VINH UNIVERSITY FOREIGN LANGUAGES DEPARTMENT ********* PHẠM THỊ THÙY DUNG A STUDY ON PRE-SEQUENCE IN INVITATION IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE (NGHIÊN CỨU LỜI ƯỚM MỜI TRONG TIẾNG ANH VÀ TIẾNG VIỆT) GRADUATION THESIS Field: Linguistic i Vinh - 2010 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS For the completion of this work, I have been fortunate to receive invaluable contributions from many people. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisor, Nguyễn Thị Tường, M.A. for guiding me to do research and giving me many advices and suggestions. I would also like to extend my sincere thanks to my teachers in Foreign Languages Department, my family and my friends for their various kinds of help and encouragement. Vinh, May 2010 Pham Thi Thuy Dung ii ABSTRACT Communicating is an important part of daily life. People must talk to each other to work and satisfy their own communicating need. Invitation is a popular speech act in daily conversation. But how to achieve the goals of invitation politely and avoid putting hearer and speaker in difficult position, using pre-invitation is a solution. This research presents pre-invitation, its functions and some common forms. Many examples were collected from many books, stories and documents to explain more clearly. Finally, some main similarities and differences in pre- invitation between English and Vietnamese are pointed out. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Pag e iv ABBREVIATION CA: contrastive analysis Fig.: figure e.g.: for example FTA: face threatening act H’s: his or her i.e.: that is to say T: turn v PART A: INTRODUCTION 1. Reasons for choosing the topic In communication, participants always try to achieve something in their turns. To achieve the goals of communication, speakers usually try to plan their actions logically and use the communicating strategies through speech acts. In conversation, we often use some certain kinds of speech acts which are likely to threaten another’s face. To reduce the greatest risk, people often use many strategies. One of these strategies is using pre- sequences. However, in textbooks for pupils, pre-sequences are not often presented. Although pre-invitation are commonly initiated as a strategy to avoid rejection, they are rarely included in textbook dialogue. For example, a lesson is used to teach about how to make an invitation, often just present the structures for making an invitation. A : Let’s go to the movie tonight. B : I have to study for an exam. Terasaki (1976) points out that in ordinary conversation invitations are not made in simple pairs such as invitation and denial or invitation and acceptance. More routinely, the inviter issues a pre-invitation in order to find out what likely result of any subsequent invitation will be. A : What are you doing tonight ? (pre-invitation) B : Not much. (positive response to project invitation) A : How about a movie? (invitation) The reason of writer for doing this study is to give knowledge to the readers about the pre-sequences, especially, pre-invitation. From this study, the writer hopes that it can give description of what is meant by pre- invitation especially in helping people for better arranging and understanding conversations. 1 2. Aims of the study This study helps the readers understand about the meaning of pre- invitation and its usage in conversation. The writer wants to describe the forms and functions of pre-invitation in order to help the readers to organize a better conversation, especially, when they want to make an invitation, to achieve the best result as well as to avoid putting participants in difficult position. 3. Scope of the study This study focuses on the utterances which contain pre-sequences, especially, pre-invitation. The writer only presents some main purposes of using pre-invitation and its common forms with the examples in both English and Vietnamese. 4. Methods of the study To conduct the study, we have used the following methods: − Analysis: analyze the collected data to find out the significant characteristics, the similarities and differences of data in English and Vietnamese. − Statistics: collect and arrange the data in order to help the author realize the outstanding characteristics. − Comparative and contrastive methods: compare the data in English and Vietnamese to find out the similarities and differences. 5. Design of the study The thesis comprises three main parts: Part A: Introduction This part presents the reasons for choosing the topic, aims, scope, methods and format of the study. Part B: Development 2 This is the main part of this study and is divided into three chapters: Chapter I: Theoretical background. Chapter II: Pre-invitation in English and Vietnamese Chapter III: Some similarities and differences Part C: Conclusion This part reviews major findings of the thesis and suggests some directions for further study. 3 PART B: DEVERLOPMENT CHAPTER I: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND 1.1. Speech acts To understand about speech acts, we will examine the origin of the concept “speech acts”. The idea of speech acts has its roots in the Philosophy of Language. J. A. Austin was the first person who wanted to capture the fact that there is more in the function of language than semantics. Traditionally, mapping of entities of a proposition onto referents and defining the truth-value of a proposition was the major area of interest in language semantics. With Austin, and his follower J. R. Searle, there is a shift towards the events or acts that occur via language, it is called “speech acts”. These acts effect changes both in the observable world, as well as in the mental states of dialogue participants. Austin's approach introduces pragmatics in studying and modeling language. Consequently, the focus is now on utterances and not propositions. Speech acts play an important role in everyday conversation. They became a topic of sustained investigation, at least in the English-speaking world, in the middle of the Twentieth Century. Since that time “speech act theory” has been influential not only within philosophy, but also in linguistics, psychology, legal theory, artificial intelligence, literary theory and many other scholarly disciplines. Recognition of the importance of speech acts has illuminated the ability of language to do other things than describe reality. In the process, the boundaries among the philosophy of language, the philosophy of action, the philosophy of mind and even ethics have become less sharp. According to Yule (1996: 47), “actions performed via utterances are generally called speech acts”. The philosopher J.L. Austin considered speech acts as “utterances (things people say) are equivalent to actions”. 4 When someone says: “I name this ship” or “I now pronounce you man and wife”, the utterance creates a new social or psychological reality. We perform speech acts when we offer an apology, greeting, request, complaint, invitation, compliment, or refusal. A speech act is an utterance that serves a function in communication. A speech act might contain just one word, as in “Sorry!” to perform an apology, or several words or sentences: “I’m sorry I forgot your birthday”. I just let it slip my mind.” Speech acts include real-life interactions and require not only knowledge of the language but also appropriate use of that language within a given culture. 1.1.1. Structure of speech act According to Austin, there are three types of acts that can be performed by every utterance, given the right circumstances: locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts. • Locutionary act is simply the speech acts that have taken place. It is the basic act of utterance or producing a meaningful-linguistic expression. Making an utterance, the speaker performs a locutionary act that is an act of saying something with a determinate sense and reference. According to Austin, locutionary act expresses the meaning of the statement itself. For example, when saying “step back”, speaker want to tell someone step back. • Illocutionary acts are the real actions which are performed by the utterance, where saying equals doing, as in betting, plighting one’s troth, welcoming and warning. The illocutionary act is not in one-to-one correspondence with the locution from which it is derived. There are different locutions that express the same illocution and vice-versa. For example, there are indirect speech acts that act with a different force than the obviously deducible one. A typical example is the locution of the utterance “Could you pass the salt?” uttered at a dinner table. For a speaker 5