Nghiên cứu giao thoa văn hoá việt mỹ về cách rào đón khi từ chối lời mời



 






 































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1. Rationale

An emphasis on language as a communication system is really necessary in an age of

globalization. Not only does it help uncover principles underlying social interactions, but it

also enables us to gain an access to ways of thinking, belief systems, and world views of

people from various cultural backgrounds and thus enhances empathy and mutual

understanding. Investigating issues concerning cross-cultural communication is especially

momentous in today’s time, when national boundaries are becoming less visible, and more

and more people are engaging in intercultural communication. Understanding social

conventions and attention to such concepts as politeness, and face, which are important to

members in a particular culture, will certainly enable us to better comprehend the different

ways of speaking by people from different cultures, thus helping eliminate ethnic

stereotypes and misunderstandings.

There have been so far plenty of researches on the field of politeness from various

perspectives. Yet, hedging in language is still an area available for more exploration. This

research, therefore, has chosen hedging as a potential subject. The study is done not only to

see the similarities and dissimilarities between the two cultures. Another goal of this

research is to raise the awareness of both teachers and learners of English about the

necessity of hedging in language, and to give teachers several suggestions in teaching this

language phenomenon to their students.

Nevertheless, hedging is a very broad area, and within the limit of the study, it is

impossible to discuss all aspects of hedging in language. As declining an invitation is an

act with high risk of making the hearers lose face, it requires different supplementary steps

to reduce the weightiness of the utterance. This is where hedging can mostly be seen. That

is the reason why hedging in invitation declining is chosen for the project.

The study has also derived from the need for improvement in English teaching process in

Thang Long University, where American-English course books The New Interchange 1, 2,

3 are employed. This study, therefore, has focused on comparing American and



 






 































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Vietnamese cultures, with the hope to pay a humble contribution to the people who the

thesis author has owed so much for their love and support: colleagues and students.

For any of those purposes, the study promises to make itself meaningful, reliable and

applicable to the reality.

2. Scope of the study

• Within the limit of a minor thesis, the research has been carried out in the office

setting. Participants selected are people who are currently working in offices. The

reasons for choosing this setting are: (1) it is suitable with the size of a minor

thesis; (2) it includes various common kinds of relationship, which promises a

meaningful research.

• The study has been done from the perspective of pragmatics where Vietnamese and

American hedging in invitation declining is analyzed as speech acts in particular

contexts. However, semantic and syntactic theories are employed at times to help

better analyze different hedging strategies.

• Hedging is known available in both spoken and written language. Yet, in this

research, the focus will be paid on hedging in spoken language only.

• Though paralinguistic and extra-linguistic factors play a very important part in

communication, the study is restricted to verbal aspect of hedging in invitation

declining.

3. Aims of the study

The main aims of the study are to:

• find out the similarities and differences in the way Vietnamese and American

people hedge when declining an invitation.

• help avoid potential cross-cultural conflicts between Vietnamese and American

speakers, with focus on the proper use of hedging in invitation declining.



 






 































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• provide language teachers and learners with an insight into hedging in invitation

declining employed by Vietnamese and American speakers to avoid hurting their

partners.

• give some suggestions on teaching hedging in the situations of invitation declining.

4. Methodology

This is mainly a quantitative method, specifically, a survey research. Survey research is the

method of gathering data from respondents supposed to be representative of some

population, using an instrument composed of closed structure or open-ended items

(questions). In a survey, researchers sample a population. Since populations can be quite

large, researchers directly question only a sample (i.e. a small proportion) of the

population. That is why survey research is a suitable choice for a cross-cultural study.

The questionnaire is designed carefully basing on some hypothesis with both close-ended

and open-ended questions. The data collected will then be analyzed to find out the

similarities and differences in hedging an invitation decline between the American and the

Vietnamese from different perspectives, age, gender, power, distance, and circumstance.

The evaluations and comments on the results, hence, are made inductively.

In addition, personal observation and some small interviews with the participants play a

very significant part in the study, especially in setting up the hypothesis and making

interpretation for the statistics.

5. Comments on the participants

The survey questionnaires were sent to thirty American and thirty Vietnamese participants.

As the scope of the research is to investigate hedging in invitation declining in office

setting, the participants are those who are currently working in offices, mean age is 28.33.

The numbers of males and females are equal in each group, i.e., 15 males and 15 females

for each party. These are Native American and Vietnamese people, not immigrants, so that

the results of the survey will hopefully be reliable.



 






 































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1. Theoretical Background

1.1. Hedging

There have been so far two main approaches about hedging. The term ‘hedge’/ ‘hedging’

itself was introduced first by G. Lakoff (1972) in his article ‘Hedges: A Study in Meaning

Criteria and the Logic of Fuzzy Concepts’. Lakoff argues that the logic of hedges requires

serious semantic analysis for all predicates. He defines hedges as follows:

For me, some of the most interesting questions are raised by the study of words whose

meaning implicitly involves fuzziness - words whose job it is to make things fuzzier or less

fuzzy. I will refer to such words as 'hedges'

(1972:195)

In his article "Fuzzy-Set - Theoretic Interpretation of Linguistic Hedges", Zadeh (1972)

followed Lakoff in using the new designation ‘hedge’ and analyzed English hedges (such

as simple ones like ‘very’, ‘much’, ‘more or less’, ‘essentially’, and ‘slightly’ and more

complex ones like ‘technically’ and ‘practically’) from the point of view of semantics and

logics. The author assumes that hedges are operators that act on the fuzzy set representing

the meaning of their operands. Hedges vary in their dependency on context.

Later on, hedging has been viewed from the perspective of pragmatics. The concept of

hedge/ hedging is understood in different ways in the literarture. Hedges have been

referred to as compromisers (James,1983), downtoners (Quirk at all, 1972,1985),

understatements (Hubler, 1983), weakeners (Brown and Levinson, 1987), downgraders

(House and Kasper, 1981), softeners (Crystal & Davy, 1975), backgrounding terms (Low,

1996), approximators and shields (Prince at all.1982) and pragmatic devices (Subble &

Homes, 1995), mitigators (Labov and Fanshel 1977, Stubbs, 1983), tentativeness (Homes,

1983,1995) and vagueness (Channell 1994).