LUẬN VĂN CHUYÊN NGÀNH NGÔN NGỮ ANH

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING HANOI OPEN UNIVERSITY M A THESIS MODALITIES IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE OFFERS (Tính tình thái trong lời đề nghị tiếng Anh và tiếng Việt) HO THI MINH THAI Field Englis.

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING

HANOI OPEN UNIVERSITY

M.A THESIS

MODALITIES IN ENGLISH AND

VIETNAMESE OFFERS (Tính tình thái trong lời đề nghị tiếng Anh

và tiếng Việt)

HO THI MINH THAI

Field: English Language Code: 8.22.02.01

Hanoi, 11 / 2020

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING

HANOI OPEN UNIVERSITY

M.A THESIS

MODALITIES IN ENGLISH AND

VIETNAMESE OFFERS (Tính tình thái trong lời đề nghị tiếng Anh

và tiếng Việt)

HO THI MINH THAI

Field: English Language Code: 8.22.02.01 Supervisor: Assoc Prof Dr Hoang Tuyet Minh

Hanoi, 11 / 2020

CERTIFICATE OF ORIGINALITY

I, the undersigned, hereby certify my authority of the study project report entitled

“Modalities in English and Vietnamese offers” submitted in partial fulfillment of

the requirements for the degree of Master in English Language Except where thereference is indicated, no other person’s work has been used without dueacknowledgement in the text of the thesis

Hanoi, 2020

Approved bySUPERVISOR

(Signature and full name)

Assoc Prof Dr Hoàng Tuyết Minh

Date:……… ……

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express my sincere thanks to many people who havesupervised, advised and encouraged me during my research, and acknowledge theircontribution directly or indirectly to the accomplishment of my thesis.

First and foremost, I am really grateful to my supervisor, Assoc Prof Dr.Hoang Tuyet Minh for her insightful questions, comments and advice for me rightfrom sketching out the plan of the research, and especially her enthusiasticsupervision during the time I composed my research, at various stages ofdeveloping my thinking and writing this thesis Without her supervision, this thesiswould not have been led to itssubmission

Also, I deeply indebted to all my lecturers at HANOI OPEN UNIVERSITYfor their useful lectures as well as their constant support and insightful suggestions

In addition, I am also grateful for my friends who gave me unconditionalencouragement and inspiration

Last but not least, I wish to express my thanks to my family With theirsupport and invaluable help, I could pay more attention on my studies and thesis

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Certificate of originality i

List of tables and figures viii

1.2 Aims and objectives of the study 2

1.4 Methods of the study 2

1.5 Scope of the study 5

1.6 Significance of the study 5

1.7 Structure of the study 6

2.2.1 Classification of modalities 172.2.2 Linguistic means to express modalities 22

2.3.1 Offering as a speech act 282.3.2 Offering and forms of offers 312.3.3 Politeness in offering 34

CHAPTER 3: A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF MODALITIES 37

IN OFFERS BETWEEN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE

3.1 Modalities in English offers 37

3.1.1.2.2 Vocative 41

3.1.1.3 Prosodic markers – Intonation 42

3.1.2 In conventionally indirect offers 433.1.2.1 Lexical markers 44

3.1.2.1.2 Other lexical markers 443.1.2.2 Grammatical markers 443.1.2.2.1 Interrogative 44

3.1.2.3 Prosodic markers – Intonation 45

3.1.3 In non-conventionally indirect offers 453.1.3.1 Lexical markers 453.1.3.2 Grammatical markers 463.1.3.3 Prosodic markers– Intonation 46

3.2 Modalities in Vietnamese offers 47

3.2.1.3 Prosodic markers – Intonation 53

3.2.2 In conventionally indirect offers 543.2.2.1 Lexical markers 54

3.2.2.1.2 Other lexical markers 553.2.2.2 Grammatical markers 563.2.2.2.1 Interrogative 56

3.2.2.3 Prosodic markers – Intonation 56

3.2.3 In non-conventionally indirect offers 56

3.2.3.1 Lexical markers 573.2.3.2 Grammatical markers 573.2.3.3 Prosodic markers– Intonation 57

3.3 A comparison between modalities in offers 58

in English and Vietnamese

3.3.1 In terms of direct offers in English and Vietnamese 583.3.2 In terms of conventionally indirect offers 60

in English and Vietnamese

3.3.3 In terms of non-conventionally indirect offers 62

in English and Vietnamese

REFERENCES IAPPENDIX IV

ABSTRACT

Natural languages offer speakers many and various linguistic devices tofacilitate their communication It can be said that modalities play an important part

in communicating activities This study investigates how speakers of English andVietnamese express the modal meaning in different offering strategies in terms oflinguistic means It attempts to seek what are the similarities and differences of themodal tools in English and Vietnamese offers Data used in this study are collectedfrom various sources of textbooks, literature works, internet, especially Englishpractical textbooks, articles, and novels, stories in English and Vietnamese Toobtain the main objective of the study which is to show the similarities anddifferences of the modal tools in the two languages, we take examples in bothEnglish and Vietnamese into consideration The results show that in offers, bothtwo languages have three kinds of modal markers, which are lexical markers,grammatical markers, and prosodic markers However, the usage of these markers isnot the same in English and Vietnamese This study wishes to help teachers andlearners of English have more knowledge of modalities in English and Vietnameseoffers when teaching and learning English The most important thing is to help themimprove their skills by providing some applications for teachers and learners

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

CA: Contrastive analysis

E.g : For example

EFL: English as a Foreign Language

LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES

Table 2.1 The commodity exchanged & the speech function and

the types of intermediacy

18

Table 2.2 Palmer’s classification of modalities in modal system 20Table 2.3 Halliday’s modality system of modalization and modulation 21Table 2.4 The three basic sentences types in English

Table 3.1 The contribution of modalities in English offers

Table 3.2 The contribution of modalities in Vietnamese offers

Table 3.3 The contribution of modalities in direct offers in

English and Vietnamese

Table 3.4 The contribution of modalities in conventionally indirect

offers in English and Vietnamese

Table 3.4 The contribution of modalities in non- conventionally

indirect offers in English and Vietnamese

Figure 2.1 A spatial model tense, aspect and modality

30465858

60

62

14

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

1.1 Rationale

A language is used as a means of social interaction and it expresses varioussocial roles and performs various communicative functions like questioning,requesting, offering or commanding somebody or telling somebody something.Such types of interpersonal functions of language are reflected in various sentencetypes like declarative, interrogative and imperative and also through the system ofmodals The three choices in the mood system perform various communicativefunctions like declaring, asking a question, making a request or giving a command.With these sentence types, modal verbs like “can”, “may”, “will”, “must” help inexpressing various social functions such as making a request, seeking permission,expressing rights, obligation and possibility Sentence types, mood choices andmodal verbs are examples of modal markers Thus, it can be said that modalities aredirectly related to the social functions of language The notion of modality as well

as linguistic means to express modalities has been studied by a lot of scholars so far;however, research on the way of using modal tools in a specific kind of speech acthas been limited

Offering is one common type of speech act, which shows considerationtowards each other and therefore it can reinforce social relationship In differentcountries, or cultures, people make offers in different ways Modalitiesare closelyrelated to the emotion and attitude of the speaker; therefore, in offering, modal toolsare usually used When thinking of modalities, what appear first in our mind may bethe modal verbs, which is a familiar concept Besides modal verbs, there are manyother lexical markers such as modal adverbs, modal adjectives…, grammaticalmarkers such as mood and vocative, and prosodic markers However, the use oflinguistic means to express modalities in offering is not the same in all languages.English and Vietnamese have their own specific features, which leads to a lot ofdifferences in using language

For the above reasons, the author would like to choose the topic “Modalities

in English and Vietnamese offers” with the attempt to find out the similarities and

differences of the modal tools in English and Vietnamese offers It’s also hopefulthat this study will be of some help to those who are interested in this aspect oflanguage

1.2 Aims and objectives of the study

The research aims at helping learners gain better knowledge of modalities inEnglish and Vietnamese offers

In order to gain the above aims, the following objectives are put forward:

- To explore the modality markers in making offers in English and Vietnamese

- To compare and contrast the range of modality markers in order to clarify thesimilarities and differences in the ways Vietnamese and English people uselinguistic means to express modalities in offering in their own language and culture

- To contribute to promoting awareness among foreign language teachers andlearners of the mentioned issue

1.3 Research questions

1 What are modalities in English and Vietnamese offers?

2 What are the similarities and differences between modalities in English andVietnamese offers?

3 What are the suggested implications for foreign language teachers and learnersunderstanding modalities in English and Vietnamese offers?

frequencies of usage Therefore, corpus based method is also used in this study forcomparative and contrastive purposes.

1.4.2 Methods of the study

1.4.2.1 Major methods

In order to achieve the aims and objectives, descriptive and contrastivemethods are used in the thesis The descriptive method is used to describemodalities in English and Vietnamese offers being studied In this thesis, it isutilized in order to give a full account of lexical markers, grammatical markers, andprosodic markers of modalities And the contrastive method is to find out thesimilarities and differences between modalities in English offers with reference tothe Vietnamese equivalent

1.4.2.2 Supporting methods

The supporting methods are analytical, synthetic method and others As amatter of fact, to investigate in details the modalities in English and Vietnamesewith their different features with various nuances of meanings, analytical method

is also employed, and then the synthetic method is used for grouping them on thebasis of certain criteria according to lexical markers, grammatical markers, andprosodic markers Moreover, quite a few of research techniques have beencombined, such as statistics, componential analysis, and contrastive analysis

In conducting the investigation, setting up a regular consultancy withsupervisor for a guidance and academic exchange is a critical technique to find out

a right direction for doing the research successfully

1.4.3 Data collection

Samples of data containing modalities taken from sources of English andVietnamese textbooks, articles, literature works, and internet, especially Englishpractical textbooks, articles, and novels, stories in English and Vietnamese Besides,the examples to illustrate the offers are also taken from works of Kiefer.F (1994),Joan L Bybee.J, Revere D, Perkins, & William Pagliuca (1994), Palmer F (1986)

The corpus used in this study are built on the following general principlesregarding size, number of languages, sources: (i) The size of the corpus: Some dataused in this research consist of 25 stories, articles, literature works, conversations ininternet in English and 20 stories, novels, articles, textbooks in Vietnamese (ii)The number of languages: The corpus in this research is considered as a bilingual

corpus; hence it contains the two languages: English and Vietnamese (iii) Thesources of the corpus: The data in this research are taken from e-books ofcontemporary works, stories, novels, grammar books, magazines, newspapers,textbooks on different sources.

1.4.4 Data analysis

The data will be described, analyzed in terms of lexical markers,grammatical markers, and prosodic markers of modalities and compared withVietnamese equivalents under a process of statistical analysis to find the answers tothe research questions It took several months for gathering useful data as well asmonths for analyzing and discussing the result from the data collections Finally,certain conclusions and implications for learning and teaching modalities in offers

in an effective way are withdrawn In order to successfully achieve all the aims ofdata analysis process, the three following stages are implemented

1.4.5 Procedure of the study

After extracting the data from the corpus, a descriptive method will be used

at first to exploit all means and expressions of modalities used in English andVietnamese offers in terms of categories in the theoretical framework Basing ondevices processed in the corpus, the author distinguishes the similarities anddifferencies between English and Vietnamese offers and then, categorizes them atthree different types of meanings: lexical markers,grammatical markers, prosodicmarkers.This type of analysis is emphasized throughout the contextual situationswith various types of illocutionary forces

In this thesis, a contrastive analysis is carried out together with a qualitativeanalysis in the analytical framework and a quantitative analysis from the corpus in

an effort to understand how contextual variables of this corpus may influencemodalities in order to determine the similarities and differences of modalities used

in English and Vietnamese The author takes the English language as the baselanguage and Vietnamese as the comparative language The examples analyzed aretaken from offers in English and Vietnamese

The statistical calculations are made and classified by the figures for eachpattern The results in English are then compared to those in Vietnamese Thesimilarities or differences will be analyzed in details with specific data and then toindicate any conclusions

Analytic stage is the main step First, the researcher counts up the totalnumber of modalities in offers in English and Vietnamese, demonstrated it to make

a pure comparison on the quantity Next, the researcher shifts through the materials

to identify the similarities and differences between the modalities in English andVietnamese offers

After analyzing the remarkable features of both modalities in English andVietnamese offers, the researcher synthesizes all similarities and differences tomake a generalization about the range of modality markers in order to clarify thesimilarities and differences in the way Vietnamese and English people use linguisticmeans to express modalities in offering in their own language and culture

1.5 Scope of the study

The study gives a description and analysis modalities in offers in terms oflexical markers, grammatical markers, and prosodic markers It centers on thesimilarities and differences in using modality markers in the speech act of offeringbetween English and Vietnamese

The materials on offers in English are taken from some English practicaltextbooks such as, English Grammar in use, Functions of English, HeadwayIntermediate, LifeLines, Business Objectives, English stories, novels… andexamples of offers in textbooks as Tiếng Việt 3, Tiếng Việt 8, Vietnamese shortstories, magazines, novels, internet…

1.6 Significance of the study

Theoretically, this study gives a selected definitions and explanations bylinguists related to the notions of modalities and speech act of offering Through thestudy, readers can also see the comparison of modalities in offers between Englishand Vietnamese

Practically, this study will provide information that can help teachers andlearners of English gain an insight into modalities in general and modalities in thespeech act of offering in specific, which contributes to the teaching and learningEnglish

1.7 Structure of the thesis

This study consists of four chapters:

Chapter 1, Introduction, introduces the rationale for choosing the field for

studying, the aims and objectives, the scope of the study, the research questions,research methods and the organization of the study

Chapter 2, Literature review, discusses the previous studies on modalities relating

to the area of the research and presents some theoretical preliminaries that could beused as foundation for the process of conducting the research

Chapter 3, A contrastive analysis of modalities in offers between English and Vietnamese, represents the study that focuses on the similarities and differences

between English and Vietnamese in term of modalities in English and Vietnameseoffers and discussing specific uses of modalities between the two languages

Chapter 4, Conclusion, summarizes the main points in the study, the major

findings of the investigation, concluding remarks, limitation and suggestions forfurther study

CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW

This chapter provides the theoretical background including the notions ofmodalities and the speech act of offering It consists of two main sections :(i)Previous studies in the world and in Vietnam; (ii) Theoretical background in theworld and in Vietnam.The first section reviews the definition, classification ofmodalities and linguistic means to express modalities, the issues on speech act andclassification of speech acts The second section reviews the offers and forms ofoffers

2.1 Previous studies

Modalities as expressed by modal verbs are an interesting, but complicatedlinguistic phenomenon in both English and Vietnamese Because of the importanceand wide aspects, modalities have been studied by various scholars in the world

Up to now, modalities in the English language has been studied by a number ofresearchers such as Langacker (1987, 1991ab, 2003, 2008, 2013),Talmy (1985),Depraetere, L & Reed, S (2006), Sweetser (1987, 1990), Johnson (1987), Coates(1983, 1995), Lakoff, R (1972) , Rabinowitz J F (1993), Van der Auwera &Plungian (1998), Halliday.M.A.K (1994), Declerck (2011), Coates J (1983),Kiefer F (1987), Quirk et al (1985), Perkins, Michael R(1983), Joan L, Bybee.J,Revere D, Perkins, & William Pagliuca (1994), Palmer F (1986) and some others

Like most of theoretically-based historical studies, modalities have beenpursued from the perspectives of both semantic and grammatical theories oflinguistics The term “modalities” derives from the postclassical Latin words

modalitas or modus in more than one sense that was used by scholars in the Middle

Ages However, this Latin term was very rare, and its current linguistic use was theearliest attestation in 1907 The history of English modal auxiliaries in general and

of modality in particular had prestigious place in studies since the nineteenthcentury

Chomsky (1957) devotes much of his research to syntactic structures ofmodalities He has researched the grounding in different perspectives on syntaxmore than semantics Functionally-oriented views of syntactic aspects of Englishmodalities include works by Denison (1993), Hopper and Traugott (2003),Peyraube (1999) in Chinese, Beninca and Poletto (1997) in Italian In these works,the study of modalities has mainly focused on grammaticalization

Van der Auwera & Plungian (1998) come up with the semantic mapincluding an account of connections between lexical and grammatical categorieswith the aim to represent an entire semantic area of modalities and main types ofmodalities and their relationships.

Still in the domain of modalities, a distinction between “mood” and

“modality” has been proposed by Palmer (1979, 1986, 1990, 1994, 2003, and 2005)

Palmer’s work (1979) is regarded as a “pioneer work on modality” related to the

notions “epistemic’ and “deontic” modality which is generally accepted as relevantlinguistic categories Palmer (1994) sets out a general theoretical framework of the

three types of deontic modality i.e commissives, directives, and volitiveswith its

subtypes However, he has not analyzed any deep insight these types of deonticmodality with regard to semantic and syntactic meanings He only provides a briefaccount of examples of these types in English

Palmer & Facchinetti (2003) study and analyze the cross-linguistic features

of modalities in the collection of evidence drawn from the corpus Their works arethe first one of a series fully dedicated to corpus-based studies of languages.Corpora, in their study, have been widely carried out in a great variety of fields,from the study of grammatical and lexical features to the compilation of contrastiveanalysis and translation theory, from historical linguistics to language acquisition.They state that the great amount of naturally occurring language applied by thecorpus shows clearly comparisons between different varieties of a language andbetween languages as well The corpus helps them count typical words and wordpatterns of a specific genre

The final paper in Palmer & Facchinetti’s work is an insightful study on theinteraction of tense, aspect and modalities in English and Greek The data are based

on a corpus of written Greek (the Hellenic National Corpus) concluding over 650

instances of modal verbs They compare the definitional properties of the modalsystem in English and Greek From the corpus, they examine the factors affectingthe disambiguation of modal verbs in the two languages (i) the meanings of modalverbs (ii) the form of modal verbs (interrogatives or negatives, present or past (iii)types of modal verbs (epistemic modality or agent-oriented modality) (iv) thegrammatical person of the subject (an utterance interpreted in the third person incomparison with the first person) Overall, studying of the Greek data from the

corpus, Palmer & Facchinetti (2003) analyze the similarities and differences asregards of semantic features of modal verbs in English and Greek.

Van der Auwera et al (2009) provides some of the papers presented at the

Second International Conference on Modality in English There are three general

themes described in their work: (i) the definition of modalities (ii) the study ofEnglish modals (iii) the analysis of modal constructions Discussing generalapproaches to modal notions, the authors argue that it is important to distinguishbetween modality and modalization The former is a modal system based on thenotions of possibility and necessity The latter is divided into five types (non-

factuality vs factuality: might and may, existential modality such as “footballers can

be sexmaniacs” (van der Auwera et al, 2009), subjectivity vs objectivity (may, can, must, should).In the analysis of modal constructions, they describe the structures of

non-factual modality such as until and before clauses Authors conclude that

subjective modals involve more pragmatic than the objective uses

For non-western languages, Wymann (1994) surveys modal constructions inKorean and Japanese He classifies modalities using the parameters “possibility”versus “necessity” and “situational” versus “epistemic” Li (2004) comparesmodality types in terms of grammatical features, semantic functions, pragmaticvariation, logical representation, and diachronic development in English under atypological perspective in comparison with Chinese In his thesis, the comparativeanalysis goes from lexical forms to syntactic features including negation, voices,subjects, main verbs, aspects, tenses and styles His research focuses on various

types of modalities in general (i.e epistemic, deontic and dynamic) in English and

Chinese

In Vietnam, many scholars have also studied modalities in general and types

of modalities in particular such as Nguyễn Thị Lương (2006), Cao Xuân Hạo(1999), Nguyễn Văn Hiệp (2001), Ngũ Thiện Hùng (2003), Võ Đại Quang (2009),Diệp Quang Ban (2004), Đỗ Hữu Châu (1996), Nguyễn Thị Thìn (2003), NguyễnMinh Thuyết & Nguyễn Văn Hiệp (2004), Diệp Quang Ban & Hoàng Dân (2000),Nguyễn Thị Thuận (2003), Phạm Thị Thanh Thủy (2008), Nguyễn Văn Hiệp (2007,2009), Bùi Minh Toán & Nguyễn Thị Lương (2010), Bùi Trọng Ngoãn (2004), BùiThị Đào (2014), etc

Nguyễn Thị Lương (1996) describes the uses of particles in questions withvarious illocutionary forces It can be said that it is a research investigating particles

on semantic perspectives in questions Based on the forms, she divides Vietnamese

particles in questions into three groups: particle à used to greet or ask for information, particles ư, hả, sao, phỏng, chắc, chăng used to predict what will happen or express irony, and particles chứ, nhỉ, nhé used to ask for affirmation or

remind somebody of something She uses a descriptive method to describeexamples taken from short stories, plays, novels and recorders The criteria toindentify the meanings of sentence particles in her research are based on Searletheory of speech act (1975) i.e., (i) propositional content, (ii) preparatory content,(iii) sincerity content and (iv) essential content She concludes that the meanings ofparticles are generally formed according to contexts and attitudes of the speakers incommunicating

Nguyễn Văn Hiệp (2001/ 2008) explores the semantics and syntax ofmodalities and sentences in Vietnamese He discusses theoretical issues relating tomain types of modality such as subjective and objective, deontic and epistemicmodality, factuality and non-factuality in general Discussing the different notions

of modality, Nguyễn Văn Hiệp describes various means of expressing modality in

Vietnamese such as adverbs, modal verbs, modal expressions, modal idioms,

performative verbs, particles, modal words and modal conditionals Nguyễn Văn

Hiệp’s work (2008) is a systematical study on modality and modal expressions inVietnamese However, no comparative study is attempted

A contrastive investigation of linguistic means expressing epistemic modality

in English and Vietnamese is carried out by Ngũ Thiện Hùng (2003) In his study,

he establishes the similarities and differences in syntactic and semantic features of

linguistic means of expressing epistemic modality such as nouns, adjectives,

adverbs, and particles Phạm Thị Ly (2003) provides a contrastive analysis on some

linguistic means of modalities in Vietnamese with the reference to English such as

modal verbs, adverbs and particles Her research is carried out to investigate the

similarities and differences of semantic meanings of modalities in general throughmodal verbs, adverbs and particles in English and Vietnamese However, deonticmodality is not the main focus of her study

Nguyễn Thị Cẩm Thanh (2003) also compares linguistic means of expressingnon-factual modalities in English and Vietnamese Her research focuses onestablishing similarities and differences between English and Vietnamese in terms

of semantic meanings of non-factual modalities Bùi Trọng Ngoãn (2004) surveys

the role of modal verbs on expressing modalities in Vietnamese such as cần, phải,

nên, dám, đành, nỡ in combination with sentence particles Võ Đại Quang (2009)

also conducts a study on linguistic means of expressing modalities in English andVietnamese in terms of semantic and syntactic features within various types ofmodalities However, he does not focus on linguistic means of expressing deonticmodality in terms of their semantic and syntactic features

So far, there has been no research exclusively focusing on the contrastivestudy of modalities in English and Vietnamese offers Thus, this dissertation is anattempt to meet such research need It is also the major contribution of this study atleast at the application level

2.2 An overview of modalities

Research on modalities has gone through a long history, appealing to a lot oflinguists, philosophers and logicians; however, there is no agreement about thedefinition of modalities yet It has been difficult to delimit the field of modalitiesand modal research to just a few topics

Several linguists have different viewpoints of modalities and used severalterms to distinguish types of modalities According to Halliday (1970), modalitiesare concerned with the expression of necessity and possibility He also claims that

modalities are “the speaker’s assessments of probability and predictability It is

external to the content, being parts of the attitude taken up by the speaker.”

Kiefer (1994) holds a philosophical perspective when he talks about

modalities as "the relativization of the validity of sentence meanings to a set of

possible worlds Talk about possible worlds can thus be construed as talk about the ways in which people could conceive the world to be different"

Lyons (1977) pointed out that modalities refer to people’s opinions andattitudes towards propositions expressed with language or circumstances described

by propositions

Modalities are not only an appealing but also complicated topic However,many linguists have an agreement on the one of the principal divisions that isbetween epistemic and non-epistemic modality

Modalities as the grammaticalized expressions of the subjective attitudes andopinions of a speaker and, more significantly, a description of the types ofmodalities incite controversy among linguists and logicians Although many

scholars have proposed descriptions of the types of modalities in language, no twoagree on a single analysis.

Wright identifies four types of modalities: alethic, epistemic, deontic, and

existential Alethic modality focuses on truth, epistemic modality on knowing,

deontic modality on obligation, and existential modality on existence (Wright,1951)

Coates (1983) focuses on a linguistic description of modalities within theframework of describing the semantics of the nine modal verbs and one quasi-

modal verb (ought) in contemporary British English in her 1983 book The

semantics of the modal auxiliaries.

Quirk et al (1985) distinguish between intrinsic and extrinsic modality

Halliday (2000) considers the mood system as a crucial and inseparable part

of the interpersonal meta-function, in which modalities and polarities are closelyrelated

In Palmer’s theory (Mood and Modality, 1986), modalities are defined assemantic information associated with the speaker’s attitude or opinion about what is

said Whereas, Bybee (Morphology: A study of the Relation between Meaning and

Form, 1985) offers a broader definition that modality is what the speaker is doing

with the whole proposition

Palmer (2001) distinguishes between propositional modality, which is concerned with “the speaker’s attitude to the truth-value or factual status of the

proposition,” and event modality, which is concerned with whether or not the event

referred to in the utterance, must be realized

Palmer (1986) states that “modalities express the speaker’s attitude or

opinion regarding the contents of the sentence or the proposition that the sentence expresses”, and modalities are considered as linguistic features that are realized by

a variety of linguistic means such as modal auxiliaries

According to Quirk et al (1985), modalities may be considered as “the

manner in which the meaning of a clause is qualified so as to reflect the speaker’sjudgment of the likelihood of the proposition it expressed being true.”

Modalities are expressed linguistically by a number of devices like moods,modal auxiliaries, quasi auxiliaries, adjectival and participial expressions, nominalexpressions, lexical verbs (Perkins, 1983) Apart from these grammaticalcategories, modalities are also manifested in orthographic devices like punctuation,

prosodic features like stress and intonation-contour (Searle, 1969) Verbalcategories like tense are also used in some cases to express modalities Lyons says

that "reference to the future is often as much a matter of modality as it is of purely

temporal reference" (Lyons, 1977) In general, modalities can be conveyed by

lexicalization, grammaticalisation, and prosodification (Võ Đại Quang, 2009)

When coming to modalities, Halliday (1985) mentioned the traditionaldefinition of modalities He is of the opinion that people use language with oneanother in order to manage their social lives Modalities are directly related to thesocial functions of language Modalities, which express different semanticimplications like permission, request, obligation, necessity, possibility, is used toperform different communicative acts Halliday regards modalities forms ofparticipation by the speaker in the communicative act Modalities are related to theinterpersonal function of the language

A rather different view is taken by Lyons (1977) who defines modalities as

“the speaker’s opinion or attitude towards the proposition that the sentence

expresses or the situation that the proposition describes.” In traditional usage,

modalities are applied to subsets of inflected form of verbs and are distinguished bymeans of term “indicative”, “imperative”, “subjunctive”, etc Lyons has chosen torespect this usage because as he says one of the advantages of doing so is that ithelps learners to draw a distinction, not only between utterances and sentences butalso between sentences that are sub-classified as declaratives, interrogatives,jussives, permissives, etc in terms of syntactic features and in terms of the mood ofthe main verbs

As Lyons (1977) describes, the declarative simply states what the speakerbelieves or claims is a fact, but the three terms in the modal system simply are thespeaker’s judgments These may be seen in terms of three types of conclusion, a

possible conclusion with may, the only possible conclusion with must and a reasonable conclusion with will He further explains that an important distinction

among these examples is that modality is sometimes redundant in the use of thesubjunctive that is wholly determined by the grammar and is semantically vacuous

Chung.S & A.Temberlake (1985) state that English sentences are categorical

or modalized In modalized sentences, modality may be expressed grammatically or

syntactically by means of auxiliaries, or it may be expressed in various lexical ways

(for example by full verbs, adjectives, adverbs …) However, they further argue that

grammatically modality is expressed in terms of mood If mood is expressed morphologically, it is considered as synthetic The subcategory synthetic mood has two types, namely the subjunctive and the imperative Both of these are expressed

by the “inflection” (in case of the subjunctive often by be instead of is), but they can

be told apart by their behavior with respect to subjects If mood is expressed

syntactically by means of auxiliaries, it is considered as analytic The subcategory

analytic mood has two factors as well, namely possibility and necessity, which are

expressed by the auxiliaries may, might, can, could, must, should, need respectively.

This analysis can be illustrated in Fig 2.1:

Modality

Synthetic Analytic

subjunctive imperative necessity permissive

(may/might (must/shouldcan/could) have to/need)

Fig 2.1.A spatial model tense, aspect and modality (Chung &Temberlake, 1985)

Downing and Locke (1995) have set forth modalities as “semantic category

by which speakers express their attitudes towards the event contained in the proposition as possibility, necessity, volition, obligation, permission, doubt, wish, regret, desire, and temporal notions such as usuality.”

Van der Auwera (2001) states “modalities have traditionally been dealt with

in relation to the analysis of semantic features associated with the speaker’s attitude

and/or opinion about what is said” According to Palmer (2001), “modality is a

valid cross language grammatical category that can be the subject of a typology study” Palmer’s definition of modalities is the same as the view point of Matthews

(2005) He defines the term modality as “category covering either of a kind of a

grammaticalized by mood” In their usages, mood comprises modal auxiliaries.

However, expressions of modalities are not limited to the verbal system There areother linguistic means of expressing modal meanings such as modal auxiliaries andlexical verbs, as well as nouns, adjectives, adverbs, idioms, particles, mood andprosody in speech

Traditionally, the concept of modalities and the modal concepts ofpossibility, probability and necessity, according to Hoye (1997), go back toAristotle and classical Greek philosophy These notions seem to derive from the factthat human beings often categorize their attitudes and experiences in terms of theways things might or must be or might have been, other than they actually are orwere Therefore, this part gives a summary of some authors’ point of views ofmodalities such as Jesperson (1949), Von Wright (1951), Rescher (1968), Bybee(1985), Mc Carthy (1994), Lyons (1977) and Palmer (1986)

According to Jesperson (1949, cited in Nguyễn Đình Hòa, 2004), modality is

defined as “an interesting issue, which can be divided into two kinds: the first

contains an element of will, which corresponds to deontic modality and the second contains no element of will, i.e epistemic modality” Although Jesperson’s

proposals of two types are of great importance, they contain little theoreticalsignificance They are purely notional, and both of his choice of the sub-categoriesand his criteria for them may be seriously questioned (Palmer, 1986)

Von Wright (1951, cited in Palmer, 1986) in a pioneering work on modallogic classifies four different “modes”: (1) the alethic mode or modes of truth; (2)the epistemic modes or modes of knowing; (3) the deontic modes or modes ofobligation and (4) the existential modes or modes of existence The most importantdistinction here is that between epistemic and deontic modality, which correspond,very roughly, to Jesperson’s two types

Within a logical framework, Rescher (1968) proposes a more extendedmodality system which consists of not only “elethic” modalities relating to thenotion of truth value, “epistemic” modalities relating to knowledge and belief,

“deontic” modalities relating to duties, but also “temporal” modalities, “boulomaic”modalities, “evaluative” modalities, “likelihood” modalities and “causal”modalities He further argues for three types of “conditional” modality According

to Rescher (1968), “A proposition is presented by a complete, self-contained

statement which taken as a whole, will be true or false” He then continues, “When

such a proposition is itself made subject to some further qualification of such a kind that the entire resulting complex is itself once again a proposition, then this qualification is said to represent a modality to which the original proposition is subjected.” Palmer (1986) argues that Rescher’s definition of modalities would raise

serious theoretical problems and would be too wide

Perkins (1980) establishes his classification of the types of modalities byreference to Rescher’s conceptual domain of modalities He reduces Rescher’s eightcategories to four: epistemic modality which is defined in terms of rational laws;deontic modality which is defined in terms of social laws; dynamic modalitydefined in terms of natural laws and temporal modality

Searle’s (1979) approach to modalities are different from the abovediscussions He concerns the issues of modalities in terms of speech act theory.According to him, there are five categories of illocutionary acts: (1) assertives:where we tell our hearers how things are; (2) directives: where we get them to dothings; (3) commisives: where we commit ourselves to doing things; (4) declaration:where we bring about changes in the world with our utterances; and (5) expressives:where we express our feelings and attitudes While assertives are described interms

of the speaker’s belief or commitment to the truth of a proposition, directives andcommissives correspond very largely to deontic modality Commissives arespeaker-oriented whereas directives are hearer-oriented Declaratives come close toassertives and therefore they are connected to epistemic modality Expressives maybelong to epistemic modality

Modalities, in Bybee’s point of view (1985), in a broad sense are what thespeaker is doing with the whole proposition whereas modalities in Pamper’s (1986)view point are defined as semantic information associated with the speaker’sattitude or opinion about what s/he says (cited in Nguyễn Đình Hòa, 2004)

Mc Carthy (1994) defines “modality as a kind of thought often consisting of

the closed class of modal verbs (must, can, will, may, etc.) and being treated as part

of grammar of English, but a large number of lexical words (nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs) carry the same or similar meanings to the modal verbs”.

The definition of modalities applied in this study is used most widely,

agreeing with the view of Lyons (1997), i.e modality is defined as “the speaker’s

opinion or attitude toward the proposition that sentence expresses or the situation that the proposition describes” Moreover, the study mainly follows the narrow

definition of modalities defined by Lock (1996), i.e “A narrow definition of

modality encompasses only modal auxiliaries and their uses ” For the purpose of

the study, modality will be considered as a semantic system expressed by the modalverbs which enable a speaker/ conceptualizer to signal and express his/ her ownpoint of view, his/ her opinion or his/ her commitment to the truth of theproposition/ state of affair or the event

So far, many different definitions and viewpoints of modalities have beenmentioned in English However, until now there have not been any definitions ofmodalities proposed in Vietnamese According to Nguyễn Văn Hiệp (2008) mostVietnamese researchers set out definition of modalities basing on theory ofmodalities in English, and most of them define modalities in Vietnamese from

Lyons’ definition of modalities (i.e “quan điểm hoặc thái độ của người nói đối với

mệnh đề mà câu nói biểu thị hoặc các tình huống mà mệnh đề miêu tả” (the

speaker’s opinion or attitude towards the proposition that the sentence expresses orthe situation that the proposition describes.)

In Vietnam, for the past few years, modalities have been the focus of manylinguists and researchers such as Cao Xuân Hạo, Hoàng Phê, Đỗ Hữu Châu andothers Hoàng Trọng Phiến broadly explains modalities as grammatical categorieswhich appear in all kinds of sentence

Although there are different opinions on the definition of modalities, it is notdifficult to see that many linguists share the point of view that modalities aredirectly related to the social functions of language and speaker’s attitude, as Palmer

says: “Modalities in language seems to be essentially subjective, and in reference to

the speaker’s opinion or attitude”.

2.2.1 Classification of modalities

Types of modalities are classified differently according to different linguists

Von Wright (1951) in “Studying modal logic” distinguishes 4 types: Alethic,

Epistemic, Deontic and Existential Rescher (1968), apart from these types, refers toone more type it is temporal modality Leech and Startvik (1985) suggest 2 types:Intrinsic and Extrinsic modality

Types of modalities in Halliday’s view

Halliday’s view on types of modality could be summed up as follows:

“Polarity is the choice between positive and negative, as in is/ isn’t, do/ don’t.

However, the possibilities are not limited to a choice between yes and no There are

intermediate degrees: various kinds of indeterminacy that fall in between, like

“sometimes” or “maybe” The intermediate degrees between the positive and negative poles are known collectively as modality” (Halliday, 1985)

He further expresses the commodity exchanged & the speech function and the types

of intermediacy in this chart:

Table 2.1 The commodity exchanged & the speech function and the types of

intermediacy (Halliday, 1985)

Commodity

exchanged

Speech function Types of intermediacy

Information Proposition Statement

question

Modality Probability (possible/

probable/ certain)Frequency (sometimes/usually/ always)

Goods &

services

Proposal Command Modulation Obligation (allowed/

supposed/ required)Offer Inclination (willing/

anxious/ determined)

As can be seen from the chart, in a proposition, the meaning of positive andnegative poles is asserting “It is so” and denying “It isn’t so” He observes twokinds of intermediate possibilities: (1) degree of probability (possible -> probable ->certain) which is equivalent to may be “yes”, may be “no” with different degrees oflikelihood attached and (2) degree of usuality (i.e sometimes “yes” sometimes

“no”)

In a proposal, there are two kinds of intermediate possibilities: (1) in acommand, the intermediate points represent degrees of obligation and (2) in anoffer, they represent degrees of described duty

However, the classification made by Sweetser and Palmer, in my opinion,seems the most acceptable for its clarity and generalization which can be applied tothe linguistic study from different angles: semantic, logic and pragmatic

Lyons (1977) (in conjunction with other scholars) states: “Epistemic modality

is concerned with matters of knowledge, belief” or “opinion rather than fact”.

Palmer (1990) considers that epistemic modality in language is often, may be

always, subjective in a way it is associated with the deduction of the speakers andnot only simply interest in the subjective judgment in the light of reality And

“Deontic modality is concerned with the necessity of possibility of acts performed

by morally responsible agents” (Lyons, 1977) By means of this, speakers intervene

in or bring about changes in events

As mentioned above, modality is not only an appealing but also complicatedtopic However, many linguists have an agreement on the one of the principaldivisions, which is between epistemic and non-epistemic modality

Coates (1983) focuses on a linguistic description of modalities within theframework of describing the semantics of the nine modal verbs and one quasi-

modal verb (ought) in contemporary British English in her 1983 book The

semantics of the modalauxiliaries Coates (1983) identifies two types of modality: epistemic and non-epistemic Like the epistemic modality defined by Wright,

epistemic modality according to Coates focuses on “the speakers’ assumptions or

assessment of possibilities” as well as “indicates the speaker’s confidence (or lack

of confidence) in the truth of the proposition expressed” (Coates, 1983) Unlike the

epistemic modality of logic, however, Coates (1983) argues that the epistemicmodality is more subjective, focusing on the attitude or opinion of the speakerrather than the truth value of the proposition In addition to epistemic modality,Coates also discusses non-epistemic modality with the term “root modality”.However, unlike with epistemic modality, no definition emerges for non-epistemicmodality other than the caveat that roots modality is “more difficult to characterise”(Coates, 1983) By not providing a clear definition in conjunction with the broadencompassment of the term root modality to include subdivisions most oftendefined separately in linguistic descriptions of modalities, Coates fails to provide acomprehensive description of modalities

Quirk et al (1985) distinguish between intrinsic and extrinsic modality Extrinsic modality involves “human judgment of what is or is not likely to happen”

and covers (epistemic and non-deontic root) possibility, (epistemic and non-deontic

root) necessity and prediction, whilst intrinsic modality involves “some kind of

intrinsic human control over events” Deontic modality and volition are categorized

together as intrinsic modality As for ability, the authors note: “The “ability”

meaning of can is considered extrinsic, even though ability typically involves human control over an action” (1985) For Quirk et al., an assertion or question about a

being’s ability to do something implies somesort of judgment about the likelihood

of actualization of the situation, and it is this aspect of ability meaning that informstheir categorization of ability as extrinsic

Palmer (2001) distinguishes between propositional modality, which is concerned with “the speaker’s attitude to the truth-value or factual status of the

proposition,” and eventmodality, which is concerned with whether or not the event

referred to in the utterance canor, must be realized Propositional modality

subsumes evidential and epistemic modality, the essential difference between these being that “with epistemic modality speakers express their judgments about the

factual status of the proposition [John may/must/will be in his office], whereas with evidential modality they indicate the evidence they have for its factual status”

(Palmer, 2001) Within event modality, Palmer distinguishes between dynamic

modality, which covers ability and volition, and deontic modality, which, as usual,

accounts for permission and obligation Dynamic modality “comes from theindividual concerned,” whilst deontic modality comes “from an external source”(2001)

Dynamic modality is similar to deontic modality except that the control isinternal to the subject (Palmer, 2003) Evidential modality is similar to epistemicmodality except that, instead of judgment, evidential modalities allow a speaker to

offer evidence for the “truth-value of the proposition” (Palmer, 2001) Palmer

(2003) also addresses the distinction between the realis and the irrealis stating thatonly the irrealis expresses modalities Despite the exclusion of the realis as a type ofmodalities, Palmer offers the most comprehensive and most reflective description ofthe modalities of Modern English

Table 2.2 Palmer’s classification of modalities in modal system (Palmer, 2003)

External conditionsInternal conditions

Perhaps this book will be useful.

He is said to be extremely rich.

John must come in now.

Mary can speak French.

Halliday (2000) considers the mood system as a crucial and inseparable part

of the interpersonal meta-function, in which modality and polarity are closelyrelated Polarity is “the choice between positive and negative”, as in yes or no, andmodality has more to dowith the “intermediate degrees” between the positiveand negative poles, such assometimes or may be (Halliday, 2000) Halliday definesmodalities as the interpersonal component of a dynamic discourse, from which aspeaker’s attitude or judgment is exposed, be it an inclination or obligation By foursub-categories of type, orientation, value and polarity, the modality system can begenerated into 144 categories and they could specifically describe all the variantsoccurring in the mood system However, as far as this paper is concerned, a generaldistinction is made on type only; that is, modalization and modulation are two basicconcerns in the current study, as shown in the table:

Table 2.3 Halliday’s modality system of modalization and modulation

(Halliday, 2000)

Types of Modality Tendency Example

Modalization Probability They may have known it.

They certainly knew.

Usuality It sometimes happens.

Modulation Obligation You are required to do so!

You should be patient.

Inclination She can perform Beijing opera.

She wants to perform Beijing opera.

Modalities as the grammaticalized expressions of the subjective attitudes andopinions of a speaker and, more significantly, a description of the types ofmodalities incite controversy among linguists and logicians Although manyscholars have proposed descriptions of the types of modalities in language, no twoagree on a single analysis From the initial alethic, epistemic, deontic, andexistential modalities proposed by Wright to the moat recent epistemic, deontic,dynamic and evidential modalities proposed by Palmer, no scholar yet to offer afully comprehensive description of linguistic modalities Even Palmer, whoseanalysis best reflects the modalities expressed in actual language use, however fails

to acknowledge that all language use expresses speaker subjectivity by denying therealis as a type of modalities.

2.2.2 Linguistic means to express modalities

Modalities are expressed linguistically by a number of devices like moods,modal auxiliaries, quasi auxiliaries, adjectival and participial expressions, nominalexpressions, lexical verbs (Perkins, 1983) Apart from these grammatical categories,modalities are alsomanifested in orthographic devices like punctuation, prosodicfeatures like stress and intonation-contour (Searle, 1969) Verbal categories like

tense are also used in some cases to express modalities Lyons says that "reference

to the future is often as much a matter of modality as it is of purely temporal reference" (Lyons, 1977) In general, modalities can be conveyed by lexicalization,

grammaticalisation, and prosodification (Võ Đại Quang, 2009)

Lexical markers include modal auxiliary verbs, modal adverbs, modal

adjectives, modal nouns, modal lexical verbs, and hedging devices

In English, modal auxiliaries play the very important part in conveying

modalities The key way to identify a modal verb is by its defectiveness (it hasneither participles nor infinitives) In addition, modal verbs do not take theinflection -s or -es in the third person singular, unlike other verbs The primarysemantic characteristics of modals are that they allow the speaker to express anattitude to the non-factual and non-temporal elements of the situation They are used

to express various attitudes like possibility, ability, willingness, probability,obligation, intention etc In a study on modalities, Võ Đại Quang has made a list of

13 modal auxiliaries including: can, could, may, might, shall, should, will, would,

must, ought to, used to, need, and dare.

Unlike English, in Vietnamese it is not easy to give the criteria fordistinguishing the modal auxiliaries from main verbs or particles There are anumber of linguists who have carried out studies on modal verbs in Vietnamesesuch as Trương Văn Trình, NguyễnVăn Hào, Nguyễn Kim Thản…and they holddifferent views of Vietnamese modal auxiliaries Trương Văn Trình (1970) statesthat by using the modal auxiliary, the speaker expresses his idea, notion of certainty,

doubt or obligation, volition etc., but according to Hữu Quỳnh – Ngữ Pháp Tiếng

Việt hiện đại, modal verbs are used to express the speaker’s attitude towards factual

events Nguyễn Văn Hào (1988) divides modal auxiliaries into two types (i) the

modal auxiliaries expressing volition such as có thể (can), không thể (cannot), dám

(dare), toan (intend), định (intend), phải (must), cần (need), nên (should), muốn (want)… (ii) the modal auxiliaries receiving actions such as bị, được, chịu đựng.

Nguyễn Kim Thản offers a clear argumentation on Vietnamese modal verbs As forhim, modal verbs do not indicate actions or states but the ability, necessity orintention of doing something or the maintenance of the state expressed by the mainverb Nguyễn Kim Thản lists some of the modal auxiliaries in Vietnamese such as

cần, có thể, dám, định, nên, nỡ, khỏi, phải, toan, muốn…(Nguyễn Kim Thản, 1977).

Some adverbs can express modalities According to Quirk (1985), modal

adverbs present on the truth-value of what is said, express levels of the speaker’sbelief in the truth of a proposition They can be placed in almost all positions in astatement; however, their most common position is at the beginning Some modal

adverbs are certainly, surely, evidently, probably, may be, perhaps, possibly,

actually, presumably, really, necessarily, hopefully… Võ Đại Quang (2009) divides

these modal adverbs into two groups

Group A: actually, certainly, clearly, definitely, indeed, obviously, plainly, really,

surely, for certain, for sure, of course;

Groups B: frankly, honestly, literally, simply, fairly, just.

Modal adverbs in group A can be combined with any other lexical verbs whereasmodal adverbs in groups B seem to appear with verbs of attitude or cognition

Examples: - Do you actually know her? Did you actually come there?

- Do you honestly admire her? (Võ Đại Quang, 2009)

Adjectives can also express modalities when they are combined with to + infinitive

or a that clause.

Examples: -It is impossible to run 60 miles per hour.

- It is essential that you drink enough liquid (Trương Văn Trình, 1970)

Modal adjectives like sure, likely, possible have the similar meaning as the adverbs

surely, possibly They are used to express the speaker’s not doubting or seeming to

doubt what he believes or knows

There are nouns that can express modalities They are often followed by a that

clauseor to + infinitive.

Examples: - There is a slight possibility, that you get the next train.

- The chance to win is not very good in a casino.

Some modal nouns such as possibility, probability have the same meaning as their derivations possible, probable, possibly, probably; however, structures with

nouns convey a more formal style Some other nouns such as risk, chance, notion,

opinion, no doubt… can be seen as devices expressing uncertainty if they appear in

their typical constructions

Examples: - In my opinion, he is a good guy.

Modal lexical verbs such as think, suppose, believe, ect

(propositional-lexical verbs) and feel, look, appear, sound, ect (Verbs of senses and perception)

also show the speaker’s opinion and attitude toward the content of the subordinate

clause Palmer considers think/ suppose/ believe… to be weak assertive, the speaker

does not totally commit himself to the truth content of the proposition

Examples: - I guess you’re feeling tired after a long day of waiting

When using verbs of sense, the speaker means to say that he is not certain aboutwhat he is saying

Examples: - Mary looks ill (The speaker is not certain but just guesses Mary’shealth basing on her tired face or voice)

Another modal lexical marker is hedges (As far as I know, I may be

mistaken, but…, I am not sure if this is right, but…) These hedging devices are

effective means of conveying the respect of the speaker to the hearer

Grammatical markers consist of Mood and Vocatives Grammatical mood

can be defined as a set of distinctive verb forms that express modalities Modalitiesare the grammaticalized expressions of the subjective attitude of the speaker, whichincludes opinions about possibility, probability, necessity, obligation, permissibility,ability, desire, and contingency Mood, in many languages including English, has

three categories: Indicative mood, Subjunctive mood, and Imperative mood The

indicative mood allows speakers to form sentences that express assertions, denials,

and questions of actuality or strong probability The subjunctive mood allows

speakers to form sentences that express commands, requests, suggestions, wishes,hypotheses, purposes, doubts, and suppositions that are contrary to fact at the time

of the utterance The imperative mood allows speakers to form sentences that make

direct commands, express requests, and grant or deny permission However, inVietnamese, the division of mood is different According to Diệp Quang Ban (Ngữ

Pháp Tiếng Việt, 2005), mood in Vietnamese consists of four types: declarative,

interrogative, imperative and exclamative The name of each type of mood is

correspondent to the name of the sentence type in interpersonal function

Vocative is used to attract the attention of the hearer Moreover, another

important function of vocatives is that they convey the emotion of the speaker eitherrespectful distance or familiarity Vocatives in form of proper names show

friendliness; endearments such as dear, including Mr/ Mrs/ Ms + proper name, Dr.,

Prof., Prime Minister, expresses respect and formality to the hearer.

Prosodic markers play a certain role in conveying the speaker’s emotion or

attitude, especially in international language like English It is said that “the waythey said it” is sometimes more important than “what they said” Connor (1980)

defines intonation as "the way of using tunes to add something to the words, and

what it adds is the speaker' feeling at that moment" Tune is the combination of

different "notes of the voice" which go up and down constantly when people speak

In this way, Connor's tune corresponds to the pitch patterns of the voice, andintonation is how people use this pitch variation to convey pragmatic meaning It isimportant to note that in his definition, Connor mentions intonation as the tool toconvey speakers' feeling According to Roach (1991), intonation has the followingfunctions: attitudinal function, accentual function, grammatical function, and

discourse function Attitudinal function is the ability of intonation to enables

speakers to express emotions and attitudes when they speak; this adds special kind

of meaning to spoken language, which is the role in conveying modalities Roach(1991) gives a short description of the four common intonation patterns According

to Roach, the falling tone signals finality and definiteness The rising tone is

normally employed in general question, listing, encouraging and when speakers want to signal something "more to follow" The fall-rise tone conveys uncertainty,

doubt, and in requesting The rise-fall tone conveys the state of being surprised,

impressed In a study by Võ Đại Quang (2009), four types of intonation patterns

express speaker’s different emotions and attitudes The Glide-down employedwould mean strong commitment while a Glide-up used would be interpreted asbeing suspicious attitude If the speaker is grumbling, he/she would be likely to usethe Take-off The Dive expresses the hesitation or irony of the speaker Besides,other parameters such as key, loudness and speed are also important in conveyingmodal meaning

In Vietnamese, the system of tones has limited the role of intonation inconveying modalities Because Vietnamese is a tonal language, (unlike English,which is an international language) expressing emotion by changing the pitch of the

sentence or phrase would make the meaning of the sentence different; therefore,many particles have arisen that can be added to the end of the sentence to expressemotion It is the main cause that leads to the increase in the number of a group of

words called modal particles (ạ, nhỉ, nhé, à…) It can be said that in Vietnamese,

modal particles are a useful tool in expressing speaker’s attitude and feeling Most

of modal particles in Vietnamese do not contain meaning and they are classified as

function words opposite to content words (Nguyễn Anh Quế, 1988) Nguyễn Kim

Thản (1997) refers them to grammatical words Hoàng Phê and others (1998) claimthat modal particles can not stand apart from other content words in sentences, andthey show the grammatical relationship among content words Nguyễn Văn Chính(2000), Nguyễn Văn Hiệp (2001) shares the same idea that modal particles areclosely related to the context Their position is flexible, at the beginning, in themiddle, or at the end (usually) of a sentence

a gift offer, favor offer, food/drink offer or an opportunity offer It helps revealpeople’s consideration towards each other and therefore it can reinforce socialrelationship People can make offer in many ways which are influenced by theirculture, customs, or personal characteristics The structural form of the offer can be

in the form of a question, a statement or a polite command

For a characterization of the nature of offers, Searle (1979) categorizes offers

as commissives since they commit a speaker to some future course of action x - acategorization followed by Harnish (1979) Similarly, Edmondson and House(1981) also underline the speaker’s role in offering by categorizing offers asattitudinal illocutions and, more specifically, as a type of willing, as they involvesituations in which a speaker communicates that s/he intends to - potentially at least

- perform a future act in the interest of the hearer

In English Speech Act Verb: A Semantic Dictionary (1987) by Wierzbicka,

offer has the following meanings:

- I think of X as something that could be good for you.

- I say: I will cause X to happen if you say you would want me to do it.

- I think that you may want it to happen.

- I don’t know if you want it to happen.

- I assume that you will say if you want it to happen.

Offering implies something like a benefit for hearer It can be more or less

tentative, but it has a degree of uncertainty “I don’t know if you want me to do it”.

As a result, offers usually call for an answer from the hearer

In terms of strategies, offers can be made by using three kinds of offeringstrategies: direct strategies, conventionally indirect strategies, and non-conventionally indirect strategies

In terms of forms, offers are grouped in three major categories with seven

types Three major categories are offering in forms of questions, statements, and

imperatives; seven types are offering in forms of tentative questions, permission questions, elliptical questions, Wh-questions, tag questions, statements and imperatives.

Politeness is a universal phenomenon in every society Brown and Levinsonbuilt their theory of politeness on the basis of the concept “face” According to

them, “face is the public self-image that every member wants to claim for himself ” (1987) This definition is explained more by Yule (1997) as “face means the public

self-image of a person It refers to that emotional and social sense of self that everyone has and expects everyone else to recognize.”

Lakoff (1975) suggests that “politeness is developed by society in order to

reduce friction in personal interaction” and comprises three rules of politeness: 1.

Don’t impose; 2 Give options and 3 Make the receiver feel good

Generally speaking, speakers from different cultures use different politenessstrategies in offering as well as in other kinds of speech acts

Offer is an act of politely doing something yourself, showing a desire or anecessity to do something for somebody depending on their needs In other words,offer is an act of expression of readiness to do or give if desired Its goal is to dosomething yourself or just do it without saying anything Offer is carried out on acondition that there are at least two participants

Example: - Would you like a cup of tea?

You are willing to bring a cup of tea to the hearer, and the hearer possiblywants or not In some cases, if you want to be very polite when someone else isdoing something, you can also offer to help

Example: - Shall I get it for you?

Making offers, in other words, involves an understanding of etiquette orpoliteness In making offer in English, it is necessary to learn not only certain wordsand expressions, but also how to use them appropriately The way of offering willdepend on the social distance among communicators It can sometimes be hard toknow how to make an offer However, communicator will get better results if theyoffer themselves to do something or help somebody in polite way

In every day interactions, communicators often show other people theirwillingness or desire; therefore, it is really important to know the correct way topresent for it Making an offer properly will not only determine whether theyactually obtain willingness the present to do something for the other But moreimportantly, it will affect the attitude that people have toward others

An offer is carried out when people want to present their politeness, theirwillingness to the other in doing something That is, when something has to bedone, they often to do it themselves honestly Or, they wish to do things together tothe people being offered, including the case they offer to do it themselves

In addition, people offer when someone needs help It means that, they asksomeone whether he/she needs a hand or not In some situations, an offer is like aninvitation to the other When people give an invitation, in other words, they areoffering Similar to request or command, offer is one of an important part incommunication

2.3.1 Offering as a speech act

Inferring the function of what is said by considering its form and context is

an ability which is essential for successful communication Speech Act Theoryprovides us with a means of establishing the function of what is being said Thetheory was developed from the basic belief that language is used to perform actions.According to Austin's theory (1962), what we say has three kinds of meaning:

1 Propositional meaning - the literal meaning of what is said

2 Illocutionary meaning - the social function of what is said

3 Perlocutionary meaning - the effect of what is said

According to Austin (1960), Speech act is a theory of performative language,

in which to say something is to do something On any occasion, the actionperformed by producing an utterance will consist of three related acts:

a Locutionary act is “what is said”, the form of uttered; the act of saying

something

b Illocutionary act is “what is done in uttering the word”, the function of the word,

the specific purpose that the speaker’s has in mind The illocutionary force is thespeaker’s intent, a true “speech act” (informing, ordering, warning, undertaking…)

For example: the utterance “I swear to give it back next time” is used to

perform the illocutionary act of promising

c Perlocutionary act is “what is done by uttering the word”; it is the effect on

listener, the listener’s reaction For example: the utterance “There is something in

your shoulder!” may cause the listener to panic and to look on his shoulder The

perlocution of this utterance is to cause those emotion and action

The classification of illocutionary acts proposed by Searle (1976) is adevelopment of ideas that appears in Austin’s theory Speech acts are classifiedaccording to the direction of fit between speech acts and the outside world

- Declaratives are those kinds of speech acts that change the world via their

utterance and bring about correspondence between the propositional content and theworld; thus, direction of fit is both words-to-world and world-to-words The acts ofdeclaratives are approving, betting, blessing, christening, confirming, cursing,declaring, disapproving, dismissing, naming, resigning, etc

- Representatives are those kinds of speech acts that express Speaker's belief that pand have a truth value, show words-to-world fit The types include arguing,

asserting, boasting, claiming, complaining, criticizing, denying, describing,informing, insisting, reporting, suggesting, swearing, etc

Example: I met your parent yesterday Informing

- Expressive are those kinds of speech acts that express Speaker's attitude to acertain

state of affairs specified (if at all) in the propositional content There is no direction

of fit and propositional content must be related to Speaker or Hearer (1975) Theacts are apologizing complimenting, condoling, congratulating, deploring, praising,regretting, thanking, etc

- Directives are those kinds of speech acts that are attempts to get Hearer to

dosomething, therefore they show world-to-words fit, and express Speaker's wish or