Non-Restrictive Elements viewed from Semantic and Pragmatic Perspectives

1 INTRODUCTION 1. Rationale To communicate, beside language, people can use different ways such as gestures, symbols, music or paintings, etc. However, language is the most effective medium of communication, which is used by people of all ages in every field of the human activities. It is the language that helps to establish social relationship, completely and clearly express all of the events as well as their thoughts and aspirations. Through language, valuable knowledge, ideas and experiences can be passed from generation to generation. According to Richards and Platts, language is often described as having three main functions: descriptive, expressive, and social. The descriptive function seems to be the most important one, as it is often employed to convey all sorts of information which can be stated or denied, and, even in some cases tested. However, beside the factual information, in most utterances people tend to emphasize the illocutionary force with additional information. To express this, non-restrictive elements are often exploited. These are what can be heard in everyday conversations or read in different discourses: Hamlet, Shakespeare’s masterpiece, is her favourite play. Even now, in my constituency of Sedgefield, which at one time had 30 pits or more, all now gone, virtually every community remembers that its roots lie in Irish migration to the mines of Britain. Cô X bây gi
làm n chc gì ri? À, cô y vn làm giáo viên th
ng, d y t t lm. Cata, vi chc á quân Á v n hi va qua, c gii chuyên môn ánh giá là mt  i th không th coi th
ng. Besides, language teachers or learners should not ignore the important role of the two other functions, expressive and social. As we observe that through some certain non-restrictive elements, the speaker may deepen or strengthen his/her feelings, attitude and relationship towards the hearer. In other words, they may enhance the focus of the message. Consider the following examples: Come to meet my beautiful wife! 2 I don’t want him to put ugly nose into my house again. M
i bác sang nhà em dùng ba cm nh t! Xin ông cho bit quý danh. This kind of extra information both in English and Vietnamese utterances truly plays an important role in expressing personality and intended feelings of the speaker. Being aware and able to manipulate non-restrictive elements in English is a must for the English learners in Vietnam, especially for the beginners or secondary school learners. Therefore, the intention of this study is to make a comparison of English non-restrictive elements and their Vietnamese counterparts, which are viewed from semantic and pragmatic perspectives. 2. Aims of the study The study Non-restrictive Elements viewed from Semantic and Pragmatic Perspectives attempts to: + Describe the Non-restrictive elements in English and Vietnamese from semantic perspective. + Compare the Non-restrictive elements in English and their counterparts in Vietnamese from pragmatic perspective. + Attempt to suggest some implications in English language teaching and learning in Vietnam. 3. Scope of the study Non-restrictive (or non-defining) covers a large number of forms and uses, but the study focuses only on: + Basic distinctions between Restrictive and Non-restrictive (including the meaning, punctuation and intonation). + Forms and functions of eight non-restrictive elements: adjectives, adverbials, appositives, full infinitives, present participles, past participles, prepositional phrases, and relative clauses (based on the ideas of Quirk (1985), Parrott (2000)). 3 + Comparison and contrast between English non-restrictive elements and their counterparts in Vietnamese (viewed from semantic and pragmatic perspectives). 4. Methods of the study + So as to successfully complete the tasks mentioned above, attention will be paid to English non-restrictive elements and their counterparts in Vietnamese. Therefore, the study was carried out through a systematic and contrastive analysis, which means describing, analyzing and comparing are principal methods of the study. The comparison also takes semantic translation as the main method, as the study deals with the comparison between the two languages, English and Vietnamese. + In order to investigate the similarities and differences in frequency and preference between English and Vietnamese non-restrictive elements, we collect the data, which are chosen at random, from 25 texts in English and 25 in Vietnamese (including 5 genres: scientific, political, press, literary and conversational). 5. Organization The study consists of three main parts: Part one deals with the rationale, the aims and the scope of the study. It also identifies the methods to be applied and the structure of the study. Part two is the main content of the study divided into three chapters. Chapter 1 mentions the theoretical background of the study, in which attention is paid to general knowledge of semantics, pragmatics and the distinction between Non-restrictive and Restrictive. Chapter 2 investigates English non-restrictive elements and their counterparts in Vietnamese in the light of semantics. Chapter 3 is the contrastive analysis of non-restrictive in English and Vietnamese, in which the similarities and differences of these elements between the two languages are studied in the light of pragmatics. Part three offers the overview of the study, the implication and suggestion for further research. The study is completed with a bibliography of reference documents and an appendix. 4 Chapter 1: THEORETICAL PRELIMINARIES 1.1. Semantics and Pragmatics Semantics and pragmatics are the two main areas of linguistic study that look at the knowledge we use both to extract meaning when we hear or read, and to convey meaning when we speak or write. Within linguistics itself, the dividing line between these two disciplines is still under considerable debate. 1.1.1. Semantics It all started in 1912 when Weekley used this suitable term semantics, which has recently been used in studies of meaning. As we know that the field of semantics has developed for past few decades, but it has attracted the attention of many world-known linguists such as Austin, Yule, Halliday, Carnap, Chafe, Chomsky, Lyons, etc. So far, a variety of definitions have been given to semantics by different linguists. According to Yule, semantics is the study of the relationships between linguistic forms and entities; that is, how words literally connect to things. Semantic analysis also attempts to establish the relationships between verbal descriptions and states of affairs in the world as accurate or not, regardless of who produces that description. Richards and Platt, in their “Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied linguistics”, give a very simple definition of semantics as “the study of meaning”. Linguists have investigated the way in which meaning in a language is structured, and have distinguished between types of meaning. In recent years, they have generally agreed that meaning plays an important part in grammatical analysis, but there has been disagreement on how it should be incorporated in a grammar. Lyons (1995) claims that semantics is by definition the study of meaning; and linguistic semantics is the study of meaning in so far as it is systematically encoded in the vocabulary and grammar or in the structure of natural languages. This broader definition will deal with first what is meant by “meaning” and, second, what exactly meant by ‘encoded’ in this context. For the question ‘what is meaning?’, Lyons mentions the following: 5 + the referential (or denotation) theory (the meaning of an expression is what it refers to (or denotes), or stands for). + the ideational, or mentalistic theory (the meaning of an expression is the idea, or concept, associated with it in the mind of anyone who knows and understands the expression). + the behaviourist theory (the meaning of an expression is either the stimulus that evokes it or the response that it evokes, or a combination of both, on particular occasions of utterance). + the meaning-in-use theory (the meaning of an expression is determined by, if not identical with, its use in the language). + the verificationist theory (the meaning of an expression, if it has one, is determined by the verifiability of the sentences, or propositions, containing it). + the truth-conditional theory (the meaning of an expression is its contribution to the truth-conditions of the sentences containing it). Though he does not attempt to provide a comprehensive classification of the different kinds of meaning that a linguistic theory of semantics should cover, Lyons draws one very broad distinction descriptive (or propositional) and non-descriptive (or non-propositional) meaning. With regard to descriptive meaning, it is a universally acknowledged fact that languages can be used to make descriptive statements which are true or false according to whether the propositions that they express are true or false. Non-descriptive meaning refers to expressive components, meant by virtue of which speakers express, rather than their beliefs, attitudes and feelings. To sum up, as a sub-branch of linguistics, semantics studies the meanings of linguistic signs. However, it focuses on how linguistic signs are conventionally meant or related with the external world. In other words, it tries to spell out those natural, static or stable meanings of words and sentences. The meanings of words in dictionaries, for instance, are semantic meanings or the outcomes of semantic explorations of words. 1.1.2. Pragmatics Pragmatics is a relatively late comer in linguistics. It enters the linguistic scene at the end 6 of the 1970s, and has flourished since then. It is now considered as an umbrella that embraces all levels of linguistics (phonetics, phonology, syntax and semantics). As a matter of fact, There are more than a dozen of definitions about pragmatics, because this field of linguistics has been so charming and appealing to so many people that each of them seems to claim an interest in it and define it from his/her own perspective. According to Richards and Platts, pragmatics is the study of the use of language in communication, particularly the relationships between sentences and the contexts and situations in which they are used. Pragmatics includes the study of (i) how the interpretation and use of utterances depend on knowledge of the real world (ii) how speakers use and understand speech acts, and (iii) how the structure of sentences is influenced by the relationship between the speaker and the hearer. In Katz’s opinion, pragmatic theories do nothing to explicate the structure of linguistic constructions or grammatical properties and relations, etc. They explicate the reasoning of speakers and hearers in working out the correlation in a context of a sentence token with a proposition. In this respect, a pragmatic theory is part of performance. Levinson, S. C. suggests a definition that is specifically aimed at capturing the concern of pragmatics with features of language structure: Pragmatics is the study of those relations between language and context that are grammaticalized, or encoded in the structure of a language. In Crystal’s opinion, pragmatics studies the factors that govern our choice of language in social interaction and the effects of our choice on others. This definition emphasizes the absolute roles that context and language users (speaker and hearer) play. The former is instrumental in framing language users’ choices of linguistic means for optimal communication outcomes, while the later are solely responsible for the awareness of context or speech environment in which they are to perform certain functions via language or fulfill specific objectives by utilizing available linguistic means within their capability. Yule, G states that pragmatics is the study of how more gets communicated than is said. For him, pragmatics belongs to that part of linguistics that tries to probe into those meanings over-loaded or beyond what is literally conveyed in concrete speech events and situations. In other words, it is often the case that language users are inclined to mean 7 something more by his speech, and as to what is exactly meant by this oversaid or communicated message, it is the job of pragmatics to figure out. Apparently, Yule is directing us to the conversational analysis of meanings, a tradition of meaning study initiated in the 1950s. In this study, I would like to quote the definition given out by Quang (2004): Pragmatics is meaning in interaction. The advantage of this definition is that it takes account of the different contributions of both speaker and hearer and contribution of utterance and context to the making of meaning. Some of the aspects of language studied in pragmatics include: + deixis: meaning 'pointing to' something. In verbal communication, however, deixis in its narrow sense refers to the contextual meaning of pronouns, and in its broad sense to what the speaker means by a particular utterance in a given speech context. + presupposition: referring to the logical meaning of a sentence or meanings logically associated with or entailed by a sentence. + performative: implying that by each utterance a speaker not only says something but also does certain things: giving information, stating a fact or hinting an attitude. The study of performatives led to the hypothesis of Speech act theory that holds that a speech event embodies three acts: a locutionary act, an illocutionary act and a perlocutionary act. + implicature: referring to an indirect or implicit meaning of an utterance derived from context that is not present from its conventional use. 1.1.3. Relationship between Semantic and Pragmatic perspectives to the study In general, semantics concentrates on meaning that comes from purely linguistic knowledge, while pragmatics concentrates on those aspects of meaning that cannot be predicted by linguistic knowledge alone and taken into account knowledge about the physical and social world. The focus of pragmatics is on the meaning of speaker’s utterances rather on the meaning of words or sentences. Vo Dai Quang, in his Lectures on Semantics, shows a diagram in which types of meaning are pragmatically considered: 8 Explicit Meaning Presupposition Common Implicit Conventional Scalar Implicature Particularized Conversational Generalized Therefore, when studying non-restrictive elements, it is essential to study these elements not only syntactically but also in the light of semantics and pragmatics. In other words, it should be necessary to study the meaning of these elements as well as the meaning of speaker or writer’s utterances in which they are used. 1.2. Non-restrictive vs. Restrictive 1.2.1. Basic distinctions between Restrictive and Non-restrictive Restrictive and non-restrictive (also called defining and non-defining) are grammatical terms. According to Chalker and Weiner, defining (or restrictive) is of modification or a modifier that identifies or restricts the meaning of the modified head. Martin Parrott, in his Grammar for English Language Teachers, states that defining is what to single out a particular thing or person from two or more similar things or people, showing which one or ones we are talking about. It’s the last house on the right. This is the hotel we stay in. The phrase and clause underlined are defining, and they are sometimes also known as identifying or restrictive. Whereas, non-restrictive is what does not define. More specifically, it is what does not define even though the same words in the same place. Restrictive: Our house is the one with the new paint. (The new paint distinguishes our house from all the other houses) Non-restrictive: Our house is the last one in the street, with the new paint. (Incidentally, it also has new paint) 9 In other words, non-restrictive words, phrases or clauses are not essential to the basic meaning of a sentence. They provide additional information; readers don’t require the information in order to understand what the writer is trying to say. We separate that information by commas. Joanne, who often plays golf, is going to the opera. Restrictive phrases and clauses are those which are necessary in a sentence because they restrict or limit the meaning of the sentence. Restrictive phrases and clauses are not enclosed with commas. Look at the following example: People who love metal will want to go to the Pantera concert. Read the sentence as though “who love metal” is a non-restrictive (non-essential) clause. If we enclose it with commas, we can remove those words without changing the meaning of the sentence. If we remove the words, the sentence reads: People will want to go to the Pantera concert. Removing the words changes the meaning of the sentence. It implies that all people will want to go. “Who love metal” is definitely a restrictive phrase. It limits the people who will want to go to the Pantera concert to those people who love metal. Look at these examples: People who drive with their headlights off at night must be crazy. George, who often drives with his headlights off at night, must be crazy. In the first sentence, “who drive with their headlights off at night” is restrictive; it is necessary for the basic meaning of the sentence. Without that restrictive clause, we would be saying: People (meaning all people) must be crazy. In the second sentence, we are saying that George is crazy. “Who often drives with his headlights off at night” is just one example – some extra information – to tell us why George must be crazy. If we remove the clause from the sentence, George is still crazy. In brief, to decide whether an element is restrictive or non-restrictive, we can mentally delete the element and then whether the deletion changes the meaning of the rest of the 10 sentence or makes it unclear. If it does, the element is restrictive. If it does not, the element is non-restrictive. 1.2.2. Punctuation and Intonation Grammars and course books for learners of English usually suggest that non-restrictive postmodification is separated from the main clause by commas. This is sensible advice to give to learners, enables them to choose between restrictive or non-restrictive clauses and phrases in writing. In fact, we often leave out the commas where the context makes it clear that the modification does not have a restrictive function. This can be found in some of the most popular genres such as newspaper report, information on packing, history, popular and literary fiction, and formal correspondence, etc. The following are some of the examples for this. (The mark [ ] shows where a comma could be used but was not in the original) The London Docks, however, faced increasing pressure from Tilbury [ ] which could handle larger boats. Old meadow shoved the man away [ ] who moved a foot or two then they came back. I enclose a note of my charges [ ] which I would mention I have limited to the absolute minimum and I look forward to receiving in settlement in due course. In speaking, we usually make a distinction in whether something is restrictive or non- restrictive by the way we use stress or intonation. First, restrictive modification tends to be given more prosodic emphasis than the head: This i