Some types of verbal responses to questions in English and Vietnamese conversation

Part A: Introduction I. Rationale In order to become competent in a foreign language, it is important for language learners not only to acquire new vocabularies and a new set of phonological and syntactic rules but also to learn what Wilson (1986) calls the rules of speaking: the patterns of sociolinguistic behavior of the target language. The rules of speaking involve us in knowing when and how it is suitable to open a conversation, what topics are appropriate to particular speech events, how speech acts are to be given and interpreted. In many cases, this interpretation goes beyond what the language learners might intend to convey and includes assessments such as “polite” and “impolite”. In Vietnam, as the economy grows and international business develops, English proficiency becomes a master tool for young people to get a job. They encounter foreigners in everyday settings where communication is necessary. In the modern society, the need for communication is increasing, especially in the process of globalization, when communication spreads beyond the boundary of a country. During the last decades, linguistic researchers have broadened their focus of their interests from the development of grammatical competence to other areas of target language development, such as discourse and pragmatic competence, common speech routines, for example, requests, apologies, complaints, compliments, refusals, and the like have been most frequently studied in cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics. According to Tsui (1994), there seems to be little empirical research that has been conducted in responses to questions. For a long time, question-response has been considered one of the most basic structures of conversation (Schegloff, 1974) but as Tsui (1994; p. 160) points out: “responses have been given little attention in the speech acts literature. Most of the acts characterized and listed in the various taxonomies are illocutionary acts which are often done by making the function of utterance in discourse, and as many responding acts do not have a corresponding responding performative verb, this kind of analysis inevitably neglects responses” A characterization of utterances (based on observation of real-life discourse) is not likely to neglect the importance of responses. Let’s consider an example illustrated by Tsui (1994) A: What’s the time? B: (a) Eleven (b) Time for coffee (c) I haven’t got a watch, sorry (d) How hold I know (e) Ask Jack (f) You know bloody well what time it is (g) Why do you ask? (h) What did you say? (i) What do you mean? Various possible responses from (a) to (i) shows us the complicated relationship between question and a proper answer. For the same question, the speaker A may be replied in different ways with different intentions by the addressee. Obviously, a response can be a proper answer, an indirect or implicit reply, an evasive answer, a refusal or denial, an outright lie or even a challenge to the speaker’s questioning act. Moreover, the question-answer exchange cannot always be a simple relationship in the actual communicative process. It is the addressee’s response that may establish, deepen and maintain the conversation, develop the intimacy among interlocutors, or interrupt the interactional process and even badly change the participants’ role, for example, from friends to enemies. There is no doubt that the addressee’s responses depend on so many social factors: the speaker’s intent; the hearer’s perception of that intent, the various fits between actual and perceived intents, concurrent gestures, facial expressions, movements and some decisions as to how the two parties are to deal with this complex mix of factors (Wardhaugh,1997). A question which is now posed to us is how we can precisely understand and interpret the speaker’s intents to a question; what types of question responses are; what strategies the speaker uses to respond to questions; and what factors affect speaker’s responding behavior. This is the reason that motivated our choice of the research to present a contrastive analysis of responses to questions in English and Vietnamese conversation. Through the study, we hope to gain some insights which highlight both the similarities and the differences between English and Vietnamese response types, strategies used to respond to question by Native Speakers of English and Vietnamese. The study will also try to present difficulties as well as some practical recommendations for the process of teaching and learning English. II. Aims of the study In order to distinguish the different ways of replies and responses to questions as well as different responding strategies in English and Vietnamese, this research aims at: - describing and analyzing different types of responses to questions in English and Vietnamese conversation - investigating how verbal responses to question express cultural values by examining the relationship between gender, closeness of relationship and status of the interlocutors and the kinds of responses to questions. - putting forward some implications for teaching and learning the functions of responses to questions in everyday conversation. III. Scope of the study In this research, we mainly concentrate on some types of responses to seeking- information questions. The term, “question”, whose illocutionary focus is to elicit information and knowledge, is defined as a functional or speech act label. A question is asked when the questioner does not really know the answer and wants the addressee to supply a piece of information (Tsui, 1994). As we mentioned the name of the study “An investigation on some types of verbal responses to questions in English and Vietnamese conversation” above, non-verbal responses such as silence, gestures, movements and the like will be outside the scope of the study. IV. Research questions 1. What are the various types of verbal responses to questions in English and Vietnamese conversations? 2. What are the differences and similarities in the choice of response patterns to questions between native speakers of English and Vietnamese? V. Organization of the study The study contains three parts. Part A: Introduction establishes the rationale of the study, the aims, and the scope of the study; the research questions and organization of the study. Part B: Contents consists of four chapters. Chapter one points out comprehensible review of theoretical background on speech acts, discourse and conversation analysis, and it is concerned with literature review in which attention is paid to the classification of questions and responses in the theoretical framework by Tsui (1994). Chapter two gives the method to collect and analyze data. The next is chapter three, in which we compare and contrast various types of responses to questions and their pragmatic functions in English and Vietnamese conversations. This chapter also analyses the data collected from linguistic books, articles, novels, tape records, find out some similarities and differences in verbal responses to questions in English and Vietnamese conversation. In the chapter four, we investigate sociolinguistic variables affecting to some typical types and strategies of responses to questions in English and Vietnamese conversation. Part C is the conclusion and some implications for English learning and teaching. PART B: development CHAPTER 1: THEORITICAL BACKGROUND 1. Conversational theory 1.1. Conversation First and foremost, it is necessary to clarify the term “conversation”. Conversation is the primary means for human communication. Many linguists have given different definitions of what a conversation is, as follow: “conversation is the exchange of language through language” (Hornby et. al, 1963), or “conversation is a friendly, natural talk in which people exchange information, ideas, and emotion to one another” (Collins, 1987). Levinson (1983: 284) sees conversation as “familiar predominant kind of talk in which two or more participants freely alternate in speaking, which generally occurs outside specific institutional settings like religious services, law courts, classroom, and the like”. However, the definition of Finegan et.al (1994: 316) about the conversation may help us understand deeply. “a conversation can be viewed as a series of speech acts- greetings, enquiries, congratulations, comment, invitations, requests…to accomplish the work of these speech acts, some organization is essential: we take turns to speak, answer questions, mark the beginning and end of conversation, and make corrections when they are needed ” 1.2. Conversation structure When we are talking to each other we are not just pronouncing words. By saying something we are also doing something. An utterance such as “Could you close the door?” can function as a request for information or a warning depends on the circumstances. When we say something, we also expect the addressee to respond in one way or another, by answering a question, by agreeing or disagreeing to a proposal, by acknowledging receipt of information, and so on, in other words by being an active partner. This is what interaction is about. The term “interaction” could actually apply to a very large number of quite different social encounters. For example, a teacher talking to a student in a classroom is one kind of interaction. Others include a boss talking to his assistant at the workplace, a doctor to patient in a clinic…The basic pattern “I speak – you speak – I speak – you speak” is what linguists call the structure of conversation. The study of question responding acts in conversation is necessary. There are two approaches to examine the conversation structure: conversation analysis and discourse analysis. 1.2.1. Conversation analysis Many conversational analysis researchers have defined ordinary conversation as the kind of casual, social talk that routinely occurs between friends and acquaintances, either face-to-face or on the phone. According to Markee (2000) “conversation analysis concerned with naturally occurring instances of everyday talk follow still another, separate academic tradition of inquiry, which concentrates on the actual discourse mechanisms that serve to allocate turns of speaking, to negotiate changes in focus and to manage and direct the flow of interaction”. Conversation analysis, like ethnomethodology, focuses on the common, everyday competencies that make the social interaction possible. It examines oral dialogue to determine the social and pragmatic principle whereby speakers and hearers negotiate, structure and interpret conversation. The general strategy in conversation analysis is to examine actual verbal interactions in order to bring the structural properties of talk. The descriptive units that the conversation analysis has been using in describing the structure of conversation are Turn, Adjacency pair and Sequence. Turn Conversation is a collaborative process. A speaker does not say everything he or she wants to say in a single utterance. Conversation progresses as a series of turns. Turn is seen as everything one speaker says before another begins to speak. Turn might be short or long. Some short turns consist of a single word like turn (1) and (4) in the following telephone closing: TURNS B: right (1) A: Yes thanks very much (2) B: OK bye (3) A: bye (4) (36: 4) Adjacency Pair Schegloff (1974) observe that a conversation is a string of at least two turns which are produced by different speakers and are related to each other in such a way they form a pair type. They call them an adjacency pair. The adjacency pair always consists of a first part and a second part. The utterance of a first part immediately creates an expectation of the utterance of a second part of the same pair. There is a class of first pair parts which include Questions, Greetings, Offers, Requests, etc. For some first pair parts, the second pair part is reciprocal (Greeting – Greeting); for some there is only one appropriate second (Question – Answer), for some more than one (Complaint – Apology/Justification). For examples: First past Second Part A: Hello B: Hi A: What time is it? B: About eighty-thirty A: Morning, Bob! Late again! B: I’m ever sorry. I promise it won’t happen again. In a second part pair, there is often a choice of two likely responses. A request is most likely to be followed by either an acceptance of refusal. An assessment is responded by an agreement or disagreement. In such cases, one of the responses is termed the preferred response and the other the dispreferred response. The preferred is the structurally expected next act and the dispreferred is the structurally unexpected next act. The following general patterns are presented by Levinson (1983, p. 336) First part Second part Preferred Dispreferred Assessment Agree Disagree Invitation/Offer Accept Refuse Request Accept Refuse Question Expected answer Unexpected answer or non-answer Blame Deny Admission Table 1. Correlation of content and format in adjacency pair Sequence The structure of adjacency pair described so far has been linear: The first pair part followed by the second pair part. However, there are also cases of embedding: one pair occurring inside another. Sometimes, either because the listener does not understand or because he does not want to commit himself until he knows more or because he is simply stalling, a next speaker produces not a second part but another first pair part. This conversational fragment is referred to as insertion sequence. Tapes of sequence are illustrated in and : Agent: Do you want the early flight? (=Q1) Client: What time does it arrive? (=Q2) Agent: Five-fifty (=A2) Client: Yeah – that’s great (=A1) (71: 78) This sequence takes the form of Q1 - Q2 - A2 - A1, A1 is the answer of Q1, and A2 is the answer of Q2. Therefore, the middle pair Q2 - A2 is called an insertion sequence. A: Your jewellery looks very nice (Assessment) B: Which one do you mean exactly? (Question) A: The necklace (Answer) B: Well, I don’t think the same (Disagreement) In this conversation, there is pair which consists of making an assessment disagreement with an insertion sequence of question answer pair which seems to function as a condition on the disagreement being provided. 1.2.2. Discourse analysis Coulthard (1985) proposed a descriptive framework for analyzing conversation. They discovered a typical classroom exchange that is made up of three moves: an initiating move, a responding move, a follow-up move, as the following example: T: What does the next one mean? You don’t often see that one round here, Miri. Initiating move P: Danger falling rocks Responding move T: Danger, falling rock Follow-up move However, Sinclair and Coulthard (1985) also pointed out that when a move consists of more than one act, then one of the acts is the main act called head act which carries the discourse function of the entire move. It is obligation. The rest are subsidiary acts called pre-head act if they precede the head act, or post-head act if they follow the head act. They are optional. Sinclair and Coulthard (1985) illustrated the following conversation: A: Why are you standing? Do sit down. (1) B: Thanks. (Sit down) (2) In this conversation, (1) consists of two acts: a question “Why are you standing?” and an invitation “Do sit down”. Obviously, the main discourse function of move (1) is an invitation (not a question). B’s response to the invitation is obligatory. B’s response “Thanks” can be understood as accepting the invitation. A cannot challenge B for not responding to his question. If B says “Well, I’ve been sitting all day”, B’s response is not only an answer to the question, but rather a declination of the invitation. A will not challenge B for having only responded to the question but also not the invitation. However, the fact that an initiating move sets up the expectation of a responding move does not mean that the former will always be followed by the latter. After the production of an initiation, the next speaker makes a systemic choice of whether, to support or reject it. The following is an illustration of how the system works in conversation form (Tsui, 1994). Tsui supposes a tourist in Birmingham City Centre asks a passer-by “Can you tell me where New Street station is?” The followings are examples of the choices that are available to the passer-by: Tourist: Can you tell me where New Street station is? Passer-by: (a) It’s just round the corner. (b) Do you know where the shopping centre is? (c) Sorry, I’m a stranger here. (66: 20) The illustration shows the passer-by the choice of supporting the utterance or rejecting it altogether. If he chooses the former, then he has the choice of producing a response, which supplies the information (7a). Or he may produce another elicitation before supplying the information (7b). If the choice is to reject the utterance, he may reject the assumption that he is able to supply the requested information (7c). 1.3. Conversational principle 1.3.1 Co-operation and implicature It has become clear from the studies of conversation that conversation proceeds on the basis that participants are “reasonable” people who can be expected to deal decently with one another. In considering the suitability of participants’ moves in conversation, Grice (1975, p. 45) formulates a rough general principle which participants will be expected to observe as follows: “Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the state at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged. One might label this the cooperative principle”. Grice has described four categories of special cases of this principle which he called “Maxims”. These maxims can briefly be characterized in modified form below: Maxim of Quantity: Be brief. Make your contribution as informative as is required and no more. Maxim of Quality: Be true. Do not say what you believe to be false and do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence. Maxim of Relation: Be relevant. Maxim of Manner: Be clear. Avoid obscurity and ambiguity. Grice points out that speaker do not always follow these maxims. They may violate, exploit the maxims. That is to say, they do not give as much of the relevant information as he could, or he may offer utterances ambiguously, etc. In such instances, the conversation maxims provide a basis for the hearer to construct a sequence of inferences which make it relevant or at least cooperative. Grice called this process “implicature”. Let us consider this example: A: What do you think of our new boss? B: Not very nice A: Not nice? I think he’s great This conversation is constructed on the basis of the observation that when a speaker questions a proposition stated by the previous speaker, he is often signaling disagreement by questioning is not relevant unless the speaker is implying disagreement with that statement. In brief, conversation is a cooperative activity. Conversation makes use of the cooperative principle. Speakers and hearers are guided by considerations of quantity, quantity relation, manner and the process of implicature which allow them to figure out relationships between the said and the unsaid. According to Thomas (1998) a speaker can say one thing and manage to mean something else or something more by exploiting the fact that he may be presumed to be cooperative, in particular, to be speaking truthfully, informatively, relevantly, and otherwise, appropriately. The listener relies on this presumption to make a contextually driven inference from what the speaker says to what the speaker means. In other words, the hearer has to work out from what is said by appealing t