Luận án: Đặc điểm ngôn ngữ học của lời điều chỉnh trong hội thoại tiếng Anh và tiếng Việt

THE UNIVERSITY OF DANANG UNIVERSITY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE STUDIES NGUYỄN THỊ MINH HẠNH LINGUISTIC FEATURES OF VERBAL REPAIRS IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE CONVERSATIONS Major: ENGLISH LINGUISTICS Code: 9.01 DOCTORAL DISSERTATION IN SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES SUPERVISOR: Assoc. NGUYỄN THỊ QUỲNH HOA Da Nang, 2021 1 ABSTRACT The study investigated linguistic features of verbal repairs in English and Vietnamese Conversations. The type of this research is qualitative, quantitative, deductive, descriptive and contrastive research. This study used 372 daily conversations from 23 English television films and 385 daily conversations from 39 Vietnamese television films to analyze the pragmatic, semantic and syntactic features of verbal repairs.

The research used the theory of conversation analysis and repair of Schegloff et al. (1977)In addition, the cooperative principles of Grice (1975), classification of illocutionary act of Searle (1969) were used to find out the pragmatic features. Semantic and syntactic features of verbal repairs were analyzed on the basis of the viewpoints of functional grammar by Halliday (1994) and then they were concretized by Downing (2015). Some aspects such as the frequencies of the use of the repairs, the functions of the repairs, the violation of Grice’s maxims, the experiential meanings of the repairs, the techniques of the repairs were to be compared.

The results revealed that for pragmatic features: English speakers used self and other-repair for the functions of representatives whereas Vietnamese speakers used self and other-repair for the functions of expressives. The findings showed that English speakers violated the maxim of cooperative principle of Grice (1975) because either they did not provide enough information or their information not clear. Vietnamese speakers used self and other-repairs for their own communicative purposes. For semantic features, the study showed that S and S1 in the extracts of English and Vietnamese film conversations repaired the experiential meanings of 5 processes: material, mental, relational, verbal and existential processes in Downing (2015)’s classification.

For syntactic features, the findings revealed that S and S1 in the extracts of English and Vietnamese film conversations used the techniques such as recycling, replacing, inserting, adding to repair after a noun, verb, preposition, adjective and clause. Rationale Conversation – verbal communication between people - is indispensable in our daily life. In the social relationships or in common communication, people need to talk to exchange information, establish and maintain social relationship, discuss together to find out the solutions to professional issues and even other problems in their daily lives. Liddicoat (2007) states that conversation is one of the ways people can socialize, develop and sustain each other’s relationship.

For that reason, delivering information smoothly is really important for achieving its goal. Although mutual understanding is the goal and the expected state of affairs in conversation, interlocutors sometimes have difficulty in interpreting the other speaker’s turn, or they may interpret their turns differently from what they actually meant. To deal with such problematic cases - where some troubles in speaking, hearing, or understanding the talk occur - repair organisation is needed. Repair is a mechanism to achieve clarification, to re-establish mutual intelligibility after some perceived trouble.

The interlocutors do not have smooth conversations because the obstructions appear in the middle of their conversations. According to Schegloff (cited in Cho, 2008), these obstructions can be any factor in the conversation. It can be a grammatically correct form or a pragmatically appropriate expression. These obstructions make the interlocutors revise a part or the whole of their utterance.

Repair is a term that refers to how people deal with the difficulty that appears in the middle of the conversation. Conversations in films are also talks about issues in the daily life between people. The conversational settings are selected and written by the scriptwriters. Although film scripts are not naturally occurring conversations and are therefore not what people actually do in real life conversations, their purposes are the same as the ones in natural conversations in every day life, as Dose (2013) states “Speakers use language for a wide range of communicative purpose: in addition to conveying 3 information, speakers express opinions, feelings, and attitudes”.

Therefore, conversational situations in films also contain obstructions which make conversations not so smooth as do conversations in daily life. Repairing the trouble sources causing communication breakdown was done to help characters in films obtain their communicative purposes, as in the following examples.1) S: It’ll only be temporary, okay? S1: What’s temporary? S: Temporary means just for a little bit of time.1), S was explaining to the guard in the flat about S’s letting her boyfriend to her room. S knew the regulation of the flat, but S supposed that letting her boyfriend in the room was “temporary”. The guard asked for explaining the meaning of the word temporary, so S made a repair by explaining that permitting her boyfriend to come in her room happened for a short period of time.

S’s repair helped S avoid the misunderstanding that could cause the communication breakdown.2) S: Bác ơi cháu báo tin mừng cho Bác. S1: Tin mừng à? Tin mừng gì thế? S: Đối thủ cạnh tranh của chúng cháu đã ngừng cạnh tranh, không chỉ có thế họ còn quay lại giúp chúng cháu, thế có đáng mừng không Bác. S1: Thế mừng quá còn gì nữa.2), S1 did not know which happy news S was mentioning, S1 asked S to give more information for S’s utterance. S repaired the utterance by giving some more detailed information of happy news (Đối thủ cạnh tranh của chúng cháu đã ngừng cạnh tranh, không chỉ có thế họ còn quay lại giúp chúng cháu).

S’s repair helped S1 understand more and their conversation became more interesting. The example shows that repairs can perform many other pragmatic functions than just preventing communication breakdowns. A communication breakdown is originated from trouble source in a conversation. It occurs when a message is not properly carried among participants and as a result, the conversation is blocked.

According to Schegloff et al. (1977), repair sequences consist, minimally, of the repairable and the repair. The repairable is 4 a linguistic unit which contains the trouble source and which is being repaired, and the repair is the turn in which the problematic element is replaced with another. "Trouble source" refers to any elements in a conversation which cause communication breakdown to the participants.

It could be placed anywhere during conversational interaction and any element could be repaired by participants in conversation. In daily communicative conversations and in conversations in films, the interlocutors can face communication breakdowns. Therefore, they have to use strategies to repair the trouble sources or ask for repair so that they can have effective communication. Schegloff et al.

(1977) were the first researchers of linguistics who mentioned the term of repair and presented strategies of repair often used to overcome the trouble sources causing communication breakdowns.3 ) Ken: Sure enough ten minutes later the bell r - the doorbell rang.3) shows that the speaker S (Ken) produced the trouble source bell because S (Ken) knew that the hearer could not know what kind of bell, So S (Ken) found out the trouble source and initiated repair by using the word the doorbell. There have been many authors dealing with the theory of repair but Schegloff is considered the first outstanding figure in this realm. Until now, there has been no complete study of linguistic features of verbal repair, especially, there are no contrastive researches of verbal repairs in films in English and Vietnamese. Therefore, it is hoped that the thesis entitled Linguistic Features of Verbal Repairs in English and Vietnamese Conversations, once finished, can help both Vietnamese learners of English and English learners of Vietnamese know how to use the strategies more effectively in conversations.

Furthermore, the study of verbal repairs in terms of pragmatics, semantics and syntactics might contribute a better understanding of linguistic natures of verbal repairs in English and Vietnamese. Teachers and learners can apply the research results to teaching and learning speaking skills in the two languages. Aims and Objectives 1. Aims of the Study This study aims at investigating the linguistic features of verbal repairs in English and Vietnamese conversations in films via the pragmatic, semantic and syntactic features.

Besides, the similarities and differences in linguistic features of verbal repair in two the languages were to be recognized. Finally, some implications were given to help English and Vietnamese interlocutors, researchers of films learn about how to overcome the breakdowns during their conversations. Objectives of the Study The study was carried out to describe and contrast the pragmatic, semantic and syntactic features of verbal repairs in English and Vietnamese conversations in films; therefore, it is essential to achieve these following goals: - To provide linguistic evidence collected from television films to illustrate the presence of many pragmatic functions, semantic and syntactic features of RECs and RVCs. - To analyze and clarify the linguistic features realized in RECs and RVCs.

- To compare and contrast English and Vietnamese verbal repairs to figure out the similarities and differences between RECs and RVCs in terms of pragmatic, semantic and syntactic features. Research Questions To carry out the study, we focus on dealing with the following questions: 1. What are the pragmatic features of verbal repairs in English and Vietnamese television film conversations? 2. What are semantic features of verbal repairs in conversations from English and Vietnamese television films? 3.

What are syntactic features of verbal repairs in conversations from English and Vietnamese television films? 6 4. What are similarities and differences between English and Vietnamese verbal repairs from television film conversations in terms of pragmatics, semantics and syntactics? 1. Scope of the Study The study focused on investigating and analyzing English and Vietnamese pragmatic, semantic and syntactic features of verbal repairs in films. However, some issues that were concerned with our study were determined and limited as follows.

Firstly, only verbal repairs were examined. Therefore, non verbal repairs were not taken into consideration. In addition, phonologic features of repairs were not analyzed. This dissertation considered repair expressed via utterances.

The basis structure of utterance was a sentence and its parts of a sentence. Secondly, all the utterances containing verbal repairs were collected from English and Vietnamese television films that first published from 1990s to 2017. The study analyzed 372 daily conversations from 23 English films and 385 daily conversations from 39 Vietnamese films on television with three topics such as Love, Family life and Social relationships. Among 23 English television films, there are 19 films whose scriptwriters were born and have worked in the United States.

There are 3 films whose scriptwriters were born and have worked in England. All of the scriptwriters have the age range from 35 to below 70. The films were distributed on channels such as The USA, Disney-ABC, New line, CBS, The UK channel 4, NBC, The CW, The USA Universal Pictures, Warner Bros Pictures, Sony Pictures, A24, The USA 20th Century Fox. The Vietnamese data were selected from 39 television films.

All of the scriptwriters were born, grew up and have worked in Vietnam. These films are distributed on channels such as VTV1, VTV2, VTV3, VTV4, VTV5, VTV9, HTV9, VOV, VTC1, VTC9, VTC10, HTV, HTV7, HTV9, H1, HTVL, VTV Cần Thơ, H1, VCTV2. 7 All of the English and Vietnamese conversations chosen have the same length to make sure that utterances containing self-repair include from 1 to 2 or 3 turns. In some situations, self-repair consisted of 1 turn because the speaker talked alone or talked on the phone.

The utterances containing other-repair include from 2 to 3 or 4 turns. Each of conversation consisted of two or three elements such as pre-repair, repair or repair, post-repair or only repair because sometimes, post-repair was not included when the interlocutor finished his/her turn by leaving out, or nodding, looking at outside…ect… Finally, the research used the theory of conversation analysis and repair of Schegloff et al.