VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES         (NGHIÊN CỨU CÁC PHƯƠNG TIỆN DIỂN ĐẠT TÌNH THÁI CHỨC PHẬN TRONG CÂU TƯỜNG THUẬT VÀ CÂU HỎI TIẾNG ANH VÀ TIẾNG VIỆT)  !"# !$"%&" '()*))*+,*-+ A dissertation submitted in total fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics at Vietnam National University, Hanoi .)-+/ VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES         (NGHIÊN CỨU CÁC PHƯƠNG TIỆN DIỂN ĐẠT TÌNH THÁI CHỨC PHẬN TRONG CÂU TƯỜNG THUẬT VÀ CÂU HỎI TIẾNG ANH VÀ TIẾNG VIỆT)  !"# !$"%&" '()*))*+,*-+ A dissertation submitted in total fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics at Vietnam National University, Hanoi $012"'1"+*1'3*1*14 5$6 # )*1*!$78 9&'6%  .)-+/  +* :&;!1'$ %'%#"%$7 Modality as an important component of linguistics has been extensively studied from syntactic, grammatical, semantic and pragmatic perspectives. The study of modality expressions within linguistics is one of the complicated problems. As Palmer (2003: 4) says “modality is realized by linguistic terms from a wide range of grammatical classes, covering not only modal auxiliaries and lexical verbs, but also nouns, adjectives, adverbs, idioms, particles, mood, and prosody in speech.” There are three types of modality that can be distinguished in the modal system of English. i.e., epistemic, deontic and dynamic that can be interpreted in terms of possibility and necessity (Palmer, 2003: 7). This research will focus on one important type of modality i.e. ' %& <':%7. The term deontic modality “is a cover term for a range of semantic notions such as ability, possibility, hypotheticality, obligation, and imperatives” (van der Auwera & Plungian, 1998: 81). In Vietnamese, deontic modality is rendered as “%= #  %#>  &#9&  0#? @  A6'  !#B:” (Nguyễn Văn Hiệp, 2008: 103) which denotes obligations, duties, necessity and the need for actions which is also chosen as the working definition for this research. A large number of studies have focused on theories of modality in general and deontic modality in particular such as the works by Chung & Temberlake (1985), Palmer (1979, 1986, 1990, 1994, 2003, 2004, 2005), Lyons (1977), van der Auwera & Plungian (1998), (Wymann, 1994), and 1 (Li, 2004). In Vietnam, many scholars have also studied modality in general and types of modality in particular such as Nguyễn Thị Lương (1996), Cao Xuân Hạo (1999), Nguyễn Văn Hiệp (2001, 2008), Ngũ Thiện Hùng (2003), Phạm Thị Ly (2003), Nguyễn Thị Cẩm Thanh (2003), Bùi Trọng Ngoãn (2004), Võ Đại Quang (2009). However, no attempt has been made to conduct a contrastive study on linguistic means of indicating deontic modality in English and Vietnamese. Therefore, this study is carried out to address that research gap in order to provide a more articulate insight into similarities and differences of deontic expressing means in the two languages, and to serve as a framework for implicational purposes, which can be both theoretical and practical. )*<'3%#"%$7 This study is aimed at finding the similarities and differences in deontic expressing means in English and Vietnamese. In order to achieve the proposed aim, the objectives of the study are set as follows: - To analyze and describe linguistic means of expressing deontic modality in English and Vietnamese. - To compare and contrast linguistic means of expressing deontic modality in terms of grammatical and lexical features and frequencies of usage in expressing deontic meanings in English and Vietnamese. To achieve the above objectives, the following research questions are to be addressed: 2 (i) What are the linguistic means of expressing deontic modality in English and in Vietnamese? (ii) What are the similarities and differences in linguistic means used in the three types of deontic modality in terms of the syntactic and semantic features and the frequencies of usage in English and Vietnamese? C*&'0'3%#"%$7 This study is focused on the descriptive account of syntactic and semantic features of linguistic means of indicating three types of deontic modality in English and Vietnamese based on the classification of Palmer (1994). They are commissives, directives and volitives with the seven sub-types of directives (deliberatives, imperatives, jussives, obligatives, permissives, precatives, prohibitives) and the two sub-types of volitives (imprecatives and optatives). Modality is realized either by lexical or semantic means such as modal auxiliaries, adverbs, adjectives, nouns, modal words, particles, etc. In terms of syntactic and semantic features, the author will describe and analyze deontic expressing means in English and Vietnamese i.e. modal auxiliaries, hedge verbs, performative verbs, modal words, adverbs, adjectives, nouns, particles, modal idioms, expletives, and modal conditionals. In English, mood (indicative, imperative, interrogative … moods) is an important means of expressing deontic modality. It also means that, to 3 some extent, sentence types including the declaratives and interrogatives can also be considered means of expressing modality in general and deontic modality in particular. Therefore, the main focus of this thesis is not on comparing and contrasting how linguistic means of expressing deontic modality operate in the two sentence types: declaratives vs interrogatives. Declarative and interrogative sentences are then used to provide samples of linguistic means used within these two sentence types. In this study, the main criteria to recognize declarative and interrogative sentences in English are based on the theory of Palmer (1986: 26- 30). The criteria to recognize declaratives and interrogatives in Vietnamese are based on the work of Cao Xuân Hạo (1991: 128). In this thesis, the author compares and contrasts deontic expressing means taken from 421 declarative and interrogative sentences found in 50 English stories and 422 declarative and interrogative sentences found in 50 Vietnamese stories. /*%#'''!7 /*+*%#'"'3%#"%$7 According to Saville-Troike (1982), one of the best methods of getting to know one’s own “ways of speaking” is by comparing and contrasting with those of others. This process will reveal the shared and unshared features of linguistic patterns and their meanings. Thus, contrastive linguistics with its associated research method – Contrastive analysis (CA) - will be used as the primary research framework for this study. 4 For the comparison of the frequencies of usage in the two languages under study, a quantitative analysis of the corpus is adopted. Corpus based methods prove to be very effective in cross-language comparative study. It allows us to access to a large sample of texts and compare various syntactic as well as semantic features and frequencies of usage. Therefore, corpus based method is also used in this study for comparative and contrastive purposes. /*)*:%:&'&%' 01'&$1" /*)*+*"&10%' '3&'10$" The corpora used in this study are built on the following general principles regarding size, number of languages, sources : (i) #"D'3 %#&'10$": The two corpora used in this research consist of 50 English stories, a total of 2060389 words and 50 Vietnamese stories, a total of 2003486 words. (ii) #  $<E1  '3  : !$:!": The corpus in this research is considered as a bilingual corpus; hence it contains the two languages: English and Vietnamese. (iii) #"'$1&"'3%#&'10$": The stories in this research are taken from e-books of contemporary works on different sources (see appendix A & B). /*)*)*'10$"&'<0:%' 01'&$1 As clarified in details the eleven types of deontic linguistic means in the theoretical framework, the author lists all the devices used in those means, such as can, could, may, might, shall, will, etc. belonged to the first means (modal auxiliaries); think, believe, know, etc. is the second means (hedge 5 verbs), etc. Then, the author uses a tool for doing lexical analysis named TexSTAT-2 program. This program can show the string matching and the concordance to count the frequency of a certain device in the whole 50 stories and also find related collocation of other words together with a certain device in English or Vietnamese. The corpus supplies the number of words in each means, in each category of sorted devices and shows a general overview of the distribution of modal linguistic means quickly and accurately so that the researcher can extract all of the declaratives and interrogatives used in each means as well as all of the means used in the stories. An illustrated example of a means of modal auxiliary is shown in Fig. 1 and Fig. 2 below: !*+*%1 !<:%&# !'3 %# !"#&'10$" 6 !*)*%1 !<:%&# !'3FG %#% :<"&'10$" The results of data processing are stored in the database for sorting and analyzing. From the corpus, the researcher can collect 378 declaratives and 43 interrogatives expressing deontic meanings in 50 English stories and 382 declaratives and 40 interrogatives conveying deontic expressions in 50 Vietnamese stories. /*C*:%:: :7"" /*C*+*"&1E !%#:%: After extracting the data from the corpus, a descriptive method will be used at first to exploit all means and expressions of deontic modality used in English and Vietnamese declarative and interrogative sentences in terms of categories in the theoretical framework. Basing on devices processed in the corpus, the author distinguishes eleven means of deontic modality within 421 declaratives and interrogatives in English and 422 declaratives and interrogatives in Vietnamese and then, categorizes them at three different types of meanings: commissives, directives and volitives. This type of analysis is emphasized throughout the contextual translation in the stories with various types of illocutionary forces. /*C*)*'<0:1 !%#%H'"'$1&"'3:%: In this dissertation, a contrastive analysis is carried out together with a qualitative analysis in the analytical framework and a quantitative analysis from the corpus in an effort to understand how contextual variables of this corpus may influence deontic modal expressions in order to determine the 7 similarities and differences of deontic expressing means used in English and Vietnamese stories. To compare eleven means of deontic modality with regards to the three types of meanings: commissives, directives and volitives, the author takes the English language as the base language and Vietnamese as the comparative language. The examples analyzed are taken from declarative and interrogative sentences in English and Vietnamese stories. The statistical calculations are made and classified by the figures for each pattern. The results in English are then compared to those in Vietnamese basing on the computation of various percentages in the corpus. The similarities or differences will be analysed in details with specific data and then to indicate any conclusions. ,*%1$&%$1'3%#"%$7 Apart from the introduction and conclusion, the dissertation consists of three chapters: #   %1'$&%' presents the theoretical background, aim, objectives, the scope, methods of the study. #:0%1'  provides a brief of previous research, the general concepts of modality and, the specific framework of deontic modality. #:0%1%H' is concerned with a detailed description and comparative analysis on commissives and volitives in English and Vietnamese. #:0%1  %#1 explores the similarities and differences of directives in English and Vietnamese. # &' &$"' provides the summary of the results of the study with research implications, contributions and suggestions for future research. 8 [...]... translators in conveying accurate modal meanings across languages and cultural nuances as a result of cross-cultural linguistic transfer and interferences 4 Limitations of the study 29 This research is an attempt at describing and analyzing the similarities and differences of deontic expressing means in terms of semantic and syntactic features Deontic expressions to be analyzed are taken from conversations in. .. understanding of the similarities and differences in the use of lexical and grammatical means in expressing deontic modality, a universal linguistic component across languages Insights gained from the study also help to inform error analysis in English language teaching and learning To improve the effectiveness of teaching and learning deontic modal means, the following teaching starategies or class room... presented in context, for example, in simple conversations in which the deontic meanings are clear Similarities and differences in the use of modal expressing devices also provide interesting background for researching into relationships and connections between languages and cultures and conceptualizations from a cognitive linguistic perspective Linguistic differences in deontic meanings also help translators... means 14 are taken in declaratives and interrogatives in the two corpus including 100 stories in English and Vietnamese Based on the frequencies of lexical means in English, among 14583 devices of modal expressions, in English, declaratives and interrogatives are normally used with 421 sentences in which commissives account for 79 sentences Declaratives and interrogatives in Vietnamese are found at a high... various illocutionary forces Nguyễn Văn Hiệp (2001/ 2008) explores the semantics and syntax of modality and sentences in Vietnamese He discusses theoretical issues relating to main types of modality such as subjective and objective, deontic and epistemic modality, factuality and non-factuality in general 9 A contrastive investigation of linguistic means expressing epistemic modality in English and Vietnamese. .. doing this the author has treated three specific types of deontic: commissives, voilitives and directives in 421 declarative and interrogative sentences in English and 422 declarative and interrogative sentences in Vietnamese The main findings of the study show that while categories of deontic modality are universal across languages, linguitic means available to speakers of differrent languages may... in Vietnamese such as c n, phải, nên, dám, đành, nỡ in combination with sentence particles Võ Đại Quang (2009) also conducts a study on linguistic means of expressing modality in English and Vietnamese in terms of semantic and syntactic features within various types of modality So far, there has been no research exclusively focusing on the contrastive study of linguistic means of expressing deontic. .. directive meanings in context Thus, there is no correspondence in the use of particles, modal words, expletives, and modal idioms in English and the equivalent expressions in Vietnamese CONCLUSIONS 1 Recapitulation 25 In this study, the researcher has attempted to carry out a contrastive analysis of deontic modality expressions in terms of syntactic and semantic features in English and Vietnamese In. .. and volitives, with particular focus on what syntactic - semantic features of commissive and volitive expressions in English and Vietnamese have in common and how they differ in terms of semantic - syntactic features and the frequencies of occurrences Of the eleven means of expressing deontic modality as set from the theoretical framework in Chapter one, only seven means of expressing commissives in. .. data can, in no way, capture elements of intonation and prosody which are considered important means of expressing deontic meanings In addition, various devices such as modal verbs, inflection, mood forms, and prosody rarely act on their own but are found to be used in combination to produce different modal effects A corpus-based study as such cannot help much to overcome the issue The sentences collected . means of expressing deontic modality in terms of grammatical and lexical features and frequencies of usage in expressing deontic meanings in English and Vietnamese. To achieve the above objectives,. researcher can collect 378 declaratives and 43 interrogatives expressing deontic meanings in 50 English stories and 382 declaratives and 40 interrogatives conveying deontic expressions in 50 Vietnamese. theoretical issues relating to main types of modality such as subjective and objective, deontic and epistemic modality, factuality and non-factuality in general. 9 A contrastive investigation of linguistic