Least Other
8.00
7.00
6.00
5.00
4.00
3.00
2.00
1.00
Count
40
30
20
10
0
First Language
English
Vietnamese
Chart 1 2: Assessment of Socio-cultural Factors: Manner of Communication
Importance
Greatest Least Other
Total
First Language
1.00
2.00
3.00
4.00
5.00
6.00
7.00
8.00
English - Count
31
21
9
14
4
4
1
1
85
English - %
36.5%
24.7%
10.6%
16.5%
4.7%
4.7%
1.2%
1.2%
100.0%
Vietnamese - Count
9
19
13
17
12
4
1
0
75
Vietnamese - %
12.0%
25.3%
17.3%
22.7%
16.0%
5.3%
1.3%
.0%
100.0%
Table 1 5: Assessment of socio-cultural factors: Manner of communication
Manner & Setting: Native Ss of English in North America are inclined to prefer factors Manner (chart 1-2, table 1-5) and Setting (chart 1-3, table 1-6) more than native Ss of Vietnamese in Hanoi: 31 mark Manner #1, 21 mark it #2, and 9 mark it #3, which accounts for more than 70%; and in regards to factor Setting, 19 rate it the most important, 18 rate it the second, and 15 rank it third, which constitute a high percentage of nearly 60.
Assessment of Socio-cultural Factors: Setting
Greatest Importance Least
7.00
6.00
5.00
4.00
3.00
2.00
1.00
Count
20
10
0
First Language
English
Vietnamese
Chart 1 3: Assessment of Socio-cultural Factors: Setting
Importance
Greatest Least
Total
First Language
1.00
2.00
3.00
4.00
5.00
6.00
7.00
English - Count
19
18
15
11
11
4
2
80
English - %
23.8%
22.5%
18.8%
13.8%
13.8%
5.0%
2.5%
100.0%
Vietnamese - Count
3
6
10
14
11
15
3
62
Vietnamese - %
4.8%
9.7%
16.1%
22.6%
17.7%
24.2%
4.8%
100.0%
Table 1 6: Assessment of socio-cultural factors: Setting
In contrast, about 50% of the Vietnamese informants rank Manner first, second and third in the continuum of importance (vs. 70% of the English rating), and about 30% attach importance to Setting (vs. 60% of the English rating). It is also worth explaining that 08 in charts 1-2, 1-4 and tables 1-5, 1-7 (and in chart 1-5, table 1-8) represents other factors suggested by the respondents themselves such as education, topic, religion belief, relationship, intimacy, attractiveness and intellectual ability.
Importance
Greatest Least Other
Total
First Language
1.00
2.00
3.00
4.00
5.00
6.00
7.00
8.00
English - Count
1
1
7
8
7
14
19
1
58
English - %
1.7%
1.7%
12.1%
13.8%
12.1%
24.1%
32.8%
1.7%
100.0%
Vietnamese - Count
5
10
14
7
13
4
7
0
60
Vietnamese - %
8.3%
16.7%
23.3%
11.7%
21.7%
6.7%
11.7%
.0%
100.0%
Table 1 7: Assessment of socio-cultural factors: Gender of co-conversants
Assessment of Socio-cultural Factors: Gender
Greatest Importance Least Other
8.00
7.00
6.00
5.00
4.00
3.00
2.00
1.00
Count
20
10
0
First Language
English
Vietnamese
Chart 1 4: Assessment of Socio-cultural Factors: Gender of Co-conversants
Gender: The informants in chart 1-4 and table 1-7 seem to differ greatly in their evaluation of the role of Gender in social interactions. Whereas almost 50% of the Vietnamese respondents abide by columns 1, 2, and 3, only 15% of the English respondents opt for these columns. Presumably, it is not necessary for them to pay attention to Gender of their interlocutors when they disagree with the prior evaluative opinions. They would probably proffer the same disagreeing tokens to their interactants regardless of their gender. Meanwhile, the Vietnamese seem to take notice of this factor. “I would be less aggressive in my expressing of disagreement if I talked with representatives of the opposite gender,” said one of the Vietnamese respondents.
Importance
Greatest Least Other
Total
First Language
1.00
2.00
3.00
4.00
5.00
6.00
7.00
8.00
English - Count
6
9
7
9
9
9
14
0
63
English - %
9.5%
14.3%
11.1%
14.3%
14.3%
14.3%
22.2%
.0%
100.0%
Vietnamese - Count
17
16
6
11
8
4
5
1
68
Vietnamese - %
25.0%
23.5%
8.8%
16.2%
11.8%
5.9%
7.4%
1.5%
100.0%
Table 1 8: Assessment of socio-cultural factors: Social status
Social Status: Chart 1-5 and table 1-8 show a really considerable difference in the respondents’ estimating Social Status. The majority of the Vietnamese informants (50 out of 68) adhere to the first four columns, constituting almost 70%. Contrary to this high proportion, only 31 English informants (almost equal 40%) mark these columns. It is worth taking notice of the Vietnamese consistent tendency to rate Status first and second in the continuum of importance. On the other hand, the high percentage among the English informants choosing columns 6 and 7 (14.3% and 22.2%, respectively) may reflect the low incidence of Status in social communication in Anglo-American culture.
Assessment of Socio-cultural Factors: Status
Greatest Importance Least Other
8.00
7.00
6.00
5.00
4.00
3.00
2.00
1.00
Count
20
10
0
First Language
English
Vietnamese
Chart 1 5: Assessment of Socio-cultural Factors: Social Status
Chart 1 6: Assessment of Socio-cultural factors: Length of time you know your co-conversants
Length of Time: Chart 1-6 and table 1-9, which demonstrate the output of the respondents’ assessment of factor Length of time (you know your co-conversants, i.e. familiarity), are intentionally selected although the sig. is 0.208, which is not worth paying attention to as regards statistics. Except for the difference in column 1, where 41.3% of the rating belongs to the group of English informants and the Vietnamese informants constitute only 22.5%, the total percentage of the first four columns shows a slight difference with 93.5% of the English respondents versus 87.4% of the Vietnamese respondents marking them. It is suggested that Ss of two languages and cultures are almost similar in their considering the influence of this factor, concerning the familiarity with their co-conversants when expressing negative responses to the first evaluations.
Importance
Greatest Least
Total
First Language
1.00
2.00
3.00
4.00
5.00
6.00
7.00
English - Count
38
23
18
7
3
1
2
92
English - %
41.3%
25.0%
19.6%
7.6%
3.3%
1.1%
2.2%
100.0%
Vietnamese - Count
16
21
15
10
4
3
2
71
Vietnamese - %
22.5%
29.6%
21.1%
14.1%
5.6%
4.2%
2.8%
100.0%
Table 1 9: Assessment of socio-cultural factors: Length of time you know your co-conversants
1.2.2.2. Comments
The respondents of English and Vietnamese give almost the same weight to factor Length of time (you know your co-conversants), and this might be a manifestation of the same psychological feature in human beings. People seem to be more relaxed when talking with someone they know for long, and they often have a feeling of inhibition conducting talk with strangers, let alone having to state their disagreements.
The empirical results also exhibit remarkable differences pertaining to factors Age, Status, Manner and Setting. The Vietnamese respondents attach great importance to Age (with 62% of the informants rating it #1) and Status (with 25%), while their English counterparts highly value Manner and Setting (with 36.5% and 23.8%, respectively). The Vietnamese significant preference for the socio-cultural determinants Age and Status can be a reflection of the strictly hierarchical order of the Vietnamese socio-cultural life, where old-aged people are socially given respect to, and social subordinates are subjected to superior personae. On the contrary, factors Manner and Setting are estimated of primary concern by the English informants. This result has testified the assumption that native Ss of English in North America live in a less hierarchical society, where Age and Status are recognized but slighted in interpersonal communicative interactions.
All in all, the native Ss of English and Vietnamese are empirically proved to differ in terms of the relative weight given to socio-cultural parameters governing their linguistic choice in expressing disagreeing responses. In the following section, the data results concerning the informants’ assessment of social situations are examined to bring out the shared or unshared features between the two languages and cultures under investigation.
1.2.3. Assessment of situations by respondents
1.2.3.1. Data results
Four groups of social situations, each contained four sub-situations, are introduced to the respondents to see if they are differently conceived by the native Ss under study. The informants consider the situations and decide how to construct their disagreements on the continuum ranging from Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Not Sure, Implicitly Disagree, and Silent. The most significant cases are taken for further discussion.
A substantial difference in how to display disagreeing tokens by native Ss of English and Vietnamese is found in table 1-10. While 85% of the English informants choose to insinuate their disagreement by either implicitly disagreeing (15%) or being silent (70%), only 56% of the Vietnamese informants are inclined to do so (32% and 24%, respectively). Only 5 English Ss prefer to directly assert their negative evaluations, whereas 30 Vietnamese Ss overtly claim their disagreements.
Sit. A1. Nice-looking Spouse
Ways of Disagreeing
Total
First Language
Strongly disagree
Disagree
Not sure
Implicitly disagree
Be silent
English - Count
3
2
10
15
70
100
English - %
3.0%
2.0%
10.0%
15.0%
70.0%
100.0%
Vietnamese - Count
11
19
14
32
24
100
Vietnamese - %
11.0%
19.0%
14.0%
32.0%
24.0%
100.0%
Table 1 10: Assessment of Social Situations - Sit. A1. Praise on Nice-looking Spouse
In contrast with the Vietnamese tendency to be direct in objecting to the prior Ss (5% strong disagree and 28% disagree), 33 % of the English respondents in Sit. A2 (table 1.11) avoid sounding too critical in their proffering disagreements (vs. 31% of the Vietnamese respondents) by adhering to ‘Implicitly disagree’ and 35% of them opt for silence (vs. Vietnamese 24%), and only 10% of them provide apparent disagreements. It is clear that the Vietnamese informants in situations A1 and A2 appear to be more direct than their English counterparts in performing the act of disagreeing.
Sit. A2. Self-praise on New Hairstyle
Ways of Disagreeing
Total
First Language
Strongly disagree
Disagree
Not sure
Implicitly disagree
Be silent
English - Count
2
8
22
33
35
100
English - %
2.0%
8.0%
22.0%
33.0%
35.0%
100.0%
Vietnamese - Count
5
28
12
31
24
100
Vietnamese - %
5.0%
28.0%
12.0%
31.0%
24.0%
100.0%
Table 1 11: Assessment of Social Situations - Sit. A2. Self-praise on New Hairstyle
Sit. A3. New Italian Shoes
Ways of Disagreeing
Total
First Language
Strongly disagree
Disagree
Not sure
Implicitly disagree
Be silent
English - Count
19
44
16
10
11
100
English - %
19.0%
44.0%
16.0%
10.0%
11.0%
100.0%
Vietnamese - Count
17
27
5
30
21
100
Vietnamese - %
17.0%
27.0%
5.0%
30.0%
21.0%
100.0%
Table 1 12: Assessment of Social Situations - Sit. A3. Disparagement of New Italian Shoes
The output of situation A3 is given in table 1-12 reveals a reverse trend of expressing disagreements compared to that of the two previous ones. While over 60% of the English informants overtly exhibit their claim of disagreement with 19% strong disagree and 44% disagree, only 17% of the Vietnamese strongly disagree with their interlocutors and 27% disagree. The Vietnamese informants seem to minimize occurrences of explicitly articulated disagreements by frequently abiding by the last two columns: Implicitly Disagree and Be Silent: 30% and 21%, respectively.
Sit. A4. Miss X Is Getting Too Fat
Ways of Disagreeing
Total
First Language
Strongly disagree
Disagree
Not sure
Implicitly disagree
Be silent
English - Count
36
40
8
11
5
100
English - %
36.0%
40.0%
8.0%
11.0%
5.0%
100.0%
Vietnamese - Count
13
42
9
20
16
100
Vietnamese - %
13.0%
42.0%
9.0%
20.0%
16.0%
100.0%
Table 1 13: Assessment of Social Situations - Sit. A4. Miss X Is Getting Too Fat
Despite having similarity in column 3 of table 1-13, the two groups of informants display a great difference in their ways of proffering disagreements. 76 out of 100 English informants make explicit their disagreeing tokens, while only 55 Vietnamese informants choose to do so. However, it is worth noting that 36 of the English informants boldly assert their opposite stance, whereas only 13 Vietnamese Ss strongly exhibit their disagreements. The number of those who soften their disagreeing or cancel doing the act verbally is greater in the Vietnamese group (20 and 16 informants, respectively) than in the English group (11 and 5 informants, respectively).
Sit. B2. Bigger Pensions
Ways of Disagreeing
Total
First Language
Strongly disagree
Disagree
Not sure
Implicitly disagree
Be silent
English - Count
22
46
18
10
4
100
English - %
22.0%
46.0%
18.0%
10.0%
4.0%
100.0%
Vietnamese - Count
20
32
13
13
22
100
Vietnamese - %
20.0%
32.0%
13.0%
13.0%
22.0%
100.0%
Table 1 14: Assessment of Social Situations - Sit. B2. Bigger Pensions
A high distribution of directness in expressing disagreements is found in both two groups in situation B2. Bigger Pensions, fluctuating from 20% to 46%. The number of Ss delivering negative and outright answer in English and Vietnamese is almost the same: 22% and 20 % respectively. The percentage slightly rises in the second column with 46% in English and 32% in Vietnamese. The low level of difference between the two groups of informants in Not Sure and Implicitly Disagree is statistically negligible. However, the striking difference is in Be Silent: the number of Vietnamese Ss who refuse to perform the act of disagreeing is almost 6 times greater than that of English Ss. Silence on the part of second Ss may provide a hint of implicit disagreement (Yule 1996; Mey 1993, 2001).
Sit. C1. Mr. Y's Promotion
Ways of Disagreeing
Total
First Language
Strongly disagree
Disagree
Not sure
Implicitly disagree
Be silent
English - Count
15
32
28
9
16
100
English - %
15.0%
32.0%
28.0%
9.0%
16.0%
100.0%
Vietnamese - Count
14
32
12
24
18
100
Vietnamese - %
14.0%
32.0%
12.0%
24.0%
18.0%
100.0%
Table 1 15: Assessment of Social Situations - Sit. C1. Mr. Y's Promotion
Table 1-15 exhibits similarities between the informants in columns 1, 2 and 5. The distinction in percentage is clearly seen in columns 4, where 9% of the English informants choose to indirectly provide their disagreements in contrast with 24% of their Vietnamese counterparts. Possibly, this is the consequence of the high percentage of the English informants who are not sure of how to deliver the disaffiliative force of their disagreeing responses. The situation, involving the promotion of the S’s inferior to a higher position than his/hers, is considered quite sensitive and subtle. By
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