(LUẬN văn THẠC sĩ) a study on deontic modality expressing means in english and vietnamese declarative and interrogative sentences

ECMAux1 English commissive modal auxiliary in English story 1 ECMAux4 English commissive modal auxiliary in English story 2 ECPV18 English performative verbs in English story 8 CADV23 En

BÙI THỊ ĐÀO

A STUDY ON DEONTIC MODALITY EXPRESSING MEANS IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE DECLARATIVE

AND INTERROGATIVE SENTENCES

(NGHIÊN CỨU CÁC PHƯƠNG TIỆN DIỂN ĐẠT TÌNH THÁI CHỨC PHẬN TRONG CÂU TƯỜNG THUẬT VÀ CÂU HỎI TIẾNG ANH VÀ TIẾNG VIỆT)

Field: English Linguistics Code: 62.22.15.01

A dissertation submitted in total fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics at Vietnam National University, Hanoi

Supervisors: 1 Prof Dr Tran Huu Manh

2 Dr Nguyen Duc Hoat

HANOI, February 2014

BÙI THỊ ĐÀO

A STUDY ON DEONTIC MODALITY EXPRESSING MEANS IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE DECLARATIVE

AND INTERROGATIVE SENTENCES

(NGHIÊN CỨU CÁC PHƯƠNG TIỆN DIỂN ĐẠT TÌNH THÁI CHỨC PHẬN TRONG CÂU TƯỜNG THUẬT VÀ CÂU HỎI TIẾNG ANH VÀ TIẾNG VIỆT)

Field: English Linguistics Code: 62.22.15.01

A dissertation submitted in total fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics at Vietnam National University, Hanoi

HANOI, February 2014

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Philosophy in Linguistics at Vietnam National University, Hanoi

Hanoi, February 2014

Bùi Thị Đào

My deepest gratitude also goes to Prof Dr Hoàng Vân Vân, Assoc Prof Dr Phan Văn Quế,

Dr Đỗ Tuấn Minh, Dr Kiều Thị Thu Hương, Dr Đỗ Thanh Hà, Dr Hà Cẩm Tâm for their enthusiastic support and invaluable remarks on my initial proposal Their comments significantly contributed to improving the quality of this research

I am particularly indebted to Assoc Prof Dr Vũ Thị Thanh Hương, Prof Dr Nguyễn Văn Hiệp, Assoc Prof Tôn Nữ Mỹ Nhật, Dr Nguyễn Huy Kỷ, who generously shared the views and materials during the process of preparing this research I have also greatly benefited from discussions with them

I take this opportunity to thank all the lecturers and members at CFL - VNU, Hanoi for their whole hearted support and guidance Thanks are also due to my colleagues, friends for their great support and encouragement throughout my study

My special thanks and love go to my parents, my husband, my daughter and son, my brother and sisters who have supported me in the completion of this dissertation

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Fig 2.13 A distribution of linguistic means of expressing commisives in English 71 Fig 2.14 A distribution of linguistic means of expressing commisives in Vietnamese 72 Fig 2.15 A contrastive analysis of commissives in English and Vietnamese 72 Fig 2.16 A distribution of linguistic means of expressing volitives in English 74

Fig 2.19 A contrastive analysis of volitives in English and Vietnamese 76

Fig 3.18 A distribution of linguistic means of expressing directives in English 137 Fig 3.19 A distribution of linguistic means of expressing directives in Vietnamese 138 Fig 3.20 A contrastive analysis of directive expressions in English and Vietnamese 139

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Table 1.3 Means of expressing deontic modality in English and Vietnamese 44

Table 3.2 Directives in the interrogatives in English and Vietnamese 84 Table 3.3 Directives in the declaratives in English and Vietnamese 84 Table 3.4 The distribution of modal verbs in English and Vietnamese 100 Table 3.5 The distribution of hedge verbs in English and Vietnamese 102 Table 3.6 The distribution of performative verbs in English and Vietnamese 106

Table 3.8 The distribution of modal adverbs in English and Vietnamese 117 Table 3.9 The distribution of modal adjectives in English and Vietnamese 119

Table 3.11 The distribution of modal idioms in English and Vietnamese 132 Table 3.12 The distribution of Expletives in English and Vietnamese 134 Table 3.13 The distribution of modal conditionals in English and Vietnamese 135

ECMAux1 English commissive modal auxiliary in English story 1

ECMAux4 English commissive modal auxiliary in English story 2

ECPV18 English performative verbs in English story 8

CADV23 English modal adverbs in English story 23

ECADJ34 English commissive adjective in English story 34

ECE15 English commissive expletives in English story 15

ECMC34 English commissive modal conditionals in English story 34

EDMAux4 English directive modal auxiliary in English story 4

EDHV4 English directive hedge verbs in English story 4

EDPV31 English directive performative verbs in English story 31

EDAdv25 English directive modal adverbs in English story 25

EDAdj23 English directive modal adjective in English story 23

EDMN35 English directive modal nouns in English story 35

EDP18 English directive particles in English story 18

EDMI12 English directive modal idioms in English story 12

EDMC23 English directive modal conditionals English story 23

EV2 English volitives in English story 2

VCMAux1 Vietnamese commissive modal auxiliary in Vietnamese story 1

VCPV1 Vietnamese commissive performative verbs in Vietnamese story 1 VCMC1 Vietnamese commissive modal conditionals in Vietnamese story 11 VDMAux5 Vietnamese directive modal auxiliary in Vietnamese story 5

VDPV8 Vietnamese directive performative verbs in Vietnamese story 8

VDMW42 Vietnamese directive modal words in Vietnamese story 42

VDAdv22 Vietnamese directive modal adverbs in Vietnamese story 22

(VDMN10) Vietnamese directive modal nouns in Vietnamese story 10

VDP8 Vietnamese directive particles in Vietnamese story 8

VDMI14 Vietnamese directive modal idioms in Vietnamese story 14

VDE17 Vietnamese directive expletives in Vietnamese story 17

VDMC36 Vietnamese Directive Modal Conditionals in Vietnamese story 36

EV26 Vietnamese Volitive in Vietnamese story 26

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of expressing deontic modality in English and Vietnamese within the theoretical frameworks and typological studies by pioneering linguists, both foreign and Vietnamese, on deontic modality This study is both descriptive and contrastive in nature Its main aims are to identify, describe and compare the various linguistic resources available in English and Vietnamese in

indicating deontic modality and its three main types i.e commissives, volitives, directives, and

their sub-types

The main data used in this research are taken from the two corpora (421 declarative and interrogative sentences in English), built on 50 English stories, a total of 2.060.389 words and (422 declarative and interrogative sentences in Vietnamese) in 50 Vietnamese stories, a total of 2.003.486 words The data collected are then qualitatively and quantitatively analyzed to show similarities and differences in terms of syntactic - semantic features and equivalences and non-equivalences in the use of linguistic means to express deontic modality in English as a source language and Vietnamese as a language of reference Statistics also show the frequencies of occurrences of various linguistic means in the respective languages to show their relative importance in expressing deontic modality in the two languages under study

Research findings show that while English and Vietnamese share some main linguistic devices

i.e., modal verbs, adjectives, adverbs, hedge verbs, etc in the declaratives, the two languages

also show major differences and non-equivalences in the interrogatives in the availability and the extent of the usage of various means to indicate deontic modality While English relies more

on modal verbs, modal auxiliaries and moods, among others, Vietnamese relies more on its system of sentence particles (mood words), modal words to indicate different meanings of

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INTRODUCTION

1 Background to the study

Modality as an important component of linguistics has been extensively studied from syntactic, grammatical, semantic and pragmatic perspectives The study of modality expressions within linguistics is one of the complicated problems As Palmer (2003: 4) says “modality is realized

by linguistic terms from a wide range of grammatical classes, covering not only modal auxiliaries and lexical verbs, but also nouns, adjectives, adverbs, idioms, particles, mood, and prosody in speech.”

There are three types of modality that can be distinguished in the modal system of English i.e.,

epistemic, deontic and dynamic that can be interpreted in terms of possibility and necessity (Palmer, 2003: 7) This research will focus on one important type of modality i.e deontic modality The term deontic modality “is a cover term for a range of semantic notions such as

ability, possibility, hypotheticality, obligation, and imperatives” (van der Auwera & Plungian,

1998: 81) In Vietnamese, deontic modality is rendered as “tình thái chức phận/ đạo nghĩa”

(Nguyễn Văn Hiệp, 2008: 103) denoting obligations, duties, necessity and the need for actions which is also chosen as the working definition for this research

A large number of studies have focused on theories of modality in general and deontic modality

in particular such as the works by Chung & Temberlake (1985), Palmer (1979, 1986, 1990,

1994, 2003, 2004, 2005) who have studied on modality both theoretical and corpus-based:

syntactic and semantic theory figured in various contributions Palmer’s theory is applied widely in linguistics and in many languages Lyons (1977) also has a great concern with

semantic related to deontic modality Lyons’ theoretical discussion finds ample confirmation in

various examples mostly from subjective and objective modality Still within the field of modality, van der Auwera & Plungian (1998) identify and describe the two types of modality i.e., participant - internal modality and participant - external modality This classification is seen

as a significant contribution to linguistics

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So far, many comparative studies on modality have been carried out in different languages other than English such as those in Korean and Japanese (Wymann A.T, 1994), and in Chinese (Li, 2004) In Vietnam, many scholars have also studied modality in general and types of modality

in particular such as Nguyễn Thị Lương (1996), Cao Xuân Hạo (1999), Nguyễn Văn Hiệp (2001, 2008), Ngũ Thiện Hùng (2003), Phạm Thị Ly (2003), Nguyễn Thị Cẩm Thanh (2003), Bùi Trọng Ngoãn (2004), Võ Đại Quang (2009), who have studied modality in the Vietnamese language

However, no attempt has been made to conduct a contrastive study on linguistic means of indicating deontic modality in English and Vietnamese Therefore, this study is carried out to address that research gap in order to provide a more articulate insight into similarities and

differences of deontic expressing means in the two languages, and to serve as a framework for

implicational purposes, which can be both theoretical and practical

Regarding theoretical values, this dissertation is the first research into three types of deontic modality in the English language compared with the Vietnamese language Though deontic expressing means have been touched upon by many reputed linguists, the description and application of the three types of deontic modality in the study of Vietnamese have rarely been found in the works by Vietnamese linguists

With respect to practical purposes, a contrastive analysis on the three types of deontic modality

in English and Vietnamese helps teachers, students of English and those who are interested in the field of linguistics understand deeply the language they deal with as well as the speakers’ attitudes or contexts that they refer to In other words, this contrastive analysis will help EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners better understand of the similarities and differences in the use of deontic expressing means in both languages The insignts gained from the study, hopefully, will help to find out error analysis in the English language teaching and learning

2 Aim of the study

This study is aimed at finding the similarities and differences in deontic expressing means in English and Vietnamese

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In order to achieve the proposed aim, the objectives of the study are set as follows:

 To analyze and describe linguistic means of expressing deontic modality in English and Vietnamese

 To compare and contrast linguistic means of expressing deontic modality in terms of grammatical and lexical features and frequencies of usage in expressing deontic meanings in English and Vietnamese

To achieve the above objectives, the following research questions are to be addressed:

1 What are the linguistic means of expressing deontic modality in English and in Vietnamese?

2 What are the similarities and differences in linguistic means used in the three types

of deontic modality in terms of the syntactic and semantic features and the frequencies of usage in English and Vietnamese?

3 Scope of the study

This study is focused on the descriptive account of syntactic and semantic features of linguistic means of indicating three types of deontic modality in English and Vietnamese based on the

classification of Palmer (1994) They are commissives, directives and volitives with the seven sub-types of directives (deliberatives, imperatives, jussives, obligatives, permissives, precatives,

prohibitives) and the two sub-types of volitives (imprecatives and optatives)

According to Chung & Temberlake (1985: 25), modality in English may be expressed

grammatically or semantically by auxiliaries, verbs, adjectives, nouns or adverbs Nguyễn Văn

Hiệp (2008: 128) states that means of expressing modality can be categorized into grammatical and lexical means Prosody is said to have played a role in expressing modality in languages However, as Palmer (1986: 6) states, “prosody is a separate study and only rarely interacts in a systematic way with grammatical systems of modality”, and modality or linguistic means of indicating modality can be studied separately from prosody elements Furthermore, in this study, due to the nature of the data taken from the short stories and the usage of devices of a

describe and analyze deontic expressing means in English and Vietnamese i.e modal

auxiliaries, hedge verbs, performative verbs, modal words, adverbs, adjectives, nouns, particles, modal idioms, expletives, and modal conditionals

In English, mood (indicative, imperative, interrogative … moods) is an important means of

expressing deontic modality It also means that, to some extents, sentence types including the declaratives and interrogatives can also be considered means of expressing modality in general and deontic modality in particular Therefore, the main focus of this research is not on comparing and contrasting how linguistic means of expressing deontic modality operate in the two sentence types: declaratives vs interrogatives Declarative and interrogative sentences are

then used to provide samples of linguistic means used within these two sentence types

In this research, the author compares and contrasts deontic expressing means taken from 421 declarative and interrogative sentences found in 50 English stories and 422 declarative and interrogative sentences found in 50 Vietnamese stories Based on the identification and the descriptive accounts of deontic expressing means in the two languages, a comparative and contrastive study on the similarities and differences of deontic expressing means in 421 declaratives and interrogatives in English and 422 declaratives and interrogatives in Vietnamese will be conducted

In this study, the main criteria to recognize declarative and interrogative sentences in English are based on the theory of Palmer (1986: 26- 30) i.e., English sentences are the major grammatical units used by speakers to make statements or ask questions The exchange of information is characteristically expressed by the indicative mood or the imperative mood Within the indicatives, making a statement is typically concerned with the declaratives, and asking a question is associated with the interrogatives More exactly, it is one part of the structures concluding the subject and the finite element In declarative structures, the subject

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precedes the finite, and in the interrogative structures, the positions of finite operator and subject are reversed The finite is the element which associates with the content of the sentence relating to time, tense, or attitudes of the speaker

The criteria to recognize declaratives and interrogatives in Vietnamese are based on the work of Cao Xuân Hạo (1991: 128) i.e., the basic word order of a declarative sentence in Vietnamese is

subject - verb - object Also, a declarative can be expressed by a number of final particles đi/

nghen/ nhé An interrogative can be expressed by a noun/ noun phrase; or an adjective/

adjective phrases; or a verb/ verb phrases or a sentence, which is realized by question marks có/

đã…… không/ chưa, có phải (là)… không?, ( có) phải không?, or question with particles à,chứ, nhé, nào,hả,…

For the purpose of describing, comparing and contrasting the use of linguistic means for expressing deontic modality in the declarative and interrogative sentences in English (as a source language) and Vietnamese (as a reference language), the data are collected from two main sources For descriptive purposes, the samples of deontic sentences used by linguists are used alongside the samples collected from stories For comparative and contrastive purposes, a corpus is built with the aim of collecting modal samples from two types of sentences: declaratives and interrogatives in 50 English stories and 50 Vietnamese stories with the help of the software: TexSTAT-2 that has been extensively used by reputed researchers in this field (McEnery & Wilson (1996), Palmer & Facchinetti (2003), McCarthy (2005), and McCarthy (2007))

4 Methodology

4.1 Methods of the study

According to Saville-Troike (1982), one of the best methods of getting to know one’s own

“ways of speaking” is by comparing and contrasting with those of others This process will

reveal the shared and unshared features of linguistic patterns and their meanings Thus, contrastive linguistics with its associated research method - Contrastive analysis (CA) - will be used as the primary research framework for this study

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Fisiak (1981: 1) defines contrastive linguistics as “a sub-discipline of linguistics concerned with the comparison of two or more languages or subsystems of languages in order to determine both the differences and similarities between them” Johansson and Hofland (1994: 25-37) states that

“contrastive linguistics is the systematic comparison of two or more languages, with the aim of describing their similarities and differences”.Thus, a combination of descriptive, comparative

and contrastive methods is used in this research

For the comparison of the frequencies of usage in the two languages under study, a quantitative analysis of the corpus is adopted Corpus means “a collection of texts held in electronic form, capable of being analyzed automatically or semi-automatically rather than manually” (Baker, 1996: 225) A corpus-based method emerged in the years of 1990s and 2000s as a new area of research in the discipline of studies It is informed by a specific area of linguistics known as corpus linguistics which involves the analysis of the corpora of authentic running text by means

of computer software According to Steinberger et al (2005: 529), a corpus can be used to

count occurrences and frequencies for machine translation, cross-lingual information retrieval, multilingual lexical extraction, and sense disambiguation

Corpus based methods prove to be very effective in cross-language comparative study It allows

us to access to a large sample of texts and compare various syntactic as well as semantic features and frequencies of usage Therefore, a corpus based method is also used in this study for comparative and contrastive purposes

4.2 Data collection procedures

4.2.1 Description of corpus

The corpora used in this study are built on the following general principles regarding size, number of languages, sources:

 The size of the corpus: The two corpora used in this research consist of 50 English

stories, a total of 2060389 words and 50 Vietnamese stories, a total of 2003486 words Thus, the corpus includes 50 English stories and 50 Vietnamese stories This corpus size is viewed as not too large or too small so that a close reading of the whole texts can be undertaken

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 The number of languages: The corpus in this research is considered as a bilingual

corpus; hence it contains the two languages: English and Vietnamese This corpus is specialized in that it includes only written records and its samples only are declarative and interrogative sentences found in the included English and Vietnamese stories

 The sources of the corpus: As mentioned in the scope of the study, the

comparisons which will be made in this study are linguistic means of expressing deontic modality in English and Vietnamese stories The reason, the researcher assumes, is that conversations in stories are too frequent a way of expressing deontic modality Moreover, according to Van Dijk (1988), famous stories present a factual account of events that typically contain an element of comments Lexical choices, for example, can reflect the attitudes towards the events described and the actors involved For these reasons, stories are considered as the main source of the data used in the present study

The stories in this research are taken from e-books of contemporary works on different sources (see appendix A & B) One of the criteria for the selection of stories is that they were written

by native speakers These stories were published in the years of 1980s, 1990s and 2000s It, therefore, assumes that the use of deontic expressions in stories may have changed over the time

4.2.2 Corpus compilation procedure

In this section, the author conducts a process of extracting the data from a 2060389 - word corpus in English and a 2003486 - word corpus in Vietnamese as follows:

As clarified in details the eleven types of deontic linguistic means in the theoretical framework,

the author lists all the devices used in those means, such as can, could, may, might, shall, will, etc belonged to the first means (modal auxiliaries); think, believe, know, etc is the second

means (hedge verbs), etc Then, the author uses a tool for doing lexical analysis named TexSTAT-2 program This program can show the string matching and the concordance to count the frequency of a certain device in the whole 50 stories and also find related collocation of other words together with a certain device in English or Vietnamese

Fig 1 String matching of CAN in the English corpus

Fig 2 String matching of CÓ THỂ in the Vietnamese corpus

The results of data processing are stored in the database for sorting and analyzing From the corpus, the researcher can collect 378 declaratives and 43 interrogatives expressing deontic meanings in 50 English stories and 382 declaratives and 40 interrogatives conveying deontic expressions in 50 Vietnamese stories

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4.3 Data analysis

4.3.1 Describing the data

After extracting the data from the corpus, a descriptive method will be used at first to exploit all means and expressions of deontic modality used in English and Vietnamese declarative and interrogative sentences in terms of categories in the theoretical framework Basing on devices processed in the corpus, the author distinguishes eleven means of deontic modality within 421 declaratives and interrogatives in English and 422 declaratives and interrogatives in Vietnamese

and then, categorizes them at three different types of meanings: commissives, directives and

volitives This type of analysis is emphasized throughout the contextual translation in the stories

with various types of illocutionary forces

The researcher labels examples of declaratives and interrogatives in English and Vietnamese with the different forms Letters and numbers signal the meanings of deontic expressions and numbers indicate the story For example, ECMAux1 stands for English modal auxiliary denoting commissive meanings of the story one of 50 English stories Vietnamese examples comprise texts labeled VCMAux1 (Vietnamese modal auxiliary expressing commissive meanings of the story one of 50 Vietnamese stories.) All the stories will be clearly specified in each case in the appendixes such as the writer’s name of the stories and the year of publication

4.3.2 Comparing the two sources of data

Fisiak (1981: 2-3) explains “drawing on the findings of theoretical contrastive studies they provide a framework for the comparison of languages, selecting whatever information is necessary for a specific purpose.” According to Johansson and Hofland (1994: 25), “language comparison is of great interest in theoretical as well as applied perspectives” It reveals what is general, what is specific and what is important both for the understanding of language in general and for the study of the individual languages compared They further explain that a comparative linguistic analysis differs considerably from a contrastive linguistic analysis “A comparative study is a diachronic comparison of two or more linguistic systems with a view to classifying languages into families” It is related to the history and evolution of languages, and involves in establishing the similarities or correspondences between languages “A contrastive linguistic analysis is the comparison and contrast of the linguistic systems of two or more

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individual languages in order to bring out points of contrast as well as points of similarity between them,” and they also argue that “a contrastive linguistic study is a synchronic comparison that studies languages belonging to the same period, without paying much attention

to their histories or language families.” It is more concerned with dissimilarities than similarities

Fisiak (1981: 2) also states that contrastive analysis was used extensively in the field of second language acquisition in the 1960s and early 1970s, as a method of explaining an exhaustive account of the differences and similarities between two or more languages, providing an adequate model for the comparison, and determining how and which elements are comparable

It is expected that once the areas of potential difficulty have been mapped out through contrastive analysis, it would be possible to design language courses more efficiently

In this study, therefore, a contrastive analysis is carried out together with a qualitative analysis

in the analytical framework and a quantitative analysis from the corpus in an effort to understand how contextual variables of this corpus may influence deontic modal expressions in order to determine the similarities and differences of deontic expressing means used in English and Vietnamese stories

To compare eleven means of deontic modality with regards to the three types of meanings:

commissives, directives and volitives, the author takes the English language as the base

language and Vietnamese as the comparative language The reason for the choice is that deontic linguistic means in English have been extensively studied from different linguistic approaches

by reputed linguists in the world Thus, the researcher collects these deontic expressions in the theoretical framework to compare with Vietnamese The examples analyzed are taken from declarative and interrogative sentences in English and Vietnamese stories

The statistical calculations are made and classified by the figures for each pattern The results in English are then compared to those in Vietnamese basing on the computation of various percentages in the corpus The similarities or differences will be analyzed in details with specific data and then to indicate any conclusions

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5 Structure of the study

Apart from the introduction and conclusion, the research consists of three chapters:

The introduction presents the background for the study, aim, objectives and the scope of this

work An account of the methods and data collection is provided

Chapter one provides the preliminaries to this study by giving a brief of previous research and basic overview of the general concepts of modality and, in more details, the specific framework

of deontic modality with different types of deontic modality and deontic linguistic means in English and Vietnamese under study

Chapter two is concerned with a detailed description and comparative analysis on the two types

of deontic modality in English and Vietnamese i.e commissives and volitives based on both the

semantic and the formal aspects of modal expressions, including a systematic inventory of means available for expressing deontic attitudes in English and Vietnamese

Chapter three explores the similarities and differences in terms of syntactic and semantic

features and frequencies of occurrences of various linguistic means of expressing directives in

English and Vietnamese basing on the theoretical framework and the results of corpus data collection provided

The conclusion provides the summary of the results of the study with research implications, contributions and suggestions for future research

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1.1 Historical perspectives of modality

Like most of theoretically-based historical studies, modality has been pursued from the perspectives of both semantic and grammatical theories of linguistics The term “modality”

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 the earliest attestation in 1907 The history of English modal auxiliaries in general and of modality in particular had prestigious place in studies since the nineteenth century

Chomsky (1957) devotes much of his research to syntactic structures of modality He has researched the grounding in different perspectives on syntax more than semantics Functionally-oriented views of syntactic aspects of English modality 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 modality has mainly focused on grammaticalization

Van der Auwera & Plungian (1998) come up with the semantic map including an account of connections between lexical and grammatical categories with the aim to represent an entire

semantic area of modality and main types of modality and their relationships This is illustrated

in Fig 1.1 below:

Fig 1.1 Types of modality (Van der Auwera & Plungian, 1998: 111)

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Still in the domain of modality, a distinction between “mood” and “modality” has been proposed by Palmer (1979, 1986, 1990, 1994, 2003, 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 relevant linguistic categories Palmer (1994) sets out a general

theoretical framework of the three types of deontic modality i.e commissives, directives, and

volitives with its subtypes However, he has not analyzed any deep insight these types of

deontic modality with regard to semantic and syntactic meanings He only provides a brief account of examples of these types in English

Palmer & Facchinetti (2003) study and analyze the cross-linguistic features of modality in the collection of evidence drawn from the corpus Their works are the 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 contrastive analysis and translation theory, from historical linguistics to language acquisition They state that the great amount of naturally occurring language applied

by the corpus shows clearly comparisons between different varieties of a language and between languages as well The corpus helps them count typical words and word patterns of a specific genre

The final paper in Palmer & Facchinetti’s work is an insightful study on the interaction of tense,

aspect and modality 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 modal system in English and Greek From the corpus, they examine the factors affecting the disambiguation of modal verbs in the two languages (i) the meanings of modal verbs (ii) the form of modal verbs (interrogatives or negatives, present or past (iii) types of modal verbs (epistemic modality or agent-oriented modality) (iv) the grammatical person of the subject (an utterance interpreted in the third person in comparison with the first person) Overall, studying of the Greek data from the corpus, Palmer & Facchinetti (2003) analyze the similarities and differences as regards of semantic features of modal verbs in English and Greek

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Van der Auwera et al (2009) provide 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 modality (ii) the study of English modals (iii) the analysis of modal constructions Discussing general approaches to modal notions, the authors argue that it is important to distinguish between modality and modalization The former is a modal system based on the notions 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 sex

maniacs” (van der Auwera et al, 2009: 2), 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 in Korean and Japanese He classifies modality using the parameters “possibility” versus “necessity” and

“situational” versus “epistemic” Li (2004) compares modality types in terms of grammatical features, semantic functions, pragmatic variation, logical representation, and diachronic

development in English under a typological perspective in comparison with Chinese In his

thesis, the comparative analysis goes from lexical forms to syntactic features including negation, voices, subjects, main verbs, aspects, tenses and styles His research focuses on

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

Chinese

In Vietnamese, Nguyễn Thị Lương (1996) describes the uses of particles in questions with various 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 describe examples taken from short stories, plays, novels and recorders The criteria

to indentify the meanings of sentence particles in her research are based on Searle theory of speech act (1975) i.e., (i) propositional content, (ii) preparatory content, (iii) sincerity content and (iv) essential content She concludes that the meanings of particles are generally formed according to contexts and attitudes of the speakers in communicating

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Nguyễn Văn Hiệp (2001/ 2008) explores the semantics and syntax of modality and sentences in Vietnamese He discusses theoretical issues relating to main types of modality such as subjective and objective, deontic and epistemic modality, 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 in Vietnamese 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 modality 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 modality in general through modal verbs, adverbs and particles in English and Vietnamese However, deontic modality is not the main focus of her study

Nguyễn Thị Cẩm Thanh (2003) also compares linguistic means of expressing non-factual modality in English and Vietnamese Her research focuses on establishing similarites and differences between English and Vietnamese in terms of semantic meanings of non-factual modality Bùi Trọng Ngoãn (2004) surveys the role of modal verbs on expressing modality 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 modality in English and Vietnamese in terms of semantic and syntactic features within various types of modality However, he does not focus on linguistic means of expressing deontic modality in terms of their semantic and syntactic features

So far, there has been no research exclusively focusing on the contrastive study of linguistic means of expressing deontic modality in English and Vietnamese Thus, this dissertation is an attempt to meet such research need It is also the major contribution of this study at least at the application level

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1.2 Modality

1.2.1 Definitions and different viewpoints

Several linguists have different viewpoints of modality and used several terms to distinguish types of modality According to Halliday (1970 a, b), modality is concerned with the expression

of necessity and possibility He also claims that modality is “the speaker’s assessment of probability and predictability It is external to the content, being part of the attitude taken up by the speaker.”

A rather different view is taken by Lyons (1977: 848, 452) who defines modality as “the speaker’s opinion or attitude towards the proposition that the sentence expresses or the situation that the proposition describes.” In traditional usage, modality is applied to subsets of inflected form of verbs and is distinguished by means of term “indicative”, “imperative”, “subjunctive”, etc Lyons has chosen to respect this usage because as he says one of the advantages of doing so

is that it helps learners to draw a distinction, not only between utterances and sentences but also

between sentences that are sub-classified as declaratives, interrogatives, jussives, permissives, etc in terms of syntactic features and in terms of the mood of the main verbs For examples:

(1.1) They may go tomorrow (Lyons, 1977: 848)

(1.2) They must go tomorrow (ibid.) (1.3) They will go tomorrow (ibid.)

Chung & Temberlake (1985: 25) 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,

17

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 1.2 and in the following examples:

Modality

subjunctive imperative necessity permissive

(may/might (must/should/

can/could) have to/need)

Fig 1.2 A spatial model tense, aspect and modality (Chung & Temberlake, 1985: 47)

(1.4) Stay as long as you like (Chung & Temberlake, 1985: 47) (1.5) This medicine may/might cure you (bid.)

(1.6) You must lock the door before going out (ibid.) (1.7) They should take a rest (ibid.)

Palmer (1986) states that “modality expresses the speaker’s attitude or opinion regarding the contents of the sentence or the proposition that the sentence expresses”, and modality is considered as a linguistic feature that is realized by a variety of linguistic means such as modal

auxiliaries According to Quirk et al (1985: 219), modality may be considered as “the manner

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

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Downing and Locke (1995) have set forth modality 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: 1) states “modality has 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: 1), “modality is a valid cross language grammatical category that can be the subject of a typology study” Palmer’s definition of modality is the same as the view point of Matthews (2005: 228) He defines the term modality as “category covering either

of a kind of a typology study”

The definition of modality applied in this study is used most widely, agreeing with the view of Huddleston & Geoffrey (2002: 172) and Palmer (2003: 4): “modality is as a category of meanings which, in the verbal system, is grammaticalized by mood” In their usages, mood comprises modal auxiliaries However, expressions of modality are not limited to the verbal system There are other linguistic means of expressing modal meanings such as modal auxiliaries and lexical verbs, as well as nouns, adjectives, adverbs, idioms, particles, mood and prosody in speech

In analyzing the different meanings associated with modality linguistic means, Huddleston & Geoffrey (2002: 175-180) suggests the different expressing means of modality that have been described in flexible ways, and have been given various meanings, i.e., model of description:

any given expression of modality will have a value on each of the three factors: kind (epistemic

to deontic), strength and degree (the latter two both on a scale from weak to strong) These are

shown in Fig 1.3 as following:

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Fig 1.3 Description of modality (Huddleston & Geoffrey, 2002: 175-177)

Huddleston & Geoffrey (2002: 175-177) explain that the group of strength expresses the

speaker's strength of commitment to the truth value of a proposition and the semantic strength

of an utterance For instance, a strong modal may be weakened semantically in its context,

becoming a polite offer Their description allows for strong (1.8), medium (1.9) and weak (1.10)

expressions of modality For instance:

(1.8) It must be some kind of joke (Huddleston & Geoffrey, 2002: 179) (1.9) It should be somewhere near here (ibid.)

(1.10) It may be some conscious or subconscious nutritional knowledge at work (ibid.)

Kind is also the area of modal research that differs from descriptions The three most frequently

recognized categories are epistemic (1.11), deontic (1.12) and dynamic (1.13) modality, as in the following examples:

(1.11) You must be joking (ibid.)

(1.12) You may go now (ibid.)

(1.13) Details are easily gained if you can speak and read French (ibid.)

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The third group of modality described by Huddleston & Geoffrey (2002) is degree where they

discuss the problem of identifying modal meaning clearly A modal element may be difficult to recognize because it does not necessarily change the meaning of an expression greatly For example (1.14) is unmodalized, (1.15) expresses low degree modality

(1.14) She is one year old tomorrow (ibid.) (1.15) She will be one year old tomorrow (ibid.)

Like strength, degree of modality can also be expressed on a scale from strong to weak These

categories are often subdivided further into possibilities, inference and necessity for epistemic; volitions, necessity, predictions and possibilities for deontic; and abilities, possibilities, predictions, necessity and habits for dynamic However, since this research focuses on deontic expressing means, other classifications of modality (epistemic, dynamic) perhaps informed by cross-linguistic thinking, may be needed when looking at a wider range of modal expressions and beyond the scope of the study

So far, many different definitions and viewpoints of modality have been mentioned in English However, until now there have not been any definitions of modality proposed in Vietnamese According to Nguyễn Văn Hiệp (2008: 86), most Vietnamese researchers set out definition of modality basing on theory of modality in English, and most of them define modality in Vietnamese from Lyons’ definition of modality (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 or the situation that the proposition describes.)

Vietnamese researchers like Nguyễn Văn Hiệp (2001, 2008), Ngũ Thiện Hùng (2003), Phạm Thị Ly (2003), Nguyễn Thị Cẩm Thanh (2003) have chosen to use this definition because in Vietnamese, the modal meanings are expressed with a system of modal verbs or particles that are always meaningful, as shown in the following examples:

(1.16) Nam sẽ lấy vợ (Nguyễn Văn Hiệp, 2008: 87) (1.17) Có lẽ Nam sẽ lấy vợ (ibid.)

(1.18) Nam, lấy vợ đi! (ibid.) (1.19) Gì thì gì, Nam cũng sẽ lấy vợ (ibid.) (1.20) Nam sẽ lấy vợ à? (ibid.)

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In declarative (1.16), the speaker wants to inform what he believes or claims as a fact (i.e Nam will get married) Example (1.17) is considered as the speakers’ judgment (i.e whether Nam will get married or not) The declarative (1.18) expresses the speaker's strength of commitment

to the truth value of an utterance as a suggestion that Nam should get married Example (1.19)

declares an obvious fact that Nam will get married regardless of other agents, and (1.20) expresses the speaker’s attitude with a surprise An important distinction among these examples

is that modal expressions are wholly determined by the speaker’s meanings or subjunctive attitudes in the use of the modal auxiliaries, modal words, etc with particles

1.2.2 Types of modality

A modality type is a set of modal meanings attributed to an identical semantic basis In the studies of modality, linguists have identified epistemic modality, deontic modality (Lyons,

1977), dynamic modality (Palmer, 1986, 2001, 1990), and agent-oriented modality (Bybee et

al., 1994), etc The last two types of modality have been reformed and renamed by van der

Auwera & Plungian (1998) as participant-internal modality and participant-external modality

Lyons (1977) uses the term ‘epistemic modality’ to refer to the type of knowledge the speaker

is going to say, and ‘deontic modality’ to indicate the speaker’s views or stance towards what he/she is saying Coates (1983) states that the term ‘attitude’ has been expanded into that of

‘subjectivity’ understood as “subject or speaker’s involvement” in order to emphasize both types of modality:

“Subjectivity is a matter of speaker’s, or more generally, of the illocutionary agent’s involvement of himself in the utterance In the case of deontic modality it is his will and authority that is involved But it both cases it is the locutionary agent who is the source of the modality” (Coates, 1983: 111)

Thus, it can be said that modality is concerned with the expression of the speaker’s involvement towards the propositional content of an utterance, whether in form of agency or subjective

Quirk et al (1985: 112) discuss modality as “constraining factors of meaning” namely in terms

of intrinsic and extrinsic modality Intrinsic modality indicates ‘permission’, ‘obligation’ and

‘volition’ that refer to deontic (using according to Lyons’, Palmer’s and Downing & Locke’s terminology) Extrinsic modality signifies ‘possibility’, ‘necessity’, and ‘prediction’ that imply epistemic (using according to Lyons’, Palmer’s and Downing & Locke’s term)

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Dik (1989), who bases his observations on previous work by Hengeveld (1987, 1988), suggests

three types of modality: (i) inherent modality, which denotes “relations like ‘ability’ and

‘willingness’ between a participant and the realization of the state of affairs in which he is

involved”; (ii) objective modality, which signals the speaker’s evaluation of the likelihood of occurrence of a state of affairs (in terms of certainty or obligation); (iii) subjective modality,

which expresses the speaker’s personal commitment to the truth of what he says

Halliday (1994: 357) differentiates modality types further i.e., (i) epistemic modality (which he labels modalization) conveys either probability or possibility; (ii) deontic modality (what he calls modulation) expresses either obligation or inclination Modalization is typically realized as indicative, while modulation is considered as imperative; (iii) dynamic modality (what he calls

ability/ potentiality) However, he claims that ability/ potentiality is one further category that lies outside the epistemic - deontic system and that corresponds to inherent modality in Dik’s division

The term ‘dynamic’ is from von Wright (1951: 28), who proposes it as a type of modalit y

concerned with ‘ability and disposition’ Nevertheless, many other linguists like Steele et al

(198: 38), Lyons (1977: 452) and Halliday (1994: 357) do not agree with this viewpoint Palmer (1979: 36-37) takes an open attitude towards it He argues that modality definition range far

beyond Lyons’ notion and suggests that it is reasonable to recognize the third type, dynamic

modality that “refers to events that are not actualized, events that have not taken place but are

merely potential.”

Palmer (1986: 102, 1990: 36, 2001: 10, 2003: 9) identifies dynamic modality as “what is possible or necessary in the circumstance.” Therefore, it can be seen that Palmer’s terms of dynamic modality covers a wide scope of meanings However, in this study the researcher only

focuses on deontic modality

The three main types of modality that will be discussed in this study are:

(1.21) Epistemic: They may/must be in the office (Palmer, 2003: 9) (1.22) Deontic: They can/must come in now (ibid.)

(1.23) Dynamic: They can run very fast (ibid.)

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Table 1.1 below summaries the basic types of modality on which the distinctions are

principally drawn by Coat (1983), van der Auwera & Plungian (1998), Quirk et al (1985), Biber et al (1999), Palmer (2001), and Huddleston & Geoffrey et al (2002)

Epistemic modality

Deontic necessity

Deontic possibility

Ability Obligation Permission Willingness

or Volition

Participant- internal

Participant-external Participant- internal

Participant-external

Propositional modality Event modality

Palmer (2001) Evidental Epistemic Dynamic Deontic Dynamic

Epistemic

& Geoffrey

et al (2002)

Table 1.1 Types of modality (Source: Depraetere & Reed, 2006: 280)

Based on the above classification, Vietnamese linguists (Nguyễn Văn Hiệp (2001, 2008), Ngũ Thiện Hùng (2003), Phạm Thị Ly (2003), Nguyễn Thị Cẩm Thanh (2003), Bùi Trọng Ngoãn

(2004)) propose three main types of modality for Vietnamese as tình thái nhận thức (epistemic modality) and tình thái chức phận/ đạo nghĩa (deontic modality) and tình thái trạng huống (dynamic modality), as illustrated by (1.23), (1.24) and (1.25) below:

(1.23) Nó có thể uống rượu (epistemic modality) (Nguyễn Văn Hiệp, 2008: 113) (1.24) Nó được phép uống rượu (deontic modality) (ibid.)

(1.25) Nó biết uống rượu (dynamic modality) (ibid.)

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This is a traditional classification and it is commonly applied in linguistics as Palmer (2004) states This study is based on this classical classification with the main focus on deontic modality Therefore, my efforts only concentrate on deontic modality with the purpose to describe and analyze the linguistic means of deontic modality throughout deontic modal verbs, hedge verbs, performative verbs, etc in English and Vietnamese These will be mentioned in details in the next Chapters

1.3 Deontic modality

1.3.1 Definitions and various viewpoints

The term “deontic” is derived from the Greek word déon that means “binding or duty.” (Li,

2004: 13) According to van der Auwera & Plungian (1998: 81), the term deontic modality “is a cover term for a range of semantic notions such as ability, possibility, hypothetically, obligation, and imperative meaning.” It “refers to circumstances that are external to the participant as some person(s), often the speaker, and/or as some social or ethical norms permitting or obliging the participant to engage in the state of affairs” As suggested by the definition, deontic modality is “sub domain or special case of participant external modality.” It

is a hyponym and a participant external a super-ordinate or hyperonym In the deontic domain, permission is deontic possibility, as exemplified by (1.26) and obligation deontic necessity as shown in (1.27) below:

(1.26) John may leave now (van der Auwera & Plungian, 1998: 81) (1.27) John must leave now (ibid.)

Deontic modality, as Lyons (1977: 823) describes, “is concerned with the necessity or possibility of acts performed by morally responsible agents” Although the term “necessity” and

“possibility” appear in Lyons’ definition, “obligation” and “permission” are the main labels used in his discussion Deontic modality can be exemplified by (1.28), which can be interpreted

as “I (hereby) permit you to open the door” and (1.29) can be paraphrased as “I (hereby) impose

upon you the obligation to open the door

(1.28) You may open the door (Lyons 1977: 832) (1.29) You must open the door (ibid.)

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According to Palmer (1986), “deontic” is used in a wide sense to include those types of

modality that are characterized by Jespersen (1909) as “containing an element of will” It is

obvious, however, that the meanings associated with deontic modality are very different from those of epistemic modality The latter is concerned with belief, knowledge, truth, etc in relation to proposition, whereas the former is concerned with action, by others and by the speaker himself It might well be argued that there are two quite distinct categories For instance:

(1.30) In English He will come tomorrow (Palmer, 1986: 96)

(1.31) In Vietnamese Anh ta sẽ đến trong ngày mai (Nguyễn văn Hiệp 2008: 113)

These examples are understood as actions of obligations or promises that “he will come”

As Nguyễn văn Hiệp (2008: 117) states, Vietnamese linguists consider deontic modality based

on Lyons’ definition: “deontic modality is concerned with the necessity or possibility of acts performed by morally responsible agents.” According to Lyons’ definition, deontic modality expresses obligatives or prohibitives and permissives or ability For example:

(1.32) Chị có thể thức đến bao lâu tùy ý chị (Nguyễn văn Hiệp 2008: 113) (You can stay up as long as you want.)

(1.33) Con phải đi học (ibid.) (You must go to school.)

Example (1.32) implies that the hearer can do the action as she/he wants Example (1.33) is a request that expresses the obligative of a mother for a child with the utterance the hearer must

do the action “going to school” This expresses the intention of the speaker to the hearer

Discussing deontic modality in Vietnamese, Duffield (1999: 4-5) claims that it is important to

highlight one further distinction referring to the English modal auxiliary can that can be understood in terms of deontic meanings i.e., được/ được phép This is syntactically

distinguished: the deontic version appearing, like English, in preverbal position, the abilitative version clause-finally, as illustrated in (1.33) below:

(1.33) Ông Quang được phép mua cái nhà (Duffield, 1999: 4-5) (Quang was allowed to buy a house.) - deontic modality (permission)

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In summary, in this part, the author has discussed major viewpoints on the definitions of the linguists It can be said that their opinions are practical and meaningful, and it is indeed necessary for our study on deontic modality Judging from the various works on deontic modality quoted throughout the research, deontic modality seems to be what one might consider

to be the truly basic type of modality This is not surprising as Bybee et al (1994: 195) states:

“Deontic modality is considered as a functional analysis of the communicative needs language that fulfill as a tool of social interaction and, clearly shows the expression of laying an obligation or granting a permission is the basis for formulating social norms

of various kinds, the existence of which is in turn the prerequisite for the survival and well-being of a collective social entity It thus seems extremely unlikely that a language would not possess at least some sort of very basic deontic system, a claim to which there is, to our knowledge, no counter-evidence.”

Hence, in this study, the author has attempted to provide a descriptive account of expressing deontic means in terms of syntactic and semantic features basing on linguists’ theoretical background proposed by Palmer (1994: 181) and Lyons (1977) Because as Nuyts (1993: 933- 969) states, their works are widely accepted and acknowledged as the most semantically fundamental modality, and the most important factor is that Palmer’s and Lyons’ theoretical

framework for deontic modality (commissives, volitives and directives) have not been studied in

details in comparison with Vietnamese

1.3.2 Types of deontic modality

Lyons (1977: 792-3) suggests the types of deontic modality as a distinction between subjective

and objective modality Nevertheless, he has not pointed out any details about this distinction

According to an early opinion of his, in terms of the source or cause of the obligation and permission, it is possible to distinguish different types of deontic modality This distinction is called “deontic source” that is referred to the speaker In this case, the deontic modality is

considered as subjective In the cases of conveying to somebody else, an institution, moral or

social norms, the deontic modality is considered as objective However, with the main purpose

of our study, and with the usage of corpus-based method, the applying Lyons’ classification can not really be exploited all linguistic means on deontic modality It is extremely difficult to

distinct subjective or objective deontic modality In this study, the theoretical framework for

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classification of deontic modality by Palmer (1986: 95-98, 1994: 181) is chosen because Palmer’s classification of deontic modality is quite clear, varied, realistic and it can be applied widely in linguistics in particular and over the world in general; and one of the most important factors of this classification is that it has not been explored in details in previous works in both English and Vietnamese languages Thus, it would be helpful to exemplify them clearly here, and a classification of Palmer on deontic modality can be divided into three types i.e.,

commissives, volitives with the two sub-types (imprecatives and optatives), and directives with the seven sub-types (deliberatives, imperatives, jussives, obligatives, permissives, precatives and prohibitives), as illustrated in Table 1.2 below:

 Deliberative: asks whether something

should be done, e.g Should we go to

the market?

 Imperative: expressing commands,

e.g Pass me the salt!

 Jussive: indicates commands, permission or agreement with a

request, e.g Why don't you pass me

the salt

 Obligative: signals the speaker’s

estimation of the necessity, e.g You

must/have to come tomorrow

 Permissive: indicates that the action is

permitted, e.g You may come inside

 Precative: signifies requests, e.g Will

you pass me the salt?

 Prohibitive: indicates that the action

of the verb is not permitted, e.g You

can't come in! or Don’t you go?

Volitives:

desires, wishes or fears

 Imprecative: indicates a desire for a

threatening event to occur, e.g May he

lose the race

 Optative: indicates wishing or hoping

for an event to occur, e.g I hope I win

the race

Table 1.2 Palmer’s theoretical framework for deontic modality (1986: 95-98, 1994: 181)

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Some Vietnamese linguists (Nguyễn Văn Độ, 2004: 241-285, Nguyễn Văn Hiệp, 2008: 77-79) also adopt the classification of Palmer and can apply effectively to account for Vietnamese modality They offer three most popular types of Vietnamese deontic modality basing on

Palmer’s theory i.e tình thái cam kết/ hứa hẹn (commissive modality), tình thái cầu khiến (directive modality) (with in the seven sub-types i.e yêu cầu (deliberatives), mệnh lệnh (imperatives), khích lệ (jussives), ép buộc (obligatives), cho phép (permissives), khẩn cầu (precatives), cấm đoán (prohibitives) and tình thái ý nguyện (volitive modality) within the two sub-types i.e không mong muốn/ nguyền rủa (imprecatives) and ước vọng/ mong mỏi

(optatives) Types of deontic modality in English and Vietnamese are described and analyzed in details in 1.4 and 1.5 as follows:

1.4 Types of deontic modality in English

1.4.1 Commissives

According to Palmer (1994: 181), commissives “connote the speaker's expressed commitment such as a promise or a threat, to bring about the proposition expressed by the utterance”, as in example (1.34) below:

(1.34) All elections shall take place on schedule (Palmer, 1994: 181)

The above example is understood as the speaker own commitment to avoid delays Thus, this statement is considered as a commitment

Commissives are defined by Searle (1983: 166) as “where we commit ourselves to doing things”, i.e., promises and threats (and the only difference among hearer’s meanings seems to

be in what the hearer wants) These are rarely expressed by a specific grammatical form and are

not stricted with deontic, though in English shall with 2nd and 3rd forms are clear For example:

(1.35) You shall go to the circus (Searle, 1983: 166) (1.36) John shall have the book tomorrow (ibid.)

Here the speaker commits himself to ensuring that the event takes place: “he promises to

arrange that the person addressed will go to the circus and that John will receive the book.”

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Quirk et al (1985: 230) also explain that shall is used with 2nd or 3rd person subjects specifically signals a way of expressing the speaker’s promise as in (1.37), either in granting a favour or a threat, as exemplified by (1.38) as follows:

(1.37) She shall get her money as soon as she has earned it (Quirk et al., 1985: 230) (1.38) He shall be punished if he disobeys (ibid.)

Palmer (1986: 106) claims that English also uses shall in the interrogative This is different

again, for although it is formally the interrogative of a commissive (where we commit ourselves

to do something), it neither asks for information nor a request, a commitment from the hearer:

Shall I come in? would not mean either “Is it the case that I promise to come in?” or “Do you

promise that I shall come in?”

1.4.2 Directives

Directives are defined as “attempts by the speaker to get the hearer to do something.” (Palmer, 1986: 97) Directive modality “is deontic modality that connotes the speaker’s degree of requirement of conformity to the proposition expressed by an utterance” (Palmer, 2001: 71) Longer lists of directive speech acts have been proposed by Searle (1976, 1979) However, these lists are not particularly relevant to my purposes The author will rather adopt the definition and the classification of Palmer (1994: 181) as mentioned i.e., a directive “is a term that covers a request, command, prohibition, instruction and the like.” And seven sub-types of directives are described in details as follows:

1.4.2.1 Deliberatives

A deliberative is a type of directives that “asks whether the speaker should do something.” e.g

“Should I go to the market?” (Palmer, 1994: 181) According to Bielsa (1988: 146), a

deliberative is “directive mood which signals the speaker’s request for instruction from the addressee as to whether to do the proposition expressed in the utterance.” For instance:

(1.39) Shall I water the grass? (Bielsa, 1988: 146)