NGHIÊN cứu về CHUYỂN DI NGỮ DỤNG TIÊU cực TRONG HÀNH ĐỘNG NGÔN từ PHÀN nàn của NGƯỜI VIỆT NAM học TIẾNG ANH

Although L2 pragmatic competence is essential in intercultural communication, many studies show that most of language learners, even those with advanced grammatical competence, lack necessary knowledge of performing speech acts in the target language. Lack of L2 pragmatic knowledge has led to pragmatic failure or error, which is considered to have more serious consequences than grammatical errors because native speakers tend to see pragmatic errors as offensive and rude rather than simply as demonstrating lack of knowledge. This can lead to misjudgment or miscommunication between them and native speakers. Moreover, the findings of many studies indicate that pragmatic failure or errors are to a large extent caused by the interference of the learners’ pragmatic knowledge in their native language with their performance in the target language, or in other words, the negative pragmatic transfer. Many learners, in performing speech acts in the target language, translate social norms of their native culture or linguistic expressions of their native language into their L2 performance, which are, in most cases, not seen appropriate by native speakers. This study investigates the negative pragmatic transfer in the performance of the facethreatening act of complaining by Vietnamese EFL learners at both pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic level. Pragmalinguistically, the study is aimed at detecting the occurrences of negative transfer in learners’ choices of complaint strategies, external modifications and internal modifications. Sociopragmatically, it seeks to examine the impact of learners’ L1based perceptions of two contextual factors, including social power (P) and social distance (D), on learners’ realization of the speech act of complaining in the target language. The data were collected via Discourse Completion Test (DCT) questionnaires. The DCT questionnaire was comprised of 6 situations that were picked up based on the results of Metapragmatic Questionnaire (MPQ) on 22 native speakers of English. DCT questionnaires were then administered to 20 native speakers of Vietnamese, 20 native speakers of English, and 20 Vietnamese learners of English, whose English proficiency was assessed as intermediate. The findings of the study have revealed the evidences of negative pragmatic transfer in learners’ interlanguage complaints. At the pragmalinguistic level, negative transfer was most strikingly evident when learners complained to people of lower and equal status. While native speakers of English managed to keep their complaints at a certain level of indirectness across power contexts, learners, just like native speakers of Vietnamese, tended to be very direct and explicit in complaining in higher and equal power contexts. They quite frequently opted for the most direct strategies on the scale and perhaps the most avoided strategies by native speakers of English – Strategy 7 (Explicit Blame on Behavior) and Strategy 8 (Explicit Blame on Person). Another occurrence of negative pragmalinguistic transfer was seen in learners’ modest use of external modifiers in their complaints. It seemed that both native speakers of Vietnamese and learners did not support their complaints as well as native speakers of English. This might have made their complaints sound straight, explicit and even confronting according to the English speakers’ perceptions. At the sociopragmatic level, Vietnamese learners of English appeared to negatively translate their L1 emphasis of power differences into their IL performance. They may have been influenced by their L1based belief that being polite means highlighting the status differences where they actually exist, whereas native speakers of English may think differently; being polite means denying the power differences even when they actually exist. In highlighting the power differences like that, learners might be judged as insincere, bossy or even rude by the other interlocutors in intercultural communication. The main findings of the study, therefore, provided language teachers, educators and learners with precious information about the possible interferences of L1 with IL performance. This will surely raise their awareness of developing learners’ L2 pragmatic knowledge and pragmatic competence in the English language teaching and learning.

Although L2 pragmatic competence is essential in intercultural communication, manystudies show that most of language learners, even those with advanced grammaticalcompetence, lack necessary knowledge of performing speech acts in the target language Lack

of L2 pragmatic knowledge has led to pragmatic failure or error, which is considered to havemore serious consequences than grammatical errors because native speakers tend to seepragmatic errors as offensive and rude rather than simply as demonstrating lack of knowledge.This can lead to misjudgment or miscommunication between them and native speakers.Moreover, the findings of many studies indicate that pragmatic failure or errors are to a largeextent caused by the interference of the learners’ pragmatic knowledge in their nativelanguage with their performance in the target language, or in other words, the negativepragmatic transfer Many learners, in performing speech acts in the target language, translatesocial norms of their native culture or linguistic expressions of their native language into theirL2 performance, which are, in most cases, not seen appropriate by native speakers

This study investigates the negative pragmatic transfer in the performance of the threatening act of complaining by Vietnamese EFL learners at both pragmalinguistic andsociopragmatic level Pragmalinguistically, the study is aimed at detecting the occurrences ofnegative transfer in learners’ choices of complaint strategies, external modifications andinternal modifications Sociopragmatically, it seeks to examine the impact of learners’ L1-based perceptions of two contextual factors, including social power (P) and social distance(D), on learners’ realization of the speech act of complaining in the target language The datawere collected via Discourse Completion Test (DCT) questionnaires The DCT questionnairewas comprised of 6 situations that were picked up based on the results of MetapragmaticQuestionnaire (MPQ) on 22 native speakers of English DCT questionnaires were thenadministered to 20 native speakers of Vietnamese, 20 native speakers of English, and 20Vietnamese learners of English, whose English proficiency was assessed as intermediate

face-The findings of the study have revealed the evidences of negative pragmatic transfer inlearners’ interlanguage complaints At the pragmalinguistic level, negative transfer was moststrikingly evident when learners complained to people of lower and equal status While native

speakers of English managed to keep their complaints at a certain level of indirectness acrosspower contexts, learners, just like native speakers of Vietnamese, tended to be very direct andexplicit in complaining in higher and equal power contexts They quite frequently opted forthe most direct strategies on the scale and perhaps the most avoided strategies by nativespeakers of English – Strategy 7 (Explicit Blame on Behavior) and Strategy 8 (Explicit Blame

on Person) Another occurrence of negative pragmalinguistic transfer was seen in learners’modest use of external modifiers in their complaints It seemed that both native speakers ofVietnamese and learners did not support their complaints as well as native speakers ofEnglish This might have made their complaints sound straight, explicit and even confrontingaccording to the English speakers’ perceptions At the sociopragmatic level, Vietnameselearners of English appeared to negatively translate their L1 emphasis of power differencesinto their IL performance They may have been influenced by their L1-based belief that beingpolite means highlighting the status differences where they actually exist, whereas nativespeakers of English may think differently; being polite means denying the power differenceseven when they actually exist In highlighting the power differences like that, learners might

be judged as insincere, bossy or even rude by the other interlocutors in interculturalcommunication The main findings of the study, therefore, provided language teachers,educators and learners with precious information about the possible interferences of L1 with

IL performance This will surely raise their awareness of developing learners’ L2 pragmaticknowledge and pragmatic competence in the English language teaching and learning

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Candidate’s statement i

Acknowledgement ii

Abstract iii

Table of Contents v

List of Abbreviations viii

List of Tables ix

List of Figures x

PART A: INTRODUCTION 1

1 Rationale 1

2 Aims and scope of the study 2

3 Research questions 3

4 Method of the study 3

5 Organization of the study 4

PART B: DEVELOPMENT 5

CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW 5

1.1 Pragmatics 5

1.2 Speech Act Theory 6

1.3 Politeness Theories 10

1.3.1 Brown and Levinson’s Notion of Face 10

1.3.2 Social Variables 12

1.4 Interlanguage Pragmatics 14

1.5 Pragmatic Competence and Pragmatic Failure 15

1.5.1 Pragmatic competence 15

1.5.2 Pragmatic failure 16

1.6 Pragmatic Transfer in Interlanguage Pragmatics 19

1.7 Negative Pragmatic Transfer 20

1.7.1 Negative Pragmalinguistic Transfer 21

1.7.2 Negative Sociopragmatic Transfer 24

1.8 The Speech Act of Complaint 26

1.9 Modifications 30

1.10 Studies on Complaints by EFL learners 30

CHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGY 36

2.1 Research Questions 36

2.2 Participants 36

2.3 Data Collection Methods 37

2.4 Data Collection Instruments 39

2.4.1 Social variables manipulated in data collection instruments 39

2.4.2 The content of the instruments 41

2.5 Data collection procedure 42

2.6 Results of the MPQ 42

2.6.1 The interpretation of the scores 44

2.6.2 Six selected situations for the DCT 44

2.7 Analytical framework 45

2.7.1 Complaint strategies 45

2.7.2 External modifications 46

2.7.3 Internal modifications 47

CHAPTER 3: RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS 49

3.1 Negative Pragmalinguistic Transfer 49

3.1.1 In the choice of complaint strategies 49

3.1.1.1 In higher power context (+P) 49

3.1.1.2 In lower power context (-P) 51

3.1.1.3 In equal power context (=P) 52

3.1.1.4 In unfamiliar context (+D) 54

3.1.1.5 In familiar context (-D) 55

3.1.2 In the choice of external modifications 56

3.1.2.1 In different power contexts (+P, =P, -P) 56

3.1.2.2 In different distance contexts (+D, -D) 58

3.1.3 In the choice of internal modifications 59

3.1.3.1 In different power contexts (+P, =P, -P) 59

3.1.3.2 In different distance contexts (+D, -D) 61

3.1.4 Summary 62

3.2 Negative Sociopragmatic Transfer 63

3.2.1 With regard to social power (P) 63

3.2.1.1 In the choice of complaint strategies 63

3.2.1.2 In the choice of external modifications 65

3.2.1.3 In the choice of internal modifications 66

3.2.2 With regard to social distance (D) 67

3.2.2.1 In the choice of complaint strategies 67

3.2.2.2 In the choice of external modifications 68

3.2.2.3 In the choice of internal modifications 69

3.2.3 Summary 70

PART C: CONCLUSION 71

1 Conclusions 71

1.1 Negative pragmalinguistic transfer 71

1.2 Negative sociopragmatic transfer 72

2 Implications 73

3 Limitations and suggestions for further study 74

REFERENCES 75

APPENDIXES I

Appendix 1: Metapragmatic Questionnaire (MPQ) I Appendix 2A: Discourse Completion Task (DCT) (English Version) VI Appendix 2B: Discourse Completion Task (DCT) (Vietnamese Version) IX

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

SLA Second Language Acquisition

CCP Cross-Cultural Pragmatics

CP Contrastive Pragmatics

ILP Interlanguage Pragmatics

DCT Discourse Completion Test

MPQ Metapragmatic Questionnaire

EFL English as a Foreign Language

ENSs Native speakers of English

VLs Vietnamese learners of English

VNSs Native speakers of Vietnamese

LIST OF TABLES

Table a : Assessment of social variables by native speakers of EnglishTable b : Assessment of social variables by Vietnamese learners of EnglishTable 1 : Choice of complaint strategies with respect to +P

Table 2 : Choice of complaint strategies with respect to –P

Table 3 : Choice of complaint strategies with respect to =P

Table 4 : Choice of complaint strategies with respect to +D

Table 5 :Choice of complaint strategies with respect to –D

Table 6 : Choice of external modification with respect to P

Table 7 : Choice of external modification with respect to D

Table 8 : Choice of internal modification with respect to P

Table 9 : Choice of downgraders with respect to P

Table 10 : Choice of upgraders with respect to P

Table 11 : Choice of internal modification with respect to D

Table 12 : Choice of downgraders with respect to D

Table 13 : Choice of upgraders with respect to D

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1 : Choice of complaint strategies with respect to +P

Figure 2 : Choice of complaint strategies with respect to –P

Figure 3 : Choice of complaint strategies with respect to =P

Figure 4 : Choice of complaint strategies with respect to +D

Figure 5 : Choice of complaint strategies with respect to -D

Figure 6 : English speakers’ choice of complaint strategies across PFigure 7 : Vietnamese speakers’ choice of complaint strategies across PFigure 8 : Learners’ choice of complaint strategies across P

Figure 9 : Choice of external modifications across P

Figure 10 : Choice of downgraders across P

Figure 11 : Choice of upgraders across P

Figure 12 : English speakers’ choice of complaint strategies across D Figure 13 : Vietnamese speakers’ choice of complaint strategies across DFigure 14 : Learners’ choice of complaint strategies across D

Figure 15 : Choice of external modifications across D

Figure 16 : Choice of downgraders across D

Figure 17 : Choice of upgraders across D

PART A INTRODUCTION

1 Rationale

The nonstop growing globalization trends have gradually turned the world into a called “Global Village”, where people from different backgrounds live, study, work andcommunicate together Such a need for intercultural communication has led to the increasingdominance of the English language, which has always been referred to as an internationallanguage of business, commerce and education The English language teaching and learninghas accordingly enjoyed more attention than ever before and undergone significant changes tomeet learners’ novel demands It is now more important for a learner to become a competentuser of English in real communication than to be a master of English grammar rules andstructures for reading and translation as in the past Correspondingly, there has been a steadyshift of focus in the English language teaching from building up learners’ grammaticalcompetence to developing their pragmatic competence Pragmatic competence, as noted byKasper (1997), is “knowledge of communicative action and how to carry it out, and the ability

so-to use language appropriately according so-to context” However, intercultural communicationinvolves interlocutors with diverse sociocultural norms and linguistic conventions, and thus, aclash of perceptions of appropriateness in communication is very likely unavoidable, whichalso means that miscommunication in intercultural contexts can occur Interculturalmiscommunication can be attributed to many causes, among which are learners’ incompleteunderstandings of the other interlocutors’ sociocultural values together with learners’ fallingback on their L1 norms in realizing speech acts in communication

This assumption has interested linguistic researchers and educators a lot, and hasdrawn more of their attention to a new SLA discipline that studies learners’ enactment oflinguistic action in the second language, namely interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) ILP is still ayoung discipline, which as claimed by Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper (1989), is needed inorder to discover “how learners do things with words in a second language” (p.9) ILP focuses

on linguistic actions, speech acts and the realization by learners to understand what mightinterfere with a learner’s comprehension and production of pragmatic meaning It is, thus,

interested in identifying the obstacles to or failures of learners’ appropriate production ofpragmatics Pragmatic transfer, among some other concerns, can be seen as the major focus ofILP studies Studies on pragmatic transfer, especially negative pragmatic transfer, examine theinfluence of learners’ L1-based perceptions of politeness and appropriateness and their L1performance of a speech act on their realization of the same speech act in L2, which mightcause pragmatic failure Studies on pragmatic transfer, hence, will provide teachers andlearners with precious knowledge about the pragmatic errors learners might make inintercultural communication and help them find ways to be more appropriate, polite andpragmatically competent in intercultural contexts

Pragmatic transfer has received much interest worldwide with a wide range of studies

on the realization of such speech acts as apologies, requests, complaints, chastisement, orcompliments by Japanese, Turkish, German, Arabian, Danish, Thai EFL learners and so on.However, the number of studies on pragmatic transfer by Vietnamese EFL is very modest.Therefore, more studies on this issue are in need in order to promote Vietnamese teachers andlearners’ understanding of the possible influence of L1 on learners’ interlanguageperformance

As a response to the need to enrich the literature about the occurrences of pragmatictransfer by Vietnamese learners, this study investigates the negative pragmatic transfer in theperformance of the face-threatening act of complaining by Vietnamese EFL learners and thesocial factors that lead to the negative transfer Negative pragmatic transfer is chosen for thestudy because negative transfer, not positive transfer, deals with the inappropriate translation

of L1 norms into interlanguage performance and it is considered as one of the main causes oflearners’ pragmatic failures Besides, complaining is picked up as the head act in investigation

as complaining is an act that can hardly be avoided in everyday communication but it is verylikely to put both the speaker and the hearer at risk of losing their faces unless the complaint ismade with caution

2 Aims and scope of the study

The study aims to find out the evidence of negative pragmatic transfer in theperformance of complaints by Vietnamese EFL learners In other words, it will examine the

extent to which learners’ L1 pragmatic knowledge of complaining interferes with theirperformance of the speech act in English The negative transfer will be investigated at twolevels: pragmalinguistic transfer and sociopragmatic transfer At the pragmalinguistic level,the study seeks information about the extent to which negative transfer occurs in the learners’preferences for complaint strategies, external modifications and internal modifications At thesociopragmatic level, the impact of learners’ L1 perceptions on their choices of complaintstrategies, external and internal modifications will be examined

The study is then limited to the investigation of negative transfer seen in theperformance of complaining speech act only Moreover, since the study focuses on theinfluence of social factors, the Vietnamese learners who are to be chosen as informants will be

at the same language proficiency

3 Research questions

The study seeks answer to the following questions:

(1) To what extent is negative pragmalinguistic transfer evident in the performance ofcomplaints by Vietnamese EFL learners in the context of the study?

(2) To what extent is negative sociopragmatic transfer evident in the performance ofcomplaints by Vietnamese EFL learners in the context of the study?

4 Method of the study

In this study data were collected via Metapragmatic Questionnaires (MPQ) andDiscourse Completion Task (DCT) The MPQ is a questionnaire in which informants, whowere native speakers of English and Vietnamese learners of English, were asked to assess the

15 given situations based on 3 criteria, namely relative social power, relative social distanceand ranking of imposition on the hearer Out of 15 given situations, 6 situations were selectedfor the DCT questionnaires These 6 situations must satisfy the constellation of contextualfactors, including social power and social distance The DCT questionnaires were thenadministered to three groups of participants: 20 native speakers of English, 20 native speakers

of Vietnamese and 20 Vietnamese learners of English; all the learners are at intermediateproficiency level The DCT questionnaires were translated into Vietnamese for the group ofVietnamese speakers and an online DCT questionnaire version was created for the group of

English speakers The data from DCT were then analyzed by calculating frequency of groups’use of complaint strategies, external and internal modifications

5 Organization of the study

This study is divided into five chapters as follows:

Chapter 1 presents an overview of the study in which the rationale for the research, the

aims and scope of the study, the research questions, and the methods of the study as well asthe organization of the study were briefly presented

Chapter 2 reviews the theoretical issues relevant to the study including speech acts and

the speech act of complaining Then, the notions of politeness and indirectness in complaining

as well as some previous studies on complaining are discussed

Chapter 3 discusses issues of methodology and outlines the study design, data

collection instruments, procedure of data collection, and analytical framework

Chapter 4 presents the data analysis and discusses the findings on the negative

pragmatic transfer on the choices of complaint strategies, external modifications and internalmodifications at the pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic level

Chapter 5 provides an overview of major findings and interpretations, implications,

limitations of the study and suggestions for further research

PART B DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW

The purpose of this chapter is to provide information pertaining to this thesis, whichwas obtained from reviewing the related literature and studies It begins with the overview ofpragmatics and main concerns of pragmatics, including speech act theory, politeness theoryand social variables P, D and R, and then some issues of interlanguage pragmatics, moststrikingly negative pragmatic transfer, will be discussed Finally, literature on the FTA ofcomplaining and related studies on IL complaints by EFL learners will be reviewed

1.1 Pragmatics

Pragmatics, as compared to syntax and semantics, is a relatively new discipline in thehistory of linguistics and philosophy Morris (1938) defined pragmatics as a branch ofsemiotics, i.e the study of signs (cited in Schiffrin 1994, p 191) He also distinguished the

three ways of studying signs: syntax is the study of formal relations of signs to one another,

semantics is the study of how signs are related to the objects to which they are applicable,

whereas pragmatics is the study of the relations of signs to interpreters or users Another way

of distinction was later provided by Levinson (1983), in which he claimed that syntax is “the study of combinatorial properties of words and their parts”, semantics is “the study of meaning”, and pragmatics, on the other hand, comprises “the study of language usage” (p 5,

cited in Trosborg 1995) These distinctions signify that pragmatics copes with how thelinguistic signs or expressions are related to their users or interpreters Similarly, Yule (1996)shared the same view that the relationship between language usage and users is central topragmatics As he put it, “pragmatics is concerned with the study of meaning ascommunicated by a speaker (or a writer) and interpreted by a listener (or reader) It has,consequently, more to do with the analysis of what people mean by their utterances than whatthe words or phrases in those utterances might mean by themselves” (cited in Minh 2005, p.6) This definition distinguishes between “semantic meaning”, which means “a property ofexpressions in a given language (What does X mean?), and “pragmatic meaning”, which is

“relative to a speaker or user of the language” (What did you mean by X?) (Leech 1983, p 6;cited in Trosborg, 1995, p 6)

A breakthrough in the history of pragmatic research was marked with Austin’s (1962)influential work, “How to do things with words” In this work, his realization that “in doingsomething a person also does something” gave rise to a new outlook on language – the view oflanguage as action His idea was widely accepted, and his categorization of speech acts intolocutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts has paved the way for the development ofcommunicative functions Austin’s speech act theory was then further developed by Searle(1969, 1975, 1976) Searle established the conditions for a speech act to be successfullycarried out, which are so-called “felicity conditions”, as well as made distinctions betweendirect and indirect speech acts As Rintell (1979) asserted that “pragmatics is the study ofspeech acts”, the notion of speech acts has ever since remained of central interest in pragmaticresearch The other aspects of language that make the focuses of study in pragmatics include

“deixis”, i.e what the speaker means by a particular utterance in a given speech context,

“presupposition”, i.e the logical meaning of a sentence or meanings logically associated with

or entailed by a sentence, and “implicature”, i.e the things that are communicated even thoughthey are not explicitly expressed

In addition, pragmatic principles, which generally denote some certain rules thatinterlocutors are expected to obey in order to successfully converse with each other, are also ofgreat concern The most influential work on these issues comprises of Paul Grice’sCooperative Principle and Conversational Maxims (1975), which stresses that incommunication, “make your contribution such as it is required, at the stage at which it occurs,

by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged”; Leech’sPoliteness Principles (1983), which is quite similar to Grice’s principles and made up of sixdifferent maxims; and Brown and Levinson’s notion of Face (1978, 1987)

1.2 Speech Act Theory

The notion of speech acts was originated by Austin (1962) According to Austin,speech is itself a form of action He assumed that language is not just a passive practice ofdescribing a given reality, but a particular practice that can be used to invent and affect

realities Accordingly, in his most influential work “How to do things with words” (1962),

Austin made an interesting point that in saying something a person is actually doing

something, which was considered as a breakthrough in linguistics and philosophy He attackedthe predominant view in his time that sentences are primarily for stating facts, being “true”when they succeed and “false” when they fail in doing so By contrast, from his viewpoint,many everyday declarative sentences are not intended to make true or false statements, butthey are used to “do things”, that is, to perform certain linguistic actions such as requesting,complimenting, complaining, gripping and so on Austin termed these sentences and theutterances realized by them “performatives” as opposed to statements, assertions andutterances like them which he called “constatives” “Performatives”, as noted by him, are thuscharacterized by a very significant feature that they cannot be true or false, yet they can still gowrong He then catalogued all the ways in which performatives can go wrong, or be

“unhappy” or “infelicitous” For instance, a performative made by a British citizen when he

says to his wife “I hereby divorce you” can go wrong in that there is simply no such procedure

in Britain where merely by uttering divorce can be achieved Based on different ways aperformative can fail to come off, he produced a set of conditions, which he called “felicityconditions”, for them to meet if those performatives are to succeed or be “happy” The felicityconditions are divided by him into three categories:

A (i) There must be a conventional procedure having a conventional effect

(ii) The circumstances and persons must be appropriate, as specified in the procedure

B The procedure must be executed (i) correctly and (ii) completely

C Often, (i) the persons must have the requisite thoughts, feelings and intentions, as specified in the procedure, and (ii) if consequent conduct is specified, then the relevant

parties must so do

(Austin, 1962, p 14-15)

Searle (1979), whose theory is largely the systemization and extension of Austin’soriginal theory, suggested that felicity conditions are not merely dimensions on whichutterances can go wrong, but are actually jointly constitutive of the various illocutionaryforces He then recommended a classification of felicity conditions into four kinds, including

preparatory conditions, sincerity conditions, propositional content conditions and Essentialconditions (Searle, 1979, p 44)

Another significant contribution that Austin made to the theory of speech act is hisclassification of kinds of acts that a person simultaneously performs when he/ she sayssomething:

 Locutionary act: the utterance of a sentence with determinate sense and reference

 Illocutionary act: the making of a statement, offer, promise, etc in uttering a sentence, byvirtue of the conventional force associated with it

 Perlocutionary act: the bringing about of effects on the audience by means of uttering thesentence, such as effects being special to the circumstances of utterances

Among the three acts, illocutionary act is the focus of Austin’s interest, and the term

“speech act” has come to refer exclusively to that kind of act The illocutionary act in Austin’sterm is related to Searle’s notion of illocutionary point, which refers to point or purpose ofillocution (Searle, 1990a, p 351, cited in Tam, 2005, p 10) On the basis of purposes of acts,Searle (1976) proposed that there are just five kinds of action that one can perform in

speaking, by means of the following five types of utterance: (i) Representatives, which

commit the speaker to the truth of the expressed proposition (paradigm cases: asserting,

concluding, etc.), (ii) Directives, which are attempts by the speaker to get the addressee to do something (paradigm cases: requesting, questioning), (iii) Commissives, which commit the

speaker to some future course of action (paradigm cases: promising, threatening, offering),

(iv) Expressives, which express a psychological state (paradigm cases: thanking, apologizing, welcoming, congratulating), and (v) Declarations, which effect immediate changes in the

institutional state of affairs and which tend to rely on elaborate extra-linguistic institutions(paradigm cases: excommunicating, declaring war, christening, firing from employment)

In general pragmatics research, it is also significant to distinguish between directspeech acts, where the speaker says what he or she means, and indirect speech acts where he

or she means more than, or something other than, what he or she says (Blum-Kulka, House &Kasper, 1989, p 2) Similarly, according to Searle (1975), direct speech acts refer toutterances in which the propositional content (sentence meaning) of the utterance is consistent

with what the speaker intends to accomplish (speaker meaning) Accordingly, in indirectspeech acts, sentence meaning and speaker meaning may be different For instance, a speakermay utter the sentence “Can you reach the salt?” and mean it not merely as a question but as arequest to pass the salt The indirect speech acts, thus, might cause a problem, that is how it ispossible for the hearer to understand them when the sentence he hears and understands meanssomething else Regarding this problem, Searle (1979) noted that the speaker communicates tothe hearer more than he actually says by way of relying on their mutually-shared backgroundknowledge, both linguistic and nonlinguistic, together with the general power of rationalityand inference on the part of the hearer Searle also contends that certain linguistic forms willtend to become conventionalized standard idiomatic forms for indirect speech acts For

example, utterances such as “Can you reach the salt” and “Do you have the time?” are

conventionally used to make indirect requests

Although the speech act theory has been influential in many fields, especiallypragmatics, the theory still poses some problems The first problem deals with the unit ofanalysis of a speech act in a speech act research Many researchers criticize traditional speechact studies for basing their findings on simulated speech in isolated and single-sentenceutterances that are divorced from the context (cited in Lin, 2005, p 32) The second area of thetheory being criticized is the notion of indirect speech acts According to Levinson (1983),basically, the diversity of actual language challenges the theory that there is a simple form-force correlation He argued that “what people do with sentences seems quite unrestricted bythe surface form (i.e sentence type) of the sentences uttered” (p 264) He then proposed thatillocutionary force is entirely pragmatic and has no direct and simple correlation withsentence-form or –meaning; there are thus simply no significance in distinguishing betweendirect or indirect speech acts Last but not least, the speech act theory does not emphasize thefact that the realization of speech acts is culture-specific Recent studies have proved that thereare cross-cultural differences in the realization of speech acts Specifically, the Cross-CulturalSpeech Act Realization Patterns (CCSARP) project, examining the speech acts of requests andapologies in Hebrew, Danish, British English, American English, German, Canadian French

and Australian English (Blum- Kulka et al., 1989) further shows that in spite of sharing certainconventions of use, these languages differ in specific modes of realization

To sum up, the speech act theory, on the one hand, has made a great contribution in thelinguistic theory in that it views language as action and offers interpretation of languagethrough its actual use, rather than through its forms However, due to the problems above, itcan provide a theoretical and methodological framework for investigation into the actualrealization of speech acts only when speech acts are examined in a unit other than isolatedsentences and the socio-cultural values are concerned

1.3 Politeness Theories

Speech acts, as discussed above, are one of the most compelling notions in the study oflanguage usage, and as claimed by Brown and Levinson (1978), their modes of performanceappear to be ruled by universal principles of cooperation and politeness The theory ofpoliteness thus plays a crucial role in the study of speech acts It was formulated in 1978 byBrown and Levinson and has since expanded academic perception of politeness

1.3.1 Brown and Levinson’s Notion of Face

According to Hill et al (1986, p 282), politeness is “is one of the constraints of humaninteraction, whose purpose is to consider other’s feelings, establish levels of mutual comfort,and promote rapport” Similarly, Lakoff (1972, p 910) noted that politeness is what we think

is appropriate behaviour in particular situations in an attempt to achieve and maintainsuccessful social relationships with others In other defintions, politeness is closely associated

with the notion of face Mills (2003, p 6) defined it as the expression of the speakers’

intention to mitigate face threats carried by certain face threatening acts towards another.Therefore, being polite involves attempting to save face for another Goffman (1967, p 319,cited in Watts, 2003, p 124) identified “face” as “the positive social value a person effectivelyclaims for himself”, i.e the public self-image “Face” is hence precisely the conceptualizationeach of us makes of our “self” through the construals of others in social interaction andparticularly in verbal interaction, i.e through talk There is a distinction between “positiveface” and “negative face” While “positive face” refers to “one’s desire to be approved oraccepted by others”, “negative face” is seen as “one’s desire to be free from imposition from

others “Face”, either “positive face” or “negative face”, is “something that is emotionallyinvested, and that can be lost, maintained, or enhanced and must be constantly attended to ininteraction” (Brown and Levinson, 1978, p 66) Therefore, it must be continually taken intoaccount in the process of communication so that politeness can be achieved

However, in everyday communication, we may unavoidably perform a speech actwhich can cause another interlocutor to lose his or her face, or, in other words, we create aface-threatening act (FTA) These acts are defined by Brown and Levinson (1987, p 65) as

“acts that by their nature run contrary to the face wants of the addressee and/ or of thespeakers” These FTAs impede the freedom of actions (negative face) and the wish that one’swants to be desired by others (positive face) – by either the speaker or the addressee or both(Phuong, 2006, p 9) Some examples of FTAs include refusing, criticizing, disagreeing orcomplaining

As stated above, FTAs can disturb the relationships between interlocutors, sointerlocutors often use specific strategies to minimize the threat of their FTAs Brown andLevinson (1987, p.60) provided a set of payoff considerations for a speaker to choose whendoing an FTA to a hearer This set can be illustrated in the diagram bellow:

From the set of politeness strategies aforementioned, there come two concepts ofpositive politeness and negative politeness strategies First, positive politeness strategiesattempt to minimize the threat to the hearer’s positive face It means they are used to make thehearer feel good about himself, his interests or possessions, and are most usually used insituations where the social distance between interlocutors is quite small Besides avoiding

conflict, some positive politeness strategies also try to claim common ground between thespeaker and the hearer, express friendship and solidarity, give compliments, seek agreementand give sympathy as well A good example was provided by Yule (1996, p 64), in which thestrategies lead the requester (in the speech act of requesting) to appeal to common goal and

even friendship via such expressions as “How about letting me use your pen?” or “Hey,

buddy, I’d appreciate it if you’d let me use your pen” In the same fashion as positive

politeness strategies, negative politeness strategies are responsive with the hearer’s negativeface and hence emphasize the avoidance of imposition on the hearer By means of negativepoliteness strategies, the speaker can satisfy the hearer’s desires to be unimpeded, which aredirectly challenged by the FTA The speaker, therefore, has to be conventionally indirect,minimize imposition on the hearer, beg forgiveness or give deference Moreover, these

strategies are typically in question form and used with a modal verbs like: “Could you lend me

a pen?” or “I’m sorry to bother you, but can I ask you for a pen or something?” According to

Yule (1996), in most English-speaking contexts, a face-saving act is more commonlyperformed via a negative politeness strategy than via a positive one About the whole set ofstrategies provided by Brown and Levinson (1987), he also stressed that “the choice of a type

of expression that is less direct, potentially less clear, generally longer, and with morecomplex structure means that the speaker is making a greater effort, in terms of concern forface (i.e politeness), than is needed simply to get the basic message across efficiently” (Yule,

1996, p 65)

1.3.2 Social variables

Brown and Levinson (1987) claimed that the speaker’s choices of politeness strategies

in realizing speech acts depend on the extent to which risk of loss of face is involved In thefigure above, the risk factor increases as one moves up the scale of strategies from 1 to 5 with

1 being the least polite and 5 being the most polite To put it another way, the more an actthreatens speaker’s or hearer’s face, the more likely the speaker will be to choose a higher-numbered strategy According to Brown and Levinson (1987, p 74), the degree of this risk orweight of face-threatening is determined by the cumulative effect of three universal socialvariables:

D: the social ‘distance’ between the participants;

P: the relative ‘power’ between them;

R: the absolute ‘ranking’ of imposition in the particular culture

They further pointed out that the way in which the seriousness of a particular FTA isweighed seems to be neutral as to whether it is speaker’s or hearer’s face that is threatened.The weightiness of an FTA is calculated as follows (1987, p 76):

Wx = D(S,H) + P(S,H) + Rx

Wx stands for the numerical value that measures the weightiness of the FTA D(S,H)refers to the social distance between the speaker and the hearer (the degree of familiarity andsolidarity) whereas P(S,H) indicates the relative power between them (the degree to which thespeaker can impose wants on the hearer) R is the absolute ranking of imposition (how

“threatening” the performed FTA is perceived to be within a particular culture) and x is theperformed FTA Hence, the seriousness or weightiness of a particular FTA such as a request, arefusal or a complaint in any given situation in a particular culture is the sum of these threefactors Based on the outcome of this calculation, the speaker will make his choices of theappropriate politeness strategies to use, i.e whether to use bald-on-record, off-record, negativepoliteness or positive politeness strategies or just simply avoid doing the FTA From Brownand Levinson’s viewpoint, increase in the hearer’s power (P), social distance (D) and thedegree of imposition (R) will increase the weightiness of a FTA, which is assumed to result inthe use of greater politeness For example, in Olshtain and Weinbach’s study (1987), thefindings showed that Hebrew EFL learners, in realizing complaints in English, tend to opt forless severe complaints to the hearer of higher status, and there is a tendency for severercomplaints to equal-status or lower-status hearers Although they claimed that these threefactors are universal, Brown and Levinson (1987, p 76) conceded that the content of eachfactor is culture- and context-dependent

However, there are still some criticisms against these three determinants of politenessstrategies Many researchers contested their universality and their possibility to capture all thecircumstances that may influence the production of politeness Moreover, the conclusions thatBrown and Levinson came to about the correspondence between the weightiness of the FTA

and the amount of politeness to be used in interaction have also been challenged Lin (2005, p.61) provided two illustrations for this point: (1) Brown and Gilman (1989), in their study,pointed out that, social distance is not a major factor, but “liking” is what increases politeness;(2) Holtgrave and Yang (1990) examined the influence of P and D on politeness choicesamong American and Korean subjects, and the results turned out to be contrary to Brown andLevinson’s prediction, i.e the least polite strategies being used by the subjects in perceptions

of the greatest distance

From what discussed above, it cannot be denied that the three social variablesintroduced by Brown and Levinson (1987), regardless of some criticisms against them, stillremain the most decisive factors affecting people’s choices of politeness strategies incommunication, and they can provide a good framework for investigating socio-pragmaticeffect on interlocutors’ realization of speech acts However, the extent to which they affectpeople’s politeness choices might differ a lot from what was concluded by Brown andLevinson and demands more in-depth investigation from linguistic researchers

1.4 Interlanguage Pragmatics

These maxims and notions were established largely based on Western or Anglocultural norms, but they were then claimed to be “universal”, or true for every culture andevery language, by their authors Meanwhile, many empirical studies have later shown that therealization of speech acts and politeness principles are actually culture- and context-specific

In other words, the pragmatic principles people abide by in one language or culture are oftendifferent in another The growing criticism against this so-called “universality” led to theemergence of a new branch of pragmatics, cross-cultural pragmatics (CCP) According toKasper and Blum-Kulka (1993), it is the study of linguistic acts carried out by language users

of different cultural backgrounds As noted by Wierzbicka (1991), the main ideas underlyingthis new direction in pragmatic research are that:

In different societies and different communities, people speak differently; these differences in ways of speaking are profound and systematic, they reflect different cultural values, or at least different hierarchies of values; different ways of speaking, different communication styles, can

be explained and made sense of in terms of independently established different cultural values and cultural priorities” (p 69)

Cross-cultural pragmatics investigates how social actions are translated into linguisticforms and therefore, can be divided into two subcategories: (1) Contrastive pragmatics (CP)and (2) Interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) (Tam 2005, p 35) She further discussed that while CPcompares speech acts across cultures and languages so as to understand how the linguisticactions interlocutors engage in reflect their background, ILP focuses on linguistic actions,speech acts and their enactment by learners to understand what might interfere with a learner’scomprehension and production of pragmatic meaning Therefore, ILP, rather than CP, is moreconcerned with identifying the obstacles to or failures of learners’ appropriate production ofpragmatics, which is the focus of this study ILP, however, is still a young discipline, which

as claimed by Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper (1989), is needed in order to discover “howlearners do things with words in a second language” (p.9) Trosborg (1995, p 55) also citedthe fields of study that ILP involves, including contrasting non-native with native performance

of speech acts, learners’ inappropriate realization of speech acts, pragmatic transfer, or howsociopragmatic factors governing speech act performance, such as age, gender, relative status

of the interlocutors and other situational constraints

1.5 Pragmatic Competence and Pragmatic Failure

1.5.1 Pragmatic competence

It is also vital to discuss “pragmatic competence”, which has recently aroused muchattention in the field of second language acquisition As cited in Thomas (1983), pragmaticcompetence refers to “the ability to use language effectively in order to achieve a specificpurpose and to understand language in context”, as opposed to grammatical competence, i.e

“abstract” or decontextualized knowledge of intonation, phonology, syntax, semantics, etc (p.92) These two components, pragmatic competence and grammatical competence, are said tomake up a speaker’s “linguistic competence” In the same fashion, in Bachman’s model(1990), “language competence” is subdivided into two components – “organizationalcompetence” and “pragmatic competence” (cited in Kasper 1997) The former comprises ofthe knowledge of linguistic units and the rules of joining them together at the levels ofsentence (“grammatical competence”) and discourse (“textual competence”) Meanwhile, thelatter is then subdivided into “illocutionary competence”, i.e the “knowledge of

communicative action and how to carry it out”, and “sociolinguistic competence”, i.e theability to use language appropriately according to context and the ability to selectcommunicative acts and appropriate strategies to implement them” From other points of view,pragmatic competence is a part of “communicative competence” (Kasper, 1997) GivenCanale & Swain’s 1980 model (Trosborg, 1995, p 10), communicative competence iscategorized into four different components: linguistic competence, sociolinguistic competence,discourse competence and strategic competence Based on the definitions of thesecomponents, it is quite apparent that pragmatic competence bears great similarity tosociolinguistic competence and strategic competence Specifically, Trosborg (1995) furtherdiscussed the subdivision of sociolinguistic competence upon two aspects: appropriateness ofmeanings – “sociopragmatic competence” and appropriateness of forms - “pragmalinguisticcompetence” (p 11) Moreover, Jung (2002) identified five things that a learner needs toacquire in order to be pragmatically competent, namely the ability to perform speech acts, toconvey and interpret non-literal meanings, to perform politeness functions, to performdiscourse functions, and to use cultural knowledge

However, learners’ development of pragmatic competence might be interfered due totheir lack of exposure to the target language or their lack of awareness of socioculturaldifferences between their mother language and the target language It is quite understandablethat even an advanced language learner might encounter difficulty in performing speech acts

in the target language appropriately Thus, there is such likelihood that pragmatic failure

occurs in cross-cultural communication The seriousness of pragmatic failure was highlighted

in both pragmatic research and second language acquisition research

Perhaps the fascination that the study of cross-cultural pragmatics holds for language teachers, researchers, and students of linguistics stems from the serious trouble to which pragmatic failure can lead No “error” of grammar can make a speaker seem so incompetent, so inappropriate, so foreign as the kind of trouble a learner gets into when

he or she doesn’t understand or otherwise disregards a language’s rules of use.

(Rintell – Mitchell 1989, p 248, cited in Trosborg 1995, p 5)

1.5.2 Pragmatic failure

Thomas (1983) pointed out that pragmatic failure has occurred on any occasion “onwhich H (the hearer) perceives the force of S’s (the speaker’s) utterance as other than Sintended she or he should perceive it” She used the following examples to illustrate herdefinitions:

 H perceives the force of S’s utterance stronger or weaker than S intended s/he should perceive it;

 H perceives as an order an utterance that S intended s/he should perceive as a request;

 H perceives S’s utterance as ambivalent where S intended no ambivalence;

 S expects H to be able to infer the force of his/ her utterance, but is relying on the system of knowledge or beliefs that S and H do not share

(Thomas, 1983, p 94)

There is also distinction between pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic failure.

Pragmalinguistics is the linguistic ends of pragmatic – “particular resources that a givenlanguage provides for conveying particular illocutions” whereas sociopragmatics is thesociological interface of pragmatics – “the ways in which pragmatic performance is subjected

to specific social conditions” (Leech, 1983, p.11, cited in Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper,

1989, p 3) Similarly, pragmalinguistics involves basically grammatical assessment of thepragmatic force of a linguistic token, and sociopragmatics refers to judgments concerning thesize of imposition, cost/ benefit, social distance, and relative rights and obligations (Thomas,

1983, pp 103-104) To put it another way, pragmalinguistics is language-specific whilesociopragmatics is culture-specific, reflecting the speaker’s system of values and beliefs.Accordingly, the two categories of pragmatic failure were identified by Thomas (1983, p 99)

as follows:

a Pragmalinguistic failure, which occurs when the pragmatic force mapped by S onto a given

utterance is systematically different from the force most frequently assigned to it by native speakers of the target language, or when speech act strategies are in appropriately transferred from L1 to L2.

b Sociopragmatic failure […] refers to the social conditions placed on language in use […]

Social pragmatic failure stems from cross-culturally different perceptions of what constitutes appropriate linguistic behavior.

Likewise, Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper (1989) believed that pragmalinguistic

failure occurs when learners’ native procedures and linguistic means are transferred to L2, and sociopragmatic failure occurs when learners assess the relevant situational factors on the basis

of their native sociopragmatic norms (p 10)

Some instances of pragmalinguistic failure have been suggested For example,Richards and Sukwiwat (1983) provided a situation in which a Japanese learner of English(JE) has to express gratitude in English to a native speaker (E) may typically go as follows:

E: Look what I’ve got for you! (Maybe a gift)

JE: Oh! I’m sorry (Thank you doesn’t sound sincere enough in Japanese)

A: Is this a good restaurant?

B: Of course [Gloss (for Russian speaker): Yes (indeed) it is (For English hearer): What a stupid question]

overgeneralization”, which is particularly likely to occur where a narrow range of structure inthe mother tongue has a wider range of possible “translations” in the target language and viceversa

Regarding sociopragmatic failure, Minh (2005) found out that in realizing criticism,Vietnamese learners of English employed the two formulas of giving advice and demandswith much higher frequency than native speakers It is, as explained by her, due to Vietnamesepeople’s belief that the two formulas demonstrate care, sincerity, and friendliness.Additionally, as the result of the fact that Vietnamese people tend to believe that strongarguments may be more convincing than hedged arguments, they were also found to use muchfewer mitigating devices in their realization of criticisms compared to Australian nativespeakers As can be seen, sociopragmatic failure illustrates how learners’ beliefs, perceptionsand values interfere with their speech act performance in the target language

According to Thomas (1983, p 104), the “cross-cultural mismatches in the assessment

of social distance, of what constitutes an imposition, of when an attempt at a face-threateningact should be abandoned, and in evaluating relative power, rights and obligations, etc.” areproperly the primary causes of sociopragmatic failure

1.6 Pragmatic Transfer in Interlanguage Pragmatics

As discussed above, pragmatic transfer is one of the major attributing factors topragmatic failure in cross-cultural communication CCP and ILP studies have provided ampleevidence that L2 learners’ L1 pragmatic knowledge significantly influences theircomprehension, production and learning of L2 pragmatic information (Kasper 1992).Pragmatic transfer is defined as the “transfer of L1 sociocultural communicative competence

in performing L2 speech acts or any other function of language where the speaker is trying toachieve a particular function of language” (Beebe, Takahashi & Uliss-Weltz, 1990, p 56, cited

in Yamagashira, 2001, p 2) The notion of pragmatic transfer is mainly based on theassumption that “intercultural miscommunication is often caused by learners’ falling back ontheir L1 sociocultural norms and conventions in realizing speech acts in a target language”(Takahashi 1996, p 189, cited in Yamagashira, 2001, p 2) This assumption virtually put suchemphasis on the downside of transfer whereas it is proved that the transference of pragmatic

knowledge from L1 to L2 can occur in two main directions – both positive and negative.

Therefore, the study of transfer might involve the study of both errors (negative transfer), which indicates inappropriate transfer of L1 sociolinguistic norms into L2, and facilitation

(positive transfer), which is considered an evidence of sociocultural and pragmatic

universality among languages However, negative pragmatic transfer, as it deals with errors ordifficulties learners have in their performance of speech acts in the target language, might be

of greater interest than positive pragmatic transfer More precisely, it is also negativepragmatic transfer, not pragmatic transfer in general, that is the main cause of pragmaticfailure or intercultural communication breakdown aforementioned Nonetheless, based onsociopragmatics-pragmalinguistics dichotomy advocated by Leech (1983) as treatment toscope of pragmatics, and applied by Thomas (1983) in her classification of pragmatic failure,Kasper (1992) proposed that pragmatic transfer should also be seen at two levels:pragmalinguistic transfer and sociopragmatic transfer

1.7 Negative pragmatic transfer

Most of ILP studies address negative pragmatic transfer as the understanding offrequently-encountered errors both socioculturally and linguistically might provide researchersand teachers an insight into the second language acquisition and inspire them to find ways tohelp their students improve their pragmatic competence The question is how linguists andresearchers identify the instances of negative transfer and distinguish it from positive transfer

in their interlanguage studies According to Minh (2005, p 33), the design developed bySelinker (1966, 1969) can provide a radical answer As described by her, in adopting thisdesign, studies compare three data sets collected from (1) the native speaker of the learners’

native language (NL); (2) the learners performing in the target language (IL); and (3) the native speaker of the target language (TL) Kasper (1992) then proposed to quantitatively

identify instances of positive and negative transfer based on the frequencies of a particular

pragmatic feature in the NL, TL, and IL data Accordingly, the evidence of positive transfer is

determined by the lack of statistically significant differences in the frequency of occurrences

of a pragmatic features in all three sets of data (IL = TL, NL = TL, IL = NL) Meanwhile, the

evidence of negative transfer is marked by the statistically significant differences between IL

and TL and between NL and TL in the frequency with which a pragmatic feature occurs, and

at the same time a lack of statistically significant differences in the frequency of occurrences

of that feature between IL and NL (IL # TL, NL # TL, IL = NL) Moreover, as mentioned

above, negative transfer, just like positive transfer, is examined at two levels:pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics

1.7.1 Negative pragmalinguistic transfer

As cited in Tam (2005, p 41), pragmalinguistic transfer has been noted in learners’ use

of conventions of means and form, affecting the illocutionary force and politeness value ininterlanguage utterances Kasper later defined pragmalinguistic transfer as “the processwhereby the illocutionary force or politeness value assigned to particular linguistic material inL1 influences learners’ perception and production of form-function mappings in L2” (Kasper

1992, p 209, cited in Takahashi 1995, p 112) To put it another way, the form-functionmappings in L1 might interfere with those in L2 For example, in her study of requestrealization by English learners of Hebrew, Blum-Kulka (1982,1983) found out that English

learners had a tendency to use the Hebrew ability question (“Can you?”) in making requests

in Hebrew whereas this question form actually did not carry a pragmatic force of requesting in

Hebrew as they might have expected In this case, the form-function mapping (“can you”

question – making requests mapping) in English was negatively transferred to those English

learners’ Hebrew interlanguage In addition, pragmalinguistic transfer is also referred to as theinappropriate transfer of speech act strategies from one language to another, usually from themother tongue to the target language, for instance using a direct speech act where a nativespeaker would use an indirect speech act or “off-record” politeness strategy (Thomas, 1983, p.102)

Pragmalinguistic transfer also deals with learners’ choice of directness levels in their

performance of speech acts in L2 Takahashi (1995) reviewed several studies which evidencedthe learners’ negative transfer in this aspect In the framework of the CCSARP (Cross-CulturalSpeech Act Realization Patterns) project, House and Kasper (1987) examined the requestrealizations by German learners of British English and Danish learners of British English viaDCT elicitation technique with five situations The findings revealed that in two out of five

given situations, both German and Danish learners of English deviated from the BritishEnglish norm and followed their L1 norms in their choice of directness levels Specifically,German and Danish learners favored direct imperatives while British English native speakerspreferred more indirect preparatory questions Another example was taken from the study onthe speech act of complaint by DeCapua (1989) In this study, she employed a five-situationDCT to investigate the complaint realization by German learners of English She found outthat German speakers, in both their L1 and IL, used more instances of the second most face-

threatening degree of directness (i.e Escalated direct confrontation – The speaker asserts the

hearer’s action is bad) On the contrary, this level of directness was found to be rarely

employed by American English native speakers As can be seen, in both studies, Germanlearners of English tended to negatively transfer their preference for direct strategies into theirinterlanguage

Transfer of internal and external modifications in learners’ speech act realizations is

another dimension of pragmalinguistic transfer Back to the study by House and Kasper (1987)within the CCSARP project framework, negative pragmalinguistic transfer was detected infewer syntactic downgraders for both German and Danish learner groups compared to BritishEnglish native speakers

Additionally, pragmalinguistic transfer can also be evident in “L1-based preferences

for frequencies of particular […] semantic formulas” in IL performance of speech acts

(Takahashi, 1995, p 113) Semantic formulas can be understood as “a word, phrase, orsentence that meets a particular semantic criterion, any one or more of which can be used toperform the act in question (Cohen, 1996) Dogancay-Aktuna and Kamisli (1997), in theirstudy on chastisements by advanced Turkish EFL learners, collected data from 80 nativespeakers of Turkish, 14 native speakers of American English, and 68 EFL learners via situatedrole plays in which individuals were asked to respond to wrongdoing of a status-unequalinterlocutor in workplace One of their major findings revealed that, even though EFL learnersused the same semantic formulas of “statement of error” and “request of repair” as AmericanEnglish in given situations, they used it at a significantly different frequency to the targetgroup To be more detailed, Turkish EFL learners asked for repair from the lower status

interlocutors at an equal rate to those of native speakers of Turkish, but at a significantly lowerrate than Americans, and thus transferring negatively their NL norms into the IL In anotherstudy on apologizing speech act, Olshtain (1983) indicated that English learners of Hebrewnegatively transferred L1 preference for the semantic formulas of “express apology” and

“offer of repair” while both Hebrew learners of English and Hebrew native speakersdispreferred them equally (Cited in Takahashi 1995, p 113)

According to Takahashi (1995), while the “frequency counts” of L1-based semanticformulas in IL performance could provide clues for evidencing transfer occurrence, some ILP

researchers made attempt to identify pragmalinguistic transfer based on similar “content” of

the L1 and IL semantic formulas One example is from the recently-conducted study on Thai

EFL refusals by Wannaruk (2008) The study was made on 40 American English nativespeakers, 40 Thai native speakers and 40 Thai EFL learners, all of whom were graduates bymeans of a DCT with four situations for respondents to refuse One case of pragmalinguistictransfer from the findings was observed in the content of “explanation” given by EFLmembers, especially low-proficiency learners In the situation of refusing an invitation tospeak for an orientation program, American English native speakers were likely to give suchreasons as being committed to something else, such as “I already have a previous engagement

so I won’t be able to attend” or “I already have a commitment for that evening” while bothThai native speakers and Thai EFL learners had a tendency to be modest in responding to thesame situation by saying “I’m not good at public speaking” or “I’m bad at speaking in front ofpeople”

In summary, from the reviewed studies, it is noticeable that pragmalinguistic transfer isdemonstrated through learners’ form-function mappings, choice of politeness strategies,choice of directness levels, choice of internal and external modifications, preferences forfrequency of particular semantic formulas, and content of chosen semantic formulas All in all,

it can be seen that pragmalinguistic transfer involves L1-based language-specific choices thataffect the illocutionary force and politeness value of learners’ interlanguage utterances

1.7.2 Negative sociopragmatic transfer

Sociopragmatics, as defined by Leech (1983, p 10), is “the sociological interface ofpragmatics”, referring to the social perceptions underlying participants’ interpretation andperformance of communicative action It was noted that speech communities differ in theirassessment of speakers’ and hearers’ social distance and social power, their rights andobligations, and the degree of imposition involved in particular communicative acts.Accordingly, sociopragmatic transfer is operative in “learners’ perceptions of contextualfactors, of whether carrying out a particular linguistic action is appropriate, and of the overallpoliteness style adopted in an encounter” (Kasper 1992, p 213)

First, sociopragmatic transfer studies cope with the interference of learners’ L1-basedperceptions of contextual factors, such as interlocutors’ relative social distance and socialpower, obligations or reasonability, with their IL performance Takahashi and Bee (1993)studied Japanese EFL learners’ realization of refusals in English and found evidence ofnegative transfer at the sociopragmatic level That is, Japanese learners tended to negativelytransfer their L1 emphasis of status differences into their IL performance; “Japanese consider

it polite to emphasize the status differences when there actually exist such differences,whereas, from the American perspective, being polite is conveyed by denying that statusdifferences do exist” (Takahashi 1995, p 110) Tam (2005), in her doctorate dissertation onrequests by Vietnamese EFL learners, discovered that Australian English native speakers didnot vary their choice of strategies in relation to the power values, whereas learners did To bemore detailed, in situations where the speaker had greater power than the addressee and wherethey were not familiar, learners appeared most direct while native speakers were still indirect.Similarly, in situations where the addressee and the speaker were familiar and the speaker hadequal or less power than the addressee, Australian speakers tended to be even more indirectthan Vietnamese EFL learners Many other studies on EFL learners of Asian origins alsoprovided the same findings; that is, their IL performance is often negatively influenced bytheir L1 social norms that emphasize differences in social power and social distance betweentwo interlocutors in interpersonal communication

Second, the influence of learners’ L1-based judgments of the appropriateness of alinguistic action to be carried out in IL is also a concern of sociopragmatic transfer studies.Robinson (1992) investigated IL refusals by Japanese EFL learners by analyzing the dataobtained from the learners’ concurrent verbal reports and the retrospective interviews withthem As noted by her, one of her subjects obviously transferred the Japanese preference fornot saying “no” to a request to her IL English discourse Robinson also observed that,

“sociopragmatic transfer prompted at least part of this subject’s confusion over what to say” in

a less familiar American cultural context (As cited in Takahashi 1995, p 112)

Third, sociopragmatic transfer might involve L1-based politeness styles or politenessorientation That means the orientation to or preference for one of two types of politenessproposed by Brown and Levinson (1987), including positive politeness – redressive actionsdirected to the addressee’s positive face (i.e the want to be approved) and negative politeness– redressive actions to maintain the addressee’s negative face (i.e the want to be unimpeded).Takahashi and Beebe (1993) detected evidence of negative transference of Japanese “lesspositive” politeness orientation into Japanese EFL learners’ IL correction realization.According to them, American English native speakers favored the use of positive remarks like

“That as a great account” before saying “but” in correcting the lower-status interlocutor’sstatement Meanwhile, both Japanese native speakers and Japanese EFL learners seemedreluctant to use such positive remarks

Takahashi (1995) in his review on interlanguage pragmatics also discussed thetransference of L1 communicative styles into learners’ IL performance One dimension of

communicative style is the direct/ indirect dimension As noted by them, direct

communicative style refers to explicitly stating one’s feelings, wants, and needs whereasindirect style stands for verbal messages that camouflage and conceal speakers’ true intensions

in terms of their wants, needs and goals in the discourse situation For instance, Americans areoften expected to communicate their ideas clearly and directly to others while Japanese peopleare expected to be involved with others with the utmost care not to reveal one’s feelingdirectly This indicates that Americans are used to be direct in communication, presentingtheir ideas openly and straightforwardly whereas Japanese are so used to indirect

communication, reading the minds of the others and presenting one’s idea indirectly (Kume,Tokui, Hasegawa and Kodama) One other dimension of communicative style identified in

available studies involves self-oriented/ other-oriented dimension House (1988) examined

English apology performed by German learners of British English and found out that GermanEFL learners transferred their L1-based self-oriented strategies (e.g expressing lack of intent),

in comparison with the British English speakers’ preference for the use of other-orientedstrategies (e.g showing concern for the hearer) (Takahashi 1995, p 111)

To sum up, while pragmalinguistic transfer involves L1-based language-specificchoices of learners, sociopragmatic transfer deals with L1-oriented culture- and context-specific judgments of learners in performing a speech act In other words, learners’ judgments

in IL performance are influenced by their L1 sociocultural norms and conventions It mightinclude the transference of learners’ L1-based perceptions of contextual factors like relativesocial power and social distance, their assessment of appropriateness, their politenessorientation and communicative style

1.8 The Speech Act of Complaint

Complaining is a speech act which occurs when the speaker (S) expresses displeasure

or annoyance to ensure – as a reaction to a past or going action – the consequences of whichare perceived by S as affecting him/ her unfavorably As listed by Olshtain and Weinbach(1993), there are some pre-conditions for the speech act of complaining to take place asfollowed:

i Hearer (H) performs a socially unacceptable act (SUA) that is contrary to a social code of behavioral norms shared by S and H;

ii S perceives the SUA as having unfavorable consequences of herself, and/or for the general public;

iii The verbal expression of S relates post facto directly or indirectly to the SUA, thus having the illocutionary force of censure.

iv S perceives the SUA as: (a) freeing S (at least partially) from the implicit understanding

of a social cooperative relationship with H; S therefore chooses to express her frustration

or annoyance and (b) giving S the legitimate right to ask for repair in order to undo the SUA, either for her benefit or for the public benefit

The speech act of complaint is said to probably cause “a breach of social goal ofmaintaining comity and harmony between S and H” due to its conflictive nature (Leech, 1983,

cited in Olshtain and Weinbach, 1993) Place (1986) formulated that “the act of moral censure

or blame is an act of social rejection – an act whereby the accuser breaks ties of affection,mutual support and cooperation” (p 145, cited in Trosborg 1995, p 312) The act ofcomplaining is thus categorized as a face-threatening act (FTA) by Brown and Levinson(1978)

When people perform the FTA of complaint, they consider the effect of their actions

on the hearer’s loss of or saving of face Taking into account the relationship and the harmonybetween himself and the hearer following his complaint, the speaker processes the sequence ofpayoff considerations, or the set of politeness strategies, before actually performing the act.Take the “water dripping” situation from Nakabachi (1996) as an example The situation is

precisely quoted as, “It is 2 o’clock in the morning Water is dripping from the ceiling in your

bedroom It is apparent that your upstairs neighbors have carelessly allowed their bathtub to overflow” In doing the complaint speech act to the neighbor, the speaker in this situation also

might go through the set of payoff considerations introduced above prior to making a choice

of the strategy that he/ she is going to use:

 Bald on Record: immediate threat or warning (e.g If you don’t try anything, I’ll go to the police)

 On Record without Redress: explicit complaint and request without any mitigation (E.g stop the water immediately!)

 On Record with Redress: inexplicit complaint and request with mitigation (E.g Could you please check your bathroom?)

 Off Record: hinting (E.g Do you know what’s going on in my room?)

 Avoidance: do not say anything

However, as quite opposed to Brown and Levinson’s theory in which solely singlespeech acts are defined, complaining, just like criticizing, is a complex speech act According

to Minh (2006, p 14), complaining may be composed of different acts, each of which carries adifferent illocutionary force and none of which is the head act She further suggested thatcomplaining may be better described in terms of speech act sets which are made up bymultiple components Moreover, as stated above, the realization of speech act is culture-specific and context-dependent; people from different socio-cultural and linguistic background

may differ in their choice of realization patterns and use the patterns in different sequence andwith different frequency It is, therefore, crucial to look at the sets of speech acts, or in otherway, realization patterns, of complaint proposed by different linguistic researchers.

Olshtain and Weinbach (1987, cited in Olshtain and Weinbach 1993) suggested fivecategories of realization patterns of complaining based on the degree of face-threat that thespeaker is willing to undertake when performing his complaining As claimed by them, thehigher-numbered it is, the severer the strategy is The less severe strategy in their

categorization is below the level of reproach, with which the speaker avoids any explicit mentioning of either the action or the person The second is expression of annoyance or

disapproval; the speakers express annoyance at the violation of the addressee yet still without

mentioning the action or the addressee explicitly The third one is explicit complaint When

the speaker opts for explicit complaints, he/she decides to perform an open FTA towards theaddressee, but this is done without implication of any sanctions However, when the speaker

draws on the fourth strategy on their scale – accusation and warning, he/she is implying potential sanctions against the addressee, for example, “Next time don’t expect me to lend you

anything” The severest strategy is immediate threat In choosing immediate threats in making

their complaints, the speakers openly attack the addressee

Another categorization of complaint strategies was set up by Trosborg (1995), based

on the directness level of a complaint She noted that complaint strategies were divided into

four main categories – no explicit reproach, expression of annoyance or disapproval,

accusation and blame – and eight sub-categories In the first category of “no explicit reproach”, the complainer resorts to hinting strategies, in which case both the addressee and

his/ her action are not mentioned There is just implication from the complainer that he/ sheknows about the offence and holds the complainee indirectly responsible However, as a result

of this indirect expression, the complainee might not understand whether an offence is referred

or not While she regarded this strategy as a “weak complaint strategy”, Trosborg (1995, p.316) also noted that “it might be used successfully to prepare for more forceful strategies

Secondly, in the category of “expression of disapproval”, the complainer shows his/ her

annoyance, dislike or disapproval, concerning a certain state of affairs he/ she considers bad

for him/herself In using these two strategies, the complainer implies that he/ she holds thecomplainee responsible but avoids mentioning him/ her as the guilty person Thirdly,

regarding the category of “accusation”, the complainer asserts the agentive role of the

complainee By using strategy 4 – “indirect accusation”, the complainer may make anassertion of the connection between the hearer and the offence and thus push forwards his/ herassertion by establishing the hearer as the agent of the complainable action An example is

“Look at the mess, haven’t you done any cleaning up for the last week?” Meanwhile, the use

of strategy 5 means the speaker directly accuses the addressee; for example, “You don’t even

clean up after you when you’ve been there, you used to do it, what’s up with you now?” In the

last category, there is a presupposition that the accused is guilty of the offence Thecomplainer passes a value judgment on the complainee If the complainer chooses strategy 6 -

“modified blame”, he/ she states a preference for an alternative approach not taken by the

accused – for instance, “You could have said no, I mean, if you had so much to do” Strategy

7, on the other hand, indicates that the action for which the addressee is held responsible is bad

(“You never clean up after you, I’m sick and tired of it”) whereas strategy 8 emphasizes that

the accused person is a non-responsible social member

In realizing a complaint, the speaker can employ more than one strategy with differentsequences of strategies being used Moreover, the realization patterns of a complaint mightvary much from person to person, from context to context, and from culture to culture.Olshtain and Weinbach (1987) and Trosborg (1995) provided a very useful and valuableframework for other pragmatic researchers to rely on in their study on the realization patterns

of complaint An appropriate combination of the two categorizations might be the best choicefor this study

1.9 Modifications

In addition to a number of strategies available to a complainer who wants to avoid adirect confrontation with the complainee, there is also a wide range of modifications,including internal and external modifications, which the complainer can make use of tomitigate their complaints Internal modifications refer to the “downgraders”, which play downthe impact a complaint is likely to have on the accused and are said to make a complaint sound

more polite, and the “upgraders”, which, by contrast, increases the impact of a complaint onthe hearer Meanwhile, external modifications include “supportive statements” to rationalizethe non-polite act of complaint According to Trosborg (1995), if a complaint is convincinglysupported, it is difficult to overturn or dispute it The knowledge of mitigating devices ormodifications is essential in studying the realization patterns of the speech act of complaint.Internal modifications are also referred to as “modality markers”, and there is a distinctionbetween “downgraders” and “upgraders” (Trosborg, 1995, p 327) Specifically, a complaintmay be softened or weakened by the inclusion of downgraders, and aggravated orstrengthened by the inclusion of upgraders Another important aspect that helps a complainersucceed in performing his/ her complaint is the ability to justify his/her accusation orreprimand so that it appears convincing (Place 1986, cited in Trosborg 1995); otherwise, acomplainer him/herself might run the risk of losing face External modifications, specifically

“supportive moves”, give the justification for the complainer’s “right” to place the blame forsomething on the complainee as well as provide face-saving arguments Supportive moves are

then categorized upon different levels of discourse: (1) at the structural level – preparators; (2) at the interpersonal level – disarmers; and finally, (3) at the content level – providing

evidence and substantiation.

1.10 Studies on Complaints by EFL Learners

There are a number of studies which investigate the differences between EFL learnersand native speakers in realizing complaints in the target language The differences have beenexamined at both pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic levels In this part, most significantCCP and ILP studies on complaints (Trosborg 1995, Murphy and Neu 1996, or Moon 2001) aswell as studies on complaints by EFL learners of such native language backgrounds asJapanese, Korean, Chinese and Vietnamese will be reviewed Studies on learners from thoselanguage backgrounds are to be chosen because of the assumption that Japanese, Korean andChinese cultures might share many similar characteristics and values Vietnamese culture

Trosborg (1995) carried out an experimental study on complaint strategies in native and native speakers of English The data were elicited from five groups of subjects:native speakers of English, native speakers of Danish, and three groups of Danish learners of

non-English at three proficiency levels Learners’ performance was compared with non-English nativespeakers’ performance in terms of complaint strategies, complaint perspective and choices ofmodifications; and the influence of P and D in learners’ choices of strategies were alsoexamined Her study showed that complaint is “an extremely difficult act to master even foradvanced learners of English” because “one must be able to voice one’s annoyance, anger, etc.while, at the same time, it is important to avoid embarrassing your interlocutor by creating asituation in which it becomes impossible for him/ her to face the aversiveness of taking theblame” (Trosborg 1995, p 370) The study had some significant findings Firstly, ituncovered that learners not only produced fewer complaints than native speakers but alsoperformed differently from them with regard to directness level and ability to support acomplaint adequately They were also found to produce fewer modality markers, upgraders aswell as downgraders, and not adjust their performance sufficiently to the parameters ofdominance and social distance Secondly, the correlation between proficiency level andappropriateness in IL performance was evidenced; in other words, there was an approximation

to native speaker performance relative to increasing proficiency Last but not least, nosignificant differences were observed between English and Danish native speakerperformance, so learners’ inappropriate performance could hardly be attributed to pragmatictransfer, but more closely related to their proficiency

Murphy and Neu (1996) investigated components of the speech act set of complainingproduced by American native speakers and Korean non-native speakers of English as well asascertained how these speech act sets were judged by native speakers based on such factors aswhether the act is aggressive, respectful, credible, appropriate, and similar to what a nativewould use The data for the productive part of the study were taken from 14 male Americansand 14 male Koreans, all of whom graduated from Penn State University; and those for thereceptive part comprised 23 undergraduates and 4 graduates, who were asked to judge theacceptability of the speech act sets The data were elicited from an oral DCT situation, whichplaced the subjects in the position of a student whose paper had been unfairly marked and thenasked the subjects to “to to speak to the professor” Meanwhile, the data collection instrumentfor judgment part was a 10-yes-no-item questionnaire and an open-ended question The speech

act set used as analysis framework involves four categories: (1) an explanation of purpose; (2)

a complaint; (3) a justification; and (4) a candidate solution – request Regarding the subjects’realization of complaints, it is found that there was a high correlation between native and non-native speakers when producing three out of the four speech act components (1), (3) and (4).However, they differed in production of component (2) – complaint More specifically, theAmerican subjects produced a complaint in each instance, i.e “I think, uh, it’s my opinionmaybe the grade was a little low” whereas most Korean subjects tended to produce a criticism,i.e “But you just only look at your point of view and uh you just didn’t recognize my point”(cited in Tanck, 2002, p 3) According to judgments of American native speakers whoparticipated in this study, non-native speakers’ speech acts appeared more aggressive, lessrespectful, less credible and less appropriate than the common "complaint" speech act setsoffered by native speakers

Moon (2001) also compared native and non-native performance of complaints inEnglish The subjects consisted of 73 native speakers and 56 non-native speakers of English.One different thing about his study is that the non-native speakers varied widely in their nativelanguage backgrounds (Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, French, Greek, Japanese, Korean, Nepali,Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Thai, Tagalog, Tigrigna, and Vietnamese) Besides, they alsoranged in language proficiency from low-intermediate to fluent and differed in their staylength in the U.S from 3 months to 10 years The DCT questionnaire used included 4situations, in each of which the social power (P) and social distance (D) between the hearerand the speaker as well as the rank of imposition (R) varied The analysis framework wasmodified from five categories proposed by Olshtain and Weinbach (1987) (for more details,see 2.6.) and then simplified into 2 categories – implicit and explicit complaints Implicitstrategies included “completely avoid explicit mention of the offensive event or person” and

“express annoyance about the offensive event and person, without direct reference, whileexplicit ones are “explicitly refer to the event and person, involving “you” and “I”” and

“accuse and threaten” The results revealed that non-native speakers tended to complain in amore explicit way whereas native speakers use more implicit ways of complaints In otherwords, non-native speakers did not always makes complaints following the appropriate ways