NGHIÊN cứu GIAO văn HOÁ CÁCH sử DỤNG các BIỂU THỨC rào đón TRƯỚC KHI báo TIN BUỒN của NGƯỜI ANH và

PART 1: INTRODUCTION

1. Rationale

It goes without saying that language plays an important part not only in recording and

understanding culture but also in communication among people who share or do not share the

same nationality, social or ethnic origin, gender, age, occupation. What is more, “language is

closely related to the way we think and to the way we behave and influence the behavior of

others” (Karmic 1998:79). Hence, culture can be well-understood or grasped with the help of

language and culture exchanges (i.e. cross-cultural or intercultural communication). To

support this point of view, Durant (1997: 332) claims that “to have a culture means to have

communication and to have communication means to have access to a language.”

Although well aware of the ultimate objective of learning a foreign language toward

successful communication, many Vietnamese learners of English hold that a good command

of a foreign language or success in foreign language learning lies only in mastering grammar

rules and accumulating as much vocabulary as possible. As a result, even possibly producing

grammatically well-formed utterances, they may experience unwanted culture shock, and

communication breakdown when running into a real and particular context of situation. This

unexpected incidence occurs due to their insufficient knowledge and awareness of social

norms and values, roles and relationships between individuals, especially those from the

target culture.

It is worth noting that different languages and cultures have different expressions of behavior

and different realizations of speech acts by language users. This has suggested a considerable

number of researchers, both local and foreign to conduct their studies on cross-cultural

pragmatics and/ or communication such as thanking, requesting, complementing, etc.

However, little attention has been paid to the speech act of giving bad news using hedges. In

daily life, no one likes to give their relatives or friends bad news because rarely does he/ she

find it easy to reduce listeners’ feeling of sadness, to lessen the hurt, but sometimes even the

best, brightest and most talented, the informers are left with no choice. Nevertheless, to

convey bad news such as informing the death of the husband in an accident to his wife if the

speaker goes straight to the point with:

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“Your husband died in the accident.”

he/ she may cause such a sudden shock to the wife (the hearer) that she can hardly stand it.

Conversely, the wife in the above case will feel less painful if the news is given this way:

“As you know, among 212 passengers, only two survived. And I regret to inform you

that your husband is not among the lucky two”

Needless to say, hedges such as “as you know”, “I regret to inform” have been resorted to

for the effect of minimizing the shock. Hedging is used in a certain context for specific

communicative intent such as: one strategy of politeness, vagueness, and mitigation.

Therefore, a desire to have a further insight into major similarities and differences in using

hedges before giving bad news by native speakers of VNSs and ENSs has inspired the writer

to develop her research entitled “A Vietnamese-English cross-cultural study of the use of

hedging before giving bad news” . It is hoped that this study can provide the increase of

some socio-cultural knowledge and awareness needed for better cross-cultural

communication and foreign language learning and teaching in Vietnam.

The significance of the study is two-fold: First, giving bad news is one of highly sensitive

acts since this type of acts happens in everyday social interaction, and is obviously face

threatening. Second, how to employ hedges/ hedging appropriately in order not to hurt the

other in the act of giving bad news is essential to achieve successful communication. As there

is a culture gap between Vietnamese and English, inappropriate language use may cause

misinterpretation, miscommunication and communication breakdown among cross-cultural

communicators.

2. Scope of the study

- Although natural communication always comes with paralinguistic (speed, tone, loudness,

pitch...) and extra-linguistic factors (facial expressions, eye contact, postures, orientation,

proximity, movement, clothing, artifacts...), the study is confined to the verbal aspects of the

act of giving bad news with the use of politeness and hedging. In addition, adjacency pairs

are beyond the scope of this paper.

- The study strictly pertains to the perspective of pragmatics though the author realizes that

syntactic theory and semantics apparently do explain the meaning of the spoken word.

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- The Northern Vietnamese dialect and the English spoken by Anglophone community of

England, America, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, are chosen for contrastive analysis.

- The data are collected by conducting survey questionnaires to examine the ways VNSs and

ENSs use hedges in conveying bad news.

3. Aims of the study

- To find out the similarities and differences in the way VNSs and ENSs give bad news using

hedges as a politeness strategy.

4. Research questions

.What are the major similarities and differences in the ways VNSs and ENSs use hedges in

conveying bad news?

5. Methodology

- Quantitative method in the form of survey questionnaires is much resorted to. To collect

data for analysis, both Metapragmatic Questionnaire (MPQ) and Discourse Completion Task

(DCT) are designed. The collected data will be analyzed in comparing and contrasting

techniques to find out the similarities and differences in the ways VNSs and ENSs perform

the act of giving bad news using hedges as a politeness strategy.

- The questionnaires were delivered to English-speaking people mostly living in Vietnam

(working for Apollo, Language Links, British council) and some abroad (mostly in

Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong). Based on English-speaking informants’ status

parameters, the researcher looked for the Vietnamese subjects of similar parameters in order

to have a symmetrical distribution of informants and data for the study.

- Besides, discussion with the supervisor, colleagues, personal observations, recording from

mass media and data collection from newspapers and magazines are also significant to the

study.

6. Design of the study

The study is composed of three parts. They are:

Part 1 (Introduction) presents the rationale, scope, aims, research questions, and

methodology of the study

Part 2 (Development) consists of three chapters:

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Chapter 1 (Theoretical lead-in): discusses the notions of language-culture

relationship, speech act theory, directness-indirectness, face, politeness, and politeness

strategies.

Chapter 2 (Hedging before giving bad news): explores different conceptualizations of

hedging and gives hedging strategies, based on speech act and politeness theories

Chapter 3 (Data analysis and findings) analyses collected data to find out major

cross-cultural similarities and differences in the choice of hedging strategies in given

situations

Part 3 (Conclusion): summarizes the main findings of the study, provides some implications

for TEFL, and offers suggestions for further research.

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PART 2: DEVELOPMENT

CHAPTER 1: THEORETICAL LEAD-IN

When two or more strangers from different cultures communicate or exchange their

information and attitude, they are doing intercultural or cross-cultural communication, trying

to show or let the other(s) learn about their cultural values, norms, and beliefs. Since

intercultural communication and cross-cultural communication are not very much different

and are used interchangeably (Scollon in Hinkel 1999: 183), we therefore would like to adopt

the view of intercultural communication as the exchange of information between individuals

who are unalike culturally (Rogers and Steinfatt, 1999: 103). What is more, such

communication is much influenced by different factors, notably the binary system of

competence-performance (what one knows vs. what one does) and context (which sets the

scene and shapes the meaning that will attributed to what is said).

Cross-cultural or intercultural communication is simply defined as “the exchange of

information between individuals who are unalike culturally” (Roger and Steifatt 1999: 103)

or “whenever a message producer is a member of one culture and a message receiver is a

member of another” (Porter and Samovar, 1985: 39). In cross-cultural communication,

people from different cultures may not understand each other or get in trouble if they bring

their cultural values and norms into mutual exchanges. One of the typical examples of

cultural misunderstanding is that they transfer what is accepted in their culture to new

situation of communicating with others from a different culture. This leads to not only

serious misunderstanding, but also communication breakdowns or fatal consequences. For

instance, people from the Anglophone cultures feel normal when saying “thank you” when

offered a compliment on the work. Nevertheless, it is not the common way for many VNSs to

do the same job. Therefore, when contacting each other, a Vietnamese and his Anglophone

counterpart may have unexpectedly negative comments on each other about the same act.

According to Thomas (1995) and Cutting (2003) one of the reasons for communication

failure is that interlocutors may not have a good acquisition of the common language used in

cross-cultural communication.

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All the above disruption can be said to be culture shock, which can lead to the feelings of

estrangement, confusion, anger, hostility, indecision, frustration, etc. That is why one is

advised to know how far one can go as individuals and learn about the culture one is exposed

to.

1.1. Speech Acts

“The inference the hearer makes and takes himself to be intended to make is based

not just on what the speaker says but also mutual contextual beliefs.”

(Bach, 1979: 5)

Naturally, sociolinguistics confirms that the study of language has to go beyond the sentences

that are the principle focuses of descriptive and linguistics. It must bring in social context. It

must deal with the real contexts that make up human communication and social situations in

which they are used. From this viewpoint, Austin discovers that:

“The business of a statement can only be to describe some state of affairs or to state

some fact, which must do either falsely or truly”

(Cf Nguyen Hoa, 2000: 69)

Some sentences, as he realizes, are not intended to do as such, but rather, are to evince

emotion or to prescribe conduct, or to influence it in special ways. In uttering the sentence,

the S is often performing some non-linguistic act such as: daring, promising, resigning,

requesting, and warning and so on. Hence, the theory of speech act originated in Austin’s

observation (1962) in which it is said that sentences are used to report states of affairs and

utterance of some sentences can be treated as performance of an act. Richards defines speech

acts as an utterance or a functional unit in communication. Similarly, Hymes (1972) defines

them as the acts we perform when we speak. When we say “Hello” or “How are you” that is,

we have just performed an act of greeting, “Please open the window” – an act of requesting

and so forth. It is argued that speech acts are culture-specific and the manner of performing

them is governed by social norms which differ from one speech community to another.

Indeed, Hudson believes that the concepts used in classifying speech acts are typical of

cultural concepts.

Following is how illocutionary acts are classified:

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Austin Searle Bach and Harnish

Exposives Assertives/ Representatives Assertives

Commisives Commisives Commisives

Behabities Expressives Acknowledgement

Exercitives Directives Directives

Verdictives Declaratives Verdictives

Effectives

1.2. Directness and indirectness

1.2.1. Directness and indirectness

“I love you. Please marry me!” (A direct way)

“I’ll buy a house but I would be very lonely when living there without you” (an

indirect way to ask a special person to marry) – Sunflower, 1997

Similarly, in many Vietnamese folk poems, indirect ways of love declaration are found

abundant. For example:

“Bây giờ mận mới hỏi đào

Vườn hồng có lối ai vào hay chưa?”

In daily life, the utterance is not always unambiguous and clear. Not only direct but also

indirect ways are resorted to for verbal expressions. Thus, directness and indirectness are the

two basic forms of expression that are linguistically and culturally universal. It is impossible

to say that one language uses only straightforward or direct ways of expression while the

other employs just roundabout or indirect expressions. The ways of language is employed to

depend largely on what is termed “culture thought patterns” that appear, to various degrees,

different in different cultures.

In the study of 700 essays of international students in the United States, Kaplan (1972: 31)

proposes four discourse structures (otherwise referred to as “cultural thought patterns”) that

contrast with English linearity (figure a). He mainly concentrates on writing and restricts his

study to paragraphs.

Parallel constructions, with the first idea completed in the second part (figure b)

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Circularly, with the topic looked at from different tangents (figure c)

Freedom to digress and to introduce “extraneous” material (figure d)

With different lengths and parenthetical amplifications of subordinate elements (figure e)

They are respectively illustrated by the following diagrams:

(a) (b) (c) (d) (e)

Kaplan’s diagrams

Each diagram represents a certain language or a group of languages. He identifies his

discourse types with genetic language types, respectively:

Figure a with English

Figure b with Semitic

Figure c with Oriental

Figure d with Romance

Figure e with Russian

According to the diagrams, English people often use roundabout and direct patterns whole

the Oriental people in general and the Vietnamese in particular seem to prefer roundabout

and indirect patterns. In the Anglophone main stream culture, the ideal form of

communication includes being direct rather than indirect. Many expressions exemplify this

tendency such as Don’t beat about the bush! Let’s get down to business; Get to the point! etc.

All indicate the importance of dealing directly with issues rather than avoiding them. Let’s

look at the following example:

Host: Would you like some more dessert?

Guest: No, thanks. It’s delicious but I really had enough.

Host: Ok, why don’t we leave the table and sit in the living room?

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