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CROSS CULTURE COMMUNICATION END OF TERM ASSIGNMENT. COMPARE AND CONTRAST THE SPEECH ACT OF COMPLAINT PATTERNS IN ENGLISH AND IN VIETNAMESE LANGUAGE. For English, what the speaker is doing is creating social realities within certain social context
HUE UNIVERSITY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES ENGLISH DEPARTMENT CROSS- CULTURE COMMUNICATION END OF TERM ASSIGNMENT COMPARE AND CONTRAST THE SPEECH ACT OF COMPLAINT PATTERNS IN ENGLISH AND IN VIETNAMESE LANGUAGE Instructor : HOÀNG TỊNH BẢO Student’s name: NGUYỄN THỊ HIỆP Class : SƯ PHẠM TIẾNG ANH LT-K11 April, 2018 TOPIC: Compare and contrast the speech act of complaint patterns in English and in Vietnamese language As we know, each country has a different culture Culture is the social behavior and norms found in human societies Culture includes all aspects of human life that are learned and shared by members of a society Specially, culture is everything that people have, think and as a member of a society respectively Cross cultural communication between countries help us understand each other better Cross-cultural communication is a field of study that looks at how people from differing cultural backgrounds communicate, in similar and different ways among themselves, and how they endeavor to communicate across cultures Intercultural communication is a related field of study With an effort to improve the communicative competence of Vietnamese, many cross-cultural studies has been carried out on the usage of common used speech acts such as inviting, thanking or requesting Among them, complaining is considered as a socially complex and culturally specific act for the fact that it is one of the face threatening acts A complaint is verbal, fully intentional and indicates something bad happened to the speaker In workplace, the Vietnamese officers working in a multicultural environment should be attended to politeness strategies to have more effective communication Specifically, it studies the advisability of making complaints and the choice of complaint strategies of English and Vietnamese workers Subjects of the study were English and Vietnamese who are working in the office in Vietnam and England There are many studies regarding the speech act of request, giving and receiving compliments, promising or addressing terms and so on have been carried out in Vietnam and in other interlanguage of English learners of different language backgrounds, but little attention is paid to the speech act of complaining which is used to express common feelings like pain, discontent or dissatisfaction about something In other words, complaining is an area that not much research has been dedicated This is surprising because everyone complains sometimes and some people seem to complain all the time We frequently hear others or ourselves complain about the weather, a test they have just taken, about their jobs, their economic status, traffic, other’s behaviors, etc So often are these remarks and expressions of dissatisfaction that we not notice how much these expressions are used and how facethreatening those speech acts are And although complaints are a common feature of our everyday lives, it is surprising the little attention that has been paid to this topic Secondly, the strategies the Vietnamese choose to carry out those speech acts are not the same as those the English or people from different societies since the ways in which a given function is realized may differ from one language to another, even though communicative functions appear to exist across languages In other words, they may speak in different ways – not only because they use different linguistic codes, involving different lexicons and different grammars, but also because their ways of using the codes are different (Wierzbicka, 1991: 67) and therefore, a systematic and scientific observation on complaining strategies is virtually necessary Of all the issues in the general theory of language usage, the speech act theory has probably aroused the widest interest It has undergone serious investigation by different theorists such as Austin (1962), Grice (1957, 1975), Hymes (1964), Searl (1969), Levinson (1983), Brown and Yule (1983), Yule (1996) Blum-Kulka and Kasper (1982:2) emphasize that “the study of speech acts is to remain a central concern of pragmatics, especially cross-cultural pragmatics” According to Austin’s theory, the speech act theory is originally developed by the Oxford philosopher of language J.L Austin In his famous work, "How to things with words," Austin outlines his theory of speech acts and the concept of performative language, in which to say something is to something To make the statement “I promise that p” (in which p is the propositional content of the utterance) is to perform the act of promising as opposed to making a statement that may be judged true or false Performatives cannot be true or false, only felicitous or infelicitous Austin creates a clear distinction between performatives and constantives, statements that attempt to describe reality and can be judged true or false, but he eventually comes to the conclusion that most utterances, at their base, are performative in nature That is, the speaker is nearly always doing something by saying something For English, what the speaker is doing is creating social realities within certain social contexts For example, using an explicit performative, to say “I now pronounce you man and wife” in the context of a wedding, in which one is marrying two people, is to create a social reality, in this case a married couple Complaint is one kind of speech act used commonly in interaction It is a face - threatening act and can be expressed in different forms To gain the social goal of polite interaction, the choice of particular form should be considered together with various factors like social variables and politeness realization There have been several attempts on establishing a categorization of complaint strategies by different linguistics One of the popular classifications of complaint strategies was provided by Olshtain and Weinbach (1987) when they studied the speech act of complaint as produced by native and non - native speakers of Hebrew These researchers developed five categories of speech acts that were based on severity of the complaint for a specific scenario, in which one colleague had waited for another colleague, who arrived late to a scheduled appointment The five categories were: (1) below the level of reproach, “No harm done, let’s meet some other time;” (2) disapproval, “It’s a shame that we have to work faster now;” (3) complaint, “You are always late and now we have less time to the job;” (4) accusation and warning, “Next time don’t expect me to sit here waiting for you;” and, (5) threat, “If we don’t finish the job today I’ll have to discuss it with the boss” Tanck (2002:7) classified the complaint into four components, especially in native speakers’ production of complaints These components are: (1) excusing self for imposition: “Excuse me for interrupting,” (2) establishing context or support: “I placed an order last week,” (3) a request: “Can you please look for it?” and (4) conveyance of a sense of urgency: “I need it right away.” Another categorization was made by Trosborg (1995), based on her own directness level of complaint In this classification, four main categories of complaint strategies, comprising eight sub-strategies are set up: no explicit reproach, expression of disapproval, accusation and blame This one is also the model for this paper’s theoretical framework to make a comparison on complaints made by Vietnamese and English in the workplace Thuan (1998) carried out the study to investigate complaining and responding strategies in terms of what has been done and what has not been done in English and Vietnamese He studied the form of complaining and responding, identified the similarities and differences of the speech acts concerned between two languages One of the interesting differences lied in politeness and face strategies He pointed out that more often than not the English people chose positive politeness strategies: they went directly to the problem and in case of refusal; both parties still retained face after conversation Vietnamese, on the other hand, often carried out negative politeness strategies to make the addressee feel good and highly appreciated even in the case of not accepting the complaining Moreover, this contrastive study also aimed at pointing out the difficulties and pragmatic problems which Vietnamese learners may face when learning these speech acts in English, helping them avoid getting into troubles with culture specific problems To make more clearly understand about this topic which is “compare and contrast the speech act of complaint patterns in English and in Vietnamese language”, I would like to focus on some aspects in work place First of all, choice of strategy in equal power settings, for example: In the settings where speaker and hearer are equal in power, English and Vietnamese subjects differed in the trend of indirectness regarding the choice of strategy English speakers tended to show more directness in their complaints than Vietnamese ones The common utterances to accuse hearer directly in English were: “You’ve made a lot of noises, recently”, “Why can’t you keep silent when you return home?” or “You have chosen to break the rule” Meanwhile, Vietnamese speakers tended to express their annoyance by saying such things as: “Mày biết tao khó ngủ mà?”(You-know-I-findhard- sleep-didn’t-you?) or “Chúng ta quy định không khuya làm ồn sau 11h mà”(No-noise-after-11h) or even more direct “Ầm ĩ quá, ngủ được”(So- noisy-I-can’t-sleep) It can be inferred that there is a statistically significant difference between the choices of strategies direct accusation and annoyance of English and Vietnamese speakers Moreover, appears that English and Vietnamese speakers differed in the trend of indirectness In situation, one people said such things as “The smoke from your cigarette is bothering me greatly”, “You are contaminating the atmosphere”, or “You are breaking the rule” or something even more direct “How on earth did you manage to be thoughtless” or “You are not supposed to smoke in train” Meanwhile, Vietnamese tended to be milder in saying such things: “Khói thuốc anh làm tơi khó chịu” (Your-smokebothering-me), “Anh biết biển ghi không hút thuốc lá” (Sign-indicateyou-not-smoke-here) or “Anh nhìn xem phòng tồn khói thuốc” (Room-fullsmoke) Secondly, the choice of complaint strategies in higher power settings In general, the English and the Vietnamese subjects have some similarities in their choice of strategies for their complaints when the complainer has higher power than the complainee The speaker complained to his or her assistant, the choice of complaint strategies by both groups differ as most of the English choose to employ direct accusation as illustrated in “You are late What’s your reason?” whereas the majority of Vietnamese tend to use Modified blame like “ Lần sau đừng muộn đấy” (Don’t be late next time ) None of both groups choose to keep silence or choose explicit condemnation towards person There is also none of the English subjects choose to give hint, but six out of thirty Vietnamese speakers employ this strategy Another point should be taken into aspect here is the use of directive acts like threat by some English and Vietnamese with expression like: “There is no excuse for being late and if you keep it up, you will be replaced” or “Anh lần sau nên đến khơng có hình thức phạt dành riêng cho người muộn” (You should be on time next time or else there will be penalty for you”) In addition, there are also a number of English subjects tend to use modified blame and explicit condemnation towards action with some down graders and disarming strategies and as illustrated in “Could you lower your voice a little bit?” or “Why you are making noise? Look, I can’t focus on my work.” Meanwhile the Vietnamese also use these strategies but without those “softening” devices, e.g “Trật tự để người khác làm việc, nói chuyện à?” (Keep silence to let others work, this is not time for chatting) In a nutshell, many Vietnamese show their agreement with English speakers in their choice of complaint strategies in high power situation However, the utilities of internal and external modifications by these two groups are quite different While down graders and disarming strategies appear in many complaints made by English, they are not preferred by Vietnamese With respect to the lower power settings, most of the English subjects think that they should complain to their superior while such decision is not preferred by the majority of Vietnamese subjects For the choice of complaint strategies, while the English often choose such indirect strategies like hint or annoyance, the Vietnamese tend to say nothing to complain, which has been reflected to some extend in their choice of advisability of making complaints In equal power situations, most of the Vietnamese speakers seem to be unsure about the advisability of making complaints while the majority of English think they need to complain in such situations The strategies the English tend to choose for such settings are once again the first two strategies hint and annoyance Meanwhile the Vietnamese either choose to keep silence or some more direct strategies like direct accusation and modified blame In the last category of situations, where the complainer is of higher power than the complainee, it has showed that both Vietnamese and English subjects think it is advisable to make complaints to their inferiors In addition, they also share agreement in employing some strategies like direct accusation and modified blame The findings also reveal some differences between two groups of subjects in their use of internal and external modifications English subjects tend to add such down graders as a bit, a little, please, etc As well as some preparatory and disarming strategies to their complaints, whereas Vietnamese subjects often include upgraders like too, much, etc while they complain These similarities and differences above suggest some interesting implications for Vietnamese officers to have better communication in terms of complaining in the workplace, especially in a multicultural one In conclusion, the advisability of making complaints and the choice of complaint strategies made by English and Vietnamese have been presented After compare and contrast two languages, we find out that English and Vietnamese have quite different ideas about the advisability of making complaints in the workplace Also, both groups employ a great variety of strategies in the complaints but the frequencies of each strategy used by each group are different ... making complaints and the choice of complaint strategies of English and Vietnamese workers Subjects of the study were English and Vietnamese who are working in the office in Vietnam and England... done in English and Vietnamese He studied the form of complaining and responding, identified the similarities and differences of the speech acts concerned between two languages One of the interesting... couple Complaint is one kind of speech act used commonly in interaction It is a face - threatening act and can be expressed in different forms To gain the social goal of polite interaction, the