TÍNH MẠCH lạc TRONG các câu CHUYỆN cười TIẾNG ANH dưới góc độ PHÂN TÍCH DIỄN NGÔN

The concept of coherence has long been introduced; however, its perspective theories have not been gathered into a collective framework. As one of the first attempts to explore the coherence features in the context of English funny stories comprehension of fourthyear mainstream students at Faculty of English Teacher Education, ULIS, VNU, this paper seeks to explore the difficulties and techniques made by the students in humorous discourse. The paper begins by reviewing the current literature on coherence, some foundation linguistic theories and related studies. The investigation then involved the participation of 30 students who undertook questionnaires and interviews. The analysis of the collected data demonstrated some specific perceptions about coherence and coherence role as a way to understand discourse humor by Vietnamese learners. In addition, it revealed the weaknesses of students when reading English funny stories. To overcome all these difficulties, students often (1) try to reestablish the context of the story and decode it, (2) find out the implicature of the story and the conversation, (3) try to link their background knowledge with the story content.

The concept of coherence has long been introduced; however, its perspectivetheories have not been gathered into a collective framework As one of the firstattempts to explore the coherence features in the context of English funny storiescomprehension of fourth-year mainstream students at Faculty of English TeacherEducation, ULIS, VNU, this paper seeks to explore the difficulties and techniquesmade by the students in humorous discourse The paper begins by reviewing thecurrent literature on coherence, some foundation linguistic theories and relatedstudies The investigation then involved the participation of 30 students whoundertook questionnaires and interviews The analysis of the collected datademonstrated some specific perceptions about coherence and coherence role as away to understand discourse humor by Vietnamese learners In addition, it revealedthe weaknesses of students when reading English funny stories To overcome allthese difficulties, students often (1) try to re-establish the context of the story anddecode it, (2) find out the implicature of the story and the conversation, (3) try tolink their background knowledge with the story content

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACCEPTANCE PAGE i

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS i

ABSTRACT i

LIST OF TABLES, FIGURES, CHARTS, AND ABBREVIATIONS i

INTRODUCTION 1

1 Statement of the problem and rationale for the study 1

2 Research questions 1

3 Significance of the study 1

4 Scope of the study 1

5 Organization 1

DEVELOPMENT 1

CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW AND THEORETICAL BACKGROUND 1 1 1 Previous studies 1

1.2 Humor 1

1.2.1 Definition of humor 1

1.2.2 Humor types 1

1.2.2.1 Situational humor 1

1.2.2.2 Linguistic humor 1

1.3 Coherence 1

1.3.1 Definition of coherence and its approaches 1

1.3.1.1 Text - based approach 1

1.3.1.2 Mind – based approach 1

1.3.2 Types of coherence 1

1.3.2.1 Local coherence & Global coherence 1

1.3.2.2 Some specific types of coherence 1

1.3.2.2.1 Topical coherence 1

1.3.2.2.2 Functional coherence 1

1.3.2.2.3 Disturbed coherence 1

1.4 Some linguistic foundation theories in the relationship with coherence 1

1.4.1 Context 1

1.4.2 Background knowledge 1

CHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGY 1

2.1 Selection of subjects 1

2.1.1 Participants 1

2.1.2 Materials 1

2 2 Data collection instruments 1

2.3 Procedures of data collection 1

CHAPTER 3: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS 1

3.1 Findings 1

3.1.1 Research question 1 - Are there some specific perceptions of coherence and the role of coherence as a way to understand discourse humor by Vietnamese learners? 1

3.1.2 Research question 2 - What are the difficulties the students encounter in order to understand coherence as well as humor features of English funny stories? 1

3.1.3 Research question 3 - What techniques have been utilized by the students to overcome those difficulties in English funny stories? 1

3.2 Implications and applications 1

CONCLUSION 1

1 Summary of findings 1

2 Limitations 1

3 Suggestions for further research 1

REFERENCES 1

APPENDICES 1

LIST OF TABLES, FIGURES, CHARTS, AND ABBREVIATIONS

PAGES Charts

Chart 1: Students’ approaches to coherence

Chart 2: Students’ perceptions of distinction between cohesion and

coherence

Chart 3: Student perception of coherence types

Chart 4: Students’ perception of discourse coherence

Chart 5: Students’ attitudes to coherence in humorous discourses

Chart 6: Students’ drawbacks when reading English funny stories

Chart 7: Steps and techniques utilized by the students to understand

English funny stories

3636

3738394046

Figures:

Table 1: Speech acts of an utterance

Table 2: Some characteristics of indirect speech act

Table 3: Widdowson’s example of functional coherence

Table 4: Nunan’s example of functional coherence

Table 5: The cooperative principle

Table 6: The features of context according to Hymes

Table 7: Areas of investigation in each part of the questionnaires

Table 8: Areas of investigation in each part of the interviews

Table 9: Substitutes

Table 10: Students’ arrangements

Table 11: Students’ explanations for arrangements

1718191921263233424243

Abbreviations

FELTE: Faculty of English Language Teacher Education

ULIS: University of Languages and International Studies

VNU: Vietnam National University

ISA: Indirect speech act

1 Statement of the problem and rationale for the study

Focusing on Discourse Analysis is a trend of linguistic research recently InDiscourse Analysis, a discourse is analyzed in the relationship with every linguisticand non-linguistic element As it is known, funny stories contain many factorswhich reflect cultural, social as well as traditional values of a society, thus to accessEnglish funny stories successfully the researcher need to make use from CognitiveDiscourse Analysis The matter rests in funny stories is that there are someunreasonable and irrelevant things; however, the readers still understand and laugh

at this type of discourse For example1:

“Birds flying south

Question: Why do birds fly south in the winter?

Answer: Because it's too far to walk!”

If the answer is “Because the South is warm in the winter”, the readers will notsmile anymore The researcher wonders what happens to the discourse coherenceand the role of coherence in two situations

Besides, “coherence” term has been extensively researched However, most ofthe research has focused on formal connection of a discourse/ text’s elements Some

of the most relevant research is Topical coherence in spoken discourse by Wolfram Bublitz (1989) and Coherence in political speeches: Interpreting ideational, interpersonal and textual meanings in opening addresses by Olga Dontcheva-

Navratilova (2010) Besides, research concerned with the development ofcoherence in funny stories is few in the current literature This is inappropriatebecause funny story is a special type of discourse, which can also help the linguisticlearners build and fulfill their language skills In addition, when studying DiscourseAnalysis in class, the researcher found that the literature on coherence is stilldisjointed

1 Retrieved from http://learnenglishkids.britishcouncil.org/en/jokes/birds-flying-south

Having a high personal interest in discourse coherence, the researcher hasdecided to conduct a study on “Coherence in English funny stories: A study ofdiscourse analysis” to provide an in-depth understanding of coherence and the role

of coherence in humorous discourse in the Vietnam educational setting In short,the research’s aim is to make it easier for leaners of English including researcherwhen reading English funny stories, and then know how to apply it to make dailylife works and activities more happily and more effectively than ever

2 Research questions

The first aim of the research is to find out some specific features ofcoherence In another words, the study aims to find out what makes a story soundsfunny in term of coherence characteristics Besides, the researcher’s ambition is topropose some methods to promote coherence understanding

From that the study would seek to answer the following questions:

1 Are there some specific perceptions of coherence and the role of coherence

as a way to understand discourse humor by Vietnamese learners?

2 What are the difficulties the students encounter in order to understandcoherence as well as humor features of English funny stories?

3 What techniques have been utilized by the students to overcome thosedifficulties in English funny stories?

3 Significance of the study

The research presents a firm collective framework of coherence subject towhich little previous English research has done It helps us realize the role ofcoherence in discourses generally and in funny stories particularly Along with that,

by gathering and defining expressive features/ characteristics of coherence, thestudy can help the readers easily realize whether a certain discourse is coherent ornot In addition, the readers’ comprehension of funny stories will be improved andthis type of discourse is not ambiguous any more The researcher, with this study,hopes to bring a real picture of what is going on in English funny storiescomprehension and to help students improve their reading skill

4 Scope of the study

The scope of the research has been made quite clear from the research tittle

“Coherence in English funny stories: a study of discourse analysis”

Firstly, the research focuses on “coherence” To be more specific, itinvestigates the definition and types of coherence as well as its expressive featuresunder Cognitive Analysis, a new branch of Discourse Analysis

Secondly, the subject of the study will be restricted to a special type ofdiscourse - English funny stories In addition, those stories are in form of smalldialogue between two people

Lastly, questionnaires and interviews will be restricted to fourth- yearstudents at Faculty of English Language Teacher Education, ULIS, VNU As one ofthe first attempts to explore the coherence features in the context of English funnystories comprehension of fourth-year mainstream students at Faculty of EnglishTeacher Education, ULIS, VNU, this paper seeks to explore the difficulties andtechniques utilized made by the students in humorous discourse

Chapter 3 – Results and Discussion – presents, analyzes and discusses the findingsthat the researcher found out in order to answer the research questions

Conclusion – summarizes the main issues in the paper Besides, the pedagogicalimplications concerning the research topic as well as the limitations of the research

and suggestions for further studies will be introduced in this part of paper.Following this chapter are the References and Appendices.

Summary:

In this chapter, the researcher has elaborated about:

- The statement of the research problem and rationale for the study

- Aims and objectives of the study

- Scope of the study

- An overview of the rest of the paper

In short, these points justify the contents and structure of the study In addition,they serve as the guidelines for the rest of the paper

CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW AND

THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

1 1 Previous studies

Research concerned with the development of coherence in funny stories is

few in the current literature Some of the most relevant researches are Topical coherence in spoken discourse by Wolfram Bublitz (1989) and Coherence in political speeches: Interpreting ideational, interpersonal and textual meanings in opening addresses by Olga Dontcheva-Navratilova (2010) Bublitz (1989) claims

that topic of a discourse is the outcome of a process of ascription in which a subjectlinked to a complex speech act pattern In addition, he shows that a text is notcoherent in it but is understood as coherent in an actual context In Dontcheva-Navratilova (2010)’s paper, she focuses on a certain type of discourse Sheintroduces some aspects of coherence in opening addresses such as 1) Coherenceand persuasion: understanding and believing, 2) Management of discourse topic andrhetorical structure, 3) Strategic uses of reference, 4) Modality markers and point ofview

In this paper, the study focuses on the coherence in English funny stories,which can only be understood if the theory relating to humor features is cleared Inother words, the readers of funny stories can smile only when they understand thecoherence of those stories Because little research directly related to theresearch topic has been carried out, the researcher will trace coherence from

humor features Some of those researches are Implicature in English cartoons: a critical discourse analysis by Phan Le Thanh Huong (2007), The language of humor in funny stories by Nguyen Thi Phuong Oanh (2007) and A pragmatic study

on some factors causing laughter in English and Vietnamese funny stories by

Huynh Thi Hoai (2010) To be more specific, the first study was carried out bygiving questionnaire to both English and Vietnamese readers The participants wererequired to give their answers about the implicatures in English funny cartoons Theanswers of English- native speakers are benchmarks to evaluate the answer ofVietnamese readers The study highlights some main causes/ difficulties that lead toVietnamese misunderstanding of those cartoons.

While the first study focuses on cognition of the readers and their drawbacks

in understanding English cartoons, the two last studies pay attention to the insidefeatures of the discourses Nguyen (2007) analyzes some groups of English funnystories basing on word meaning and meaning transference types such as polysemy,homonymy, synonym, antonym, hyponymy, metaphor, metonymy, etc By usingPocheptsov (1974)’s classification and materials, the study analyzes the meaning ofthe whole stories and explains the reason why the key but ambiguous words canmake the readers smile Huynh (2010) makes a turning point in analyzing funnydiscourse when the researcher accesses those stories via their inferences andpromotes two types of humor mechanisms: 1) Base on Speech act theory of Austin,2) Base on Implicature

Although little research directly related to the research topic has been carriedout and the literature on coherence is still disjointed The sections below will bedevoted to elaborating the key concepts of the paper through collecting all thetheories in qualified sources to provide a theoretical basis for the study

1.2 Humor

1.2.1 Definition of humor

It is important to bear in mind what humor is before getting into coherencefeatures of English funny stories

The origin of the word ―humor comes from the ancient Greek word

“chymos”, which means “juice” Later on, Latin adopted the word “umor” for

“fluid”2, specifically “body fluid” and the word “humorem”3 which means moisture

2 Retrieved from http://www.funtrivia.com/en/subtopics/Aspects-of-Humor-Whats-So-Funny-261363.html

3 See more in Liu, W (2010) Cohesive Device Analysis in Humor.

According to Liu (2010), the explanation is that “when the flow of the fourHypocratean humors (phlegm, blood, choler and bile) was normal, a person was

said to be ―in good humor”, as explained furthermore on funtrivia.com website:

“The first fluid was blood, which when someone had a surplus, put him in a'sanguine', or positive/optimistic mood The second fluid was phlegm and anexcess of this fluid put a person in a 'phlegmatic' mood, meaning the personwas unexcitable and often slow The third fluid was bile, sometimes referred

to as 'choler', which put a person into an irritated mood Other terms for thismood are 'bilious' and 'choleric', both obviously coming from the "liquids"they were referring to The last fluid was black bile, which in reality does notexist The word 'melancholy' is used to best describe the mood of someonewith too much black bile in their system, and in fact, the term 'melancholia'itself meant an excess of black bile.”4

There are some more representative definitions of humor Audrieth (1998)defines humor as "the mental faculty of discovering, expressing or appreciating theludicrous or absurdly incongruous" He explained that ludicrous is an adjectivemeaning amusing or laughable through obvious absurdity, incongruity,exaggeration or eccentricity and incongruous is something lacking congruity,inconsistent within itself Meanwhile, Romero and Cruthirds (2006, p.59) says thathumor is “amusing communications that produce positive emotions and cognitions

in the individual, group, or organization.” In easier words, Nguyen (2007, p.5)describes humors as “the quality in something that makes it funny or amusing, theability to laugh at things that are amusing” There is no fixed definition of humoraccepted, Nash (1985, p.1) also claims that “humor is subtle, evasively difficult todescribe.’

Nguyen (2007) also refers to the definition of sense of humor In her paper,she defines sense of humor is “the ability to experience humor” Sense of humor isalso the sensitivity of a person to humor features which can contribute a lot inunderstanding discourse humor

For example:

A young soldier who came home on leave was telling his folks about hismilitary life Suddenly he stopped to look with interest at four pretty girlscoming down the street His mother gave a nudge to the father

“Look how our little boy has grown,” she gasped “He was never interested

in girls before the Army.”

Meanwhile their son watched the girl intently until they were out of sight,

then turned back and announced, “One of them is out of step.”

(Pocheptsov, 1971, p 17)The interpretation of the mother mismatches the aim of the son’s action,which brings humor to readers’ lips

1.2.2.2 Linguistic humor

“Linguistically based jokes, anecdotes, etc is ambiguity Ambiguity isaffected by various linguistic means.” Nguyen (2007) analyzes some groups ofEnglish funny stories basing on word meaning and meaning transference types such

as polysemy, homonymy, synonym, antonym, hyponymy, metaphor, metonymy,etc in her paper There are several English funny stories which employ the means

of language to create humor

For example:

“Teacher - When was Rome built?

Percy – At night

Teacher – Who told you that?

Percy – You did You said Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

For example:

Our son was constantly wandering in and out of the house, leaving the front

or back door wide open ‘One and for all, will you please close that!’ my exasperated wife pleaded one day ‘Were you born in a barn?’ ‘No, I was born in a hospital,’ he replied, smirking ‘With automatic doors.’

(Huynh, 2010, p.154)

In term of this example, both the utterances of the mother and the son haveimplicatures Besides, the mother also uses indirect speech act to request her sonclose the door via a question, “Were you born in a barn?” (interrogative form butrequest function) Although the son might understand his mother’s implicature hestill answers “I was born in a hospital with automatic doors” instead of saying ‘No’directly

For the purpose of exploiting the main goal of the study, all the conceptsrelated are made clearly The following part will deal with the features ofcoherence

1.3 Coherence

1.3.1 Definition of coherence and its approaches

According to Givon (1992), there are two way to approaches to coherencewhich are coherence in text and coherence in mind.5 However, this paper waswritten in Spanish it is difficult to trace back exactly the characteristics of thoseapproaches under the view of Givon The researcher still would like to use thoseapproaches to discover coherence features and the sub-tittles of the nextdevelopment part Besides, the definitions of coherence are influenced by twoapproaches including text-based approach and mind-based approach so they will beraised in each part of the approach

1.3.1.1 Text - based approach

Following text – based approach, there are some famous linguists such asVan Dijk (1972, 1977), Halliday and Hasan (1976), Widdowson (1978), Reinhart(1980), Sanders (2000), etc

“Early research on coherence, defined in general terms as the semantic unity

of a text, was to a large extent confined to a static text-based formalapproach, according to which coherence is the product of textualconnectivity and cohesion (For example Bellert 1970, Daneš 1974, Enkvist

1978, Gutwinski 1976, Halliday and Hasan 1976, Reinhart 1980).”

(Olga Dontcheva-Navratilova, 2010, p.11)Following this approach, the linguists deal primarily with syntactic andlexical features such as cohesion, discourse markers of text to identify the coherence

of a text Nowadays, the terms cohesion and coherence are separated from eachother Cohesion is the surface structure of a text while coherence is the concepts andrelations underlying text Although a text has cohesion but it may be incoherent

Apart from the ideas of linguists listed in Olga Dontcheva-Navratilova’sstudy, Reinhart’s (1980) concept of coherence “involves formal, semantic andpragmatic elements.” Van Dijk (1977), Widdowson (1978) and Reinhart’s (1980)also focus on semantic and pragmatic features of coherence in discourse Forexample, they analyze the semantic relation, functional relation among thesentences and the structure inside a text While, “Palmer (1983) writes: ‘Coherence

5 See more in Givon, T (1992) Coming to Terms with Cognition: Coherence in Text vs Coherence in Mind

en Functionalism and Grammar Amsterdam: John Benjamin.

refers to the rhetorical devices, to ways of writing and speaking that bring aboutorder and unity and emphasis’” (Nguyen, 2000, p.23) Beside, Redeker (2000)claims that “coherence should be thought of as consisting of three parallelcomponents: ideational (semantic) structure, rhetorical structure, and sequential (orsegment) structure” (p.1) There are 24 relations6 which introduced by Mann andThompson (1987) which can be noticed easily through essays or monologue suchnon-volitional cause/result, volitional cause/result, sequence, evidence, etc.

1.3.1.2 Mind – based approach

Mind – based approach have various other name in literature: based strand (Enkvist, 1985), reader-based coherence (John, 1986)

“The discourse-based strand approaches coherence as a property ofdiscourse instantiated in the process of meaning interpretation, which isaffected by the context and the background knowledge of the individualsinvolved in interaction The different analytical frameworks share a dynamicview of meaning interpretation which is based on the assumption thatdiscourse coherence is a collaborative achievement on the part of theparticipants in the interaction, who use their experience of the world anddiscourse processing when (re-)constructing meanings encoded in texts.”

(Olga Dontcheva-Navratilova, 2010, p.14)This approach is very popular in linguistic field from past to now There aresome famous linguists such as Milsark (1977), Edmonson (1981), Sinclair (1987),Bublitz (1989), Green (1989), Yule (1996), Lenk (1995), Renkema (2004), etc

Edmonson (1981, p.13) takes an example as follows: “We will have guestsfor lunch Calderon was great writer.”

He says that between these two sentences there is a causal link and thisdiscourse is coherent although there is no visible semantic or functional link Thecoherence of the discourse is constructed in mind of the readers These twosentences can be linked to each other:

“Did you know Calderon died exactly one hundred years ago today? Goodheavens! I’d forgotten The occasion shall not pass unnoticed We will have

6 See more in Mann and Thompson (1987) Rhetorical relation theory: A theory of text organization Or http://www.sfu.ca/rst.

guests for lunch Calderon was a great Spanish writer I shall invite ProfessorWilson and Senor Caste llano right away…”

(Edmonson 1981, p.13)According to Yule (1996), coherence is “what is said or written will makesense in terms of their normal experience of things That ‘normal’ experience will

be locally interpreted by each individual and hence will be tied to the familiar andthe expected” (p.84) If the information of the discourse is familiar and the readerscan interpret; the discourse is judged as coherent He takes his own example in dailylife:

“In the neighborhood where I live, the notice in [Ia.] means that someone isselling plants, but the notice in [Ib.] does not mean that someone is sellinggarages

[I] a Plant Sale

b Garage Sale

(…) Indeed, the interpretation of [Ib.], that someone is selling householditems from their garage, is one that requires some familiarity with suburbanlife

This emphasis on familiarity and knowledge as the basis of coherence isnecessary because of evidence that we tend to make instant interpretations offamiliar material and tend not to see possible alternatives.”

(Yule, 1996, pp 84-85)From this point of view, characteristics of coherence made by Yule (1996)coincide with Relevance theory by Sperber and Wilson (1995).7 There are somesubtypes of relevance such as relevance to context, relevance to individual,relevance of phenomena and stimuli:

“(10) Relevance:

Extent condition 1: an assumption is relevant in a context to the extent that

its contextual effects in this context are large

Extent condition 2: an assumption is relevant in a context to the extent that

the effort required to process it in this context is small”

(43) Relevance to an individual (comparative)

Extent condition 1: an assumption is relevant to an individual to the extent

that the contextual effects achieved when it is optimally processed are large

7 See more in Sperber, D., Wilson, D (1995) Relevance Communication and Cognition.

Extent condition 2: an assumption is relevant to an individual to the extent

that the effort required to process it optimal is small

(59) Relevance of a phenomenon (comparative)

Extent condition 1: a phenomenon is relevant to an individual to the extent

that the contextual effects achieved when it is optimally processed are large

Extent condition 2: a phenomenon is relevant to an individual to the extent

that the effort required to process it optimally is small”

(Sperber and Wilson 1995, pp.125-153)For example:

“(4) Flag-seller: Would you like to buy a flag for the Royal National

(5) (a) Birmingham is inland

(b) The Royal National Lifeboat Institution is a charity

(c) Buying a flag is one way of subscribing to a charity

(d) Someone who spends his holidays inland has no need of the services

of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution

(e) Someone who has no need of the services of a charity cannot beexpected to subscribe to that charity

(6) The passer- by cannot be expected to subscribe to the Royal NationalLifeboat Institution.”

(Sperber and Wilson 1995, pp 121-122)Renkema (2004) defines coherence as the connection that is brought about

by something outside the text In addition, Dontcheva-Navratilova (2012)emphasises that coherence is not inherent to a text It means that coherence belongs

to cognition of human-beings The “interpretative faculty is activated” and we start

to “infer a relationship between the event described: we try to create a coherentdiscourse” (Widdowson, 1978, pp 38-39)

“It follows that “human beings do not require formal textual markers beforethey are prepared to interpret a text They naturally assume coherence, andinterpret the text in the light of that assumption” (Brown and Yule 1983: 66),

in other words they use their common sense and impose coherence on thetext (Tárnyiková 1995: 24) while trying to achieve a coherent interpretation.”

(Olga Dontcheva-Navratilova, 2010, p.12)

To serve the aim of this paper, pro-mind-based approach will be employed

to measure the understanding and sensitivity of the readers to English funny stories

A discourse is judged as coherent when the readers/ listeners find the presented one real, believable and relevant

To sum up, in this paper the researcher would like to introduce one more but the most neutral definition by Nguyen (2000), “coherence refers to the type of semantic or rhetorical relationships that underlined text (…) Coherence can obtain

on the basis of relevance, the cooperative principle, the common shared back

ground knowledge between participants in a speech event, and how discourse is structured, as well.”

1.3.2 Types of coherence

Though linguists do not reach consensus among them about the classification

of coherence types, the research desire to present all the ones listed in previousstudies in this part

1.3.2.1 Local coherence & Global coherence

Basing on the scale of semantic connection, there are two types of coherencewhich are local and global coherence

According to Van Dijk (1980), “local coherence is defined for (pair wise)relations between sentences of a textual sequence” In other words, local coherence

is establishment of semantic or meaningful connection of ideas at a local level, forexample: in a conversation, local coherence is the relations of adjacency pair Healso defines the term “global coherence” as the “theme”, “idea” “upshot” or “gist”

of a discourse or a passage of the discourse Global coherence is the connection ofall ideas in a text in order to get the meaning of them It leads us to the topic and thewhole meaning of a discourse

1.3.2.2 Some specific types of coherence

1.3.2.2.1 Topical coherence

Nguyen (2000) defines topic as “what is being talked about”, it help us todecide “what set of sentences should be considered together as a set of some kind,separate from another set” (p.82) There are two types of topic including sentential/local topic and discourse/ global topic According to Nguyen (2000), in term ofsentential topic, we recognize the topic thank to “Theme” (topic) and Rheme(comment) in paper by Palmer (1983)

However, Van Dijk (1985) argues that “we do not assign a theme or a topic to onesentence, but to larger stretches of talk or texts” (p.75)

Bublitz (1989) also claims that topic of a discourse is the outcome of aprocess of ascription in which a subject linked to a complex speech act pattern.While, Plãcintar (2007) raises a new way to recognize the topic of a discourse asfollows:

“Topical organization is the level of propositional coherence in the structure

of the conversational flow and goes hand in hand with functionalorganization, as conversational topicality, that sense that conversation isabout something, can only be analyzed in relation to the sequential structureand activity types in discourse.” (p.295)

All the students raise their hands Professor:

- Very good That means all of us have understood the lesson already.The book hasn’t been published yet, actually.”

(Nụ cười Việt – Anh, 1999, p 234)

Following above methods to recognize the topic of this story, here are somesuggested variants:

- Teacher and student (the main character)

- Very good (the same as the tittle)

- Students and their lie ( theme and main idea)

- Students tell lie to the professor that they had read the book (subject andspeech act)

In power point slides of Cheng Xiaotang from Beijing Normal University, hesays that “a coherent text must develop around one single global topic; within thetext, sub-topic or local topics may develop and may change from one to another, butthis should not be done at the expense of the loss of the global topic.”

We produce utterances with a certain communicative purpose and “we form

an utterance with some kind of function in mind” (Yule, 1996, p.48) The nextimportant act is illocutionary act, which also is central to the concept of a speechact An illocutionary act is an act performed in saying something For example, ifsomeone utters this utterance: “The weather is hot”, it may be a statement, acomplaint, etc

The third act is perlocutionary act that is performed by saying something,

“we do not, of course, simply create an utterance with a function without intending

it to have an effect” (Yule, 1996, p.48) In other word, the perlocutionary act is theact of causing a certain effect/ the result on the hearer and others.

One problem with the speech act is that the distinction between illocutionaryand perlocutionary act seems to be overlapped Nguyen (2000) claimed, “Basically,

an illocutionary act is a linguistic act performed in uttering certain word in a givencontext, a perlocutionary act is a non-linguistic act performed as a consequence ofthe locutionary and illocutionary act.” For example:

“I’ve just made some coffee.”

(Yule, 1996, p.48)Locutionary act Illocutionary act Perlocutionary act

Table 1: Speech acts of an utterance

With general functions of speech act, Austin grouped utterances into fiveclasses including verdictives, exercitives, commisives, behabitives and expositive

In term of Searle’s system, speech act is also divided into five types that aredirectives, commisives, representatives, declaratives and expressives However, toserve the main purposes of this paper, it had better access speech act system throughdirect and indirect speech acts According to Yule, there are three basic sentences(declarative, interrogative and imperative) and three general communicativefunctions (statement, question, command/ request.) in English We have directspeech act when “there is a direct relationship between a structure and a function”and if “there is an indirect relationship between a structure and a function; we have

an indirect speech act.” (Yule, 1996, p.54) For example: a declarative used to make

a statement is a direct speech act, but a declarative used to make a request is anindirect speech act In his book, Yule (1996) also said, “different structures can be

used to accomplish the same basic function (…).” For example, the utterance “It is

cold outside!” (Yule, 1996, p55) is uttered immediately by one person after entering

a room It can be a simple statement concerning the low temperature in the room,but it can be a request from a speaker to a hearer to close the window if there is awide-open window in that room The case is sometimes called an indirect speechact, consisting of two subtypes, i.e the primary illocutionary act (request to closethe window) and the secondary illocutionary act (simple description of thetemperature)

Here are some characteristics of indirect speech act (ISA) which areintroduced by Finegan and Sworth (2004, p.303):

- ISA violate at least one maxim of the cooperative principle

- The literal meaning of the locution of an indirect speech act differs from itsintended meaning

- Hearers and readers identify indirect speech act by noticing that an utterancehas characteristic one (it violate the maxim) and by assuming that theinterlocutors following the cooperative principle

- As soon as hearers and readers have identified an ISA, they identify itsintended meaning with the help of knowledge of the context and of theworld around them

Table 2: Some characteristics of indirect speech act

Indirectness is a widely used conversational strategy People tend to useindirect speech acts mainly in connection with politeness (Leech, 1983, p.108) sincethey thus diminish the unpleasant message contained in requests and orders forinstance However, politeness is not the only motivation for indirectness Peoplealso use indirect strategies when they want to make their speech more interesting,when they want to reach goals different from their partners’ or when they want toincrease the force of the message Sometimes, indirectness leaves the speaker a wayout if challenged by the addressee It provides a means to deny perceived intentions,avoid conflict and escape from responsibility for an utterance

Widdowson (1978) suggests that we are able to recognize a discourse is coherent or not

by creating context and identifying the functions of each utterance Here is the example of Widdowson:

A: That’s the telephone

B: I’m in the bath

A: Ok

RequestExcuseAcceptance of excuses

Table 3: Widdowson’s example of functional coherence

“The missing bits of conversation” could be “restored” (Widdowson, 1978) asfollows:

A: That’s the telephone Can you answer it, please?

B: No, I’m sorry, I can’t answer it because I’m in the bath

A: Ok I’ll answer it

Apply the way to identify functional coherence to English funny story, coherence of

a discourse (funny story) also is established For example:

A: Are you wearing gloves?

B: No

A: What about the spiders?

B: They’re not wearing gloves either

(Nunan, 1993, p.62)

Request

Refusal

Table 4: Nunan’s example of functional coherence

According to Nunan (1993), B and the readers can perceive that two A’sutterances is coherent as follows:

“1 What about the spiders? You might get bitten if you don’t wear gloves.2.What about the spiders, are they wearing gloves?”

The most preferable interpretation is the first, in which “Are you wearing gloves?”means the request that A wants B to wear gloves Besides, the answers of B meanthe refusal to that request.

In disturbed coherence, the speakers want to “mislead” the hearers and

“violate the expectation” of the hearers so the hearers will make “wrongassumption” about the situation and the meaning of discourse (Dontcheva andNavratilova, 2010, p.50)

“Among factors that may lead to disturbed coherence, topic drifts and topicchange are perhaps the most frequently mentioned (Van Dijk 1977, Wikborg

1985, Fowler 1986, Giora 1997, Herring 1999) (…).Other factors affectingthe global degree of coherence are frame breaks, register breaks andinformation processing problems (Enkvist 1978, Bublitz and Lenk 1999) Atlocal coherence level, misinterpretation may be caused by unclear referenceand sentence connectors (Wikborg 1985, Bublitz and Lenk 1999).”

(Dontcheva and Navratilova, 2010, p.51)For more information about topic break and drift, the researcher retrieved thefollowing ideas from power point slides of Cheng Xiaotang from Beijing NormalUniversity

• “Topic break refers to the phenomenon where a text segment (usually not theinitial segment) introduces a topic that neither relates to the topic of theprevious segment nor has obviously connection with the global topic

• Topic drift occurs when the global topic is temporally neglected or evenpermanently abandoned When this happens, discourse will developaccording to what is associatively closest or “easiest to say next” rather than

to what the speaker’s projected goals of the global topic demand.”

The main roots of disturbed coherence are topic drift, topic change, framebreaks, which can be achieved via maxim violation Following “Grice (1975),

‘cooperative principle has divided into four sub-principles called maxims’” (Yule,

1996, p37):

The cooperative principle: Make your conversational contribution such as isrequired, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of thetalk exchange in which you are engaged

The maxims

Quantity:

1 Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the currentpurposes of the exchange)

2 Do not make your contribution more informative than is required

Quality: Try to make your contribution one that is true

2 Do not say what you believe to be false

3 Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence

Table 5: The cooperative principle

In detail, in daily life conversation, illocutors share the same cooperative principle, in which they have to ensure four involving maxims: quality, quantity, relation, and manner They normally speak the truth with adequate evidence, be as informative as required as well as relevant to topic of discussion

As Yule (1996) also said that:

“It is important to recognize these maxims as unstated assumptions we have

in conversations We assume that people are normally going to provide anappropriate amount of information; we assume that they are telling the truth,being relevant, and trying to be as clear as they can.” (p.37)

However, the truth is not very often the speakers follow all the maxims:

“Grice notes that speakers value the maxim of Quantity much more highly than theother maxims-violating it amounts to a moral offense, whereas violating the others

is at worst inconsiderate or rude” (Green, 1989, p.89) Particularly, funny storiestend to base on non-observer of maxims to create humor features “A maxim may

be just ignored, or quietly violated, in which case hearers will be misled” (Green,

1989, p.89) There are many ways to violate a maxim such as flouting, infringing,opting out, suspending, clashing, etc The classification of maxim violation is notclear enough; up to now many linguistics tend to use the most neutral word “maximviolation” so in this paper the researcher would also like to use the term “maximviolation” to describe all above situations

Examples: 8

A, John: Where’s Meredith?

Elizabeth: The control room or the science lab

Maxim Violated: Quantity; Elizabeth didn’t give as much information as

John wanted (Meredith’s exact location), but instead gave a weakerstatement (giving two possible options)(…)

B, Simon: When are you coming home?

Elizabeth: I will codify that question to my superiors and respond at such

a time as an adequate answer is preparable

Maxim Violated: Manner; Elizabeth is using unnecessarily complicated and

confusing words and construction (…)

C, Meredith: You really love me?

John: I like Ferris wheels, and college football, and things that go real fast

Maxim Violated: Relation; John is changing the topic (…)

D, Elizabeth: A lot of people are depending on you

Meredith: Thanks, that really takes the pressure off

8 Retrieved from http://faculty.mu.edu.sa/download.php?fid=36774

Maxim Violated: Quality; knowing that “a lot of people are depending on

you” does not, in fact, take the pressure off Meredith is saying somethingobviously untrue (…)

As have been taught in Pragmatics, violating a maxim is a major way tocreate implicature, by intentionally violating a maxim; you can imply somethingbeyond what you say According to Green (1989), “implicatures are likely to arise

or be intended whenever a maxim to be conspicuously violated, whether theviolation is real or only apparent, and whether or not the maxim is sacrificed foranother maxim” The important role of maxim violation in creating implicaturescannot be denied but it is not the only way to produce implicatures To be clearer, it

is important to recognize types of implicatures in linguistic field

Figure 1: Implicature’s classification

Foremost, all the conversational implicatures are based on the cooperativeprinciple or the maxims They occur in conversation, “with the inferences beingmade by people who hear the utterances and attempt to maintain the assumption ofcooperative interaction” (Yule, 1996, p.44)

For generalized conversational implicature which includes scalarimplicature, “no special background knowledge of the context of utterance is

required in order to make the necessary inferences” (Yule, 1996, p.40) Theaudience can identify the implicature basing on the discourse only For example:9

Doobie: Did you invite Bella and Cathy?

Mary: I invited Bella

Implication: Mary only invited Bella; she did not invite Cathy yet Maybe Mary

does not want to invite Cathy

The subtype of generalized conversational implicature is scalar implicature

or quantity implicature Scalar implicature is communicated on the “scale of value”,

“where terms are listed from the highest to the lowest value” (Yule, 1996, p.41), thelower level is the negative form of the higher level There are some commonwordlist of scales following Yule (1996) : <all, most, many, some, few> and

<always, often, sometimes> For example:

Mom: Who ate all the cookies in the fridge?

Child: I ate some of them

Implication: the child wants to imply that he did not eat all of the cookies.

The implicatures discussed so far can be “calculated without specialknowledge of any particular context However, most of the time, our conversationstake place in very specific contexts in which locally recognized inferences areassumed” (Yule, 1996, p.42) This also leads to another type of implicature which isparticularized conversational implicature For example:10

Rick: Hey, coming to the wild party tonight?

Tom: My parents are visiting

Implication: Tom will be spending that evening with his parents, and time spent

with parents is quite -> Tom will not at party

In this situation, Rick has to care about the context of the conversation Rickmay infer that Tom’s parents are visiting so Tom spends his time with his parents,

9 Retrieved from Pragmatics by George Yule (1996)

10 Retrieved from Pragmatics by George Yule (1996)

he cannot go to the party and leave his parents alone The inference depends on thecontext much, if Tom is not get on well with his parents, maybe the visit bores himand he will go to the party

In the past time, the linguists often judge the discourse which containsphenomena such as topic drift and frame breaks is incoherent; however nowadaysthank to mind-based coherence approach and disturbed coherence, this type ofdiscourse is still regarded as a truly coherent discourse Basing on the explicatureand implicature of an utterance, the readers will understand the reason and therelationship when topic of conversation is suddenly changed Coherent text not onlydevelops around one single topic but also talks about more than one topic; actuallythe truth value of this situation serves as the main approach to conversations in reallife The important thing rests on reader mind is global topic of a discourse

Dontcheva and Navratilova (2010) suggest that “when there is a break incoherence, successful communication can be restored on the basis of a cooperativeeffort by the participants to signal the misunderstanding, reconstruct the lostcommon ground, negotiate meanings and agree on a coherent discourseinterpretation” (p.51)

For example:

“ON A DIET

Wife: - why? Whenever seeing any girls, you stare at her as if you intended

to devour her Remember that you are married

Husband: - Oh, my honey! I always do However for a man on a diet, itdoesn’t mean that he isn’t allowed to have a look at the menu in therestaurant.”

(Nụ cười Việt – Anh, 1999, p 7)

1.4 Some linguistic foundation theories in the relationship with coherence

In the next part of Literature review, coherence will be approached mainlythrough mind-based method so it is necessary to introduced two last important

terms of discourse subject, background knowledge and context The roles of contextand background knowledge in interpretation will be discussed in more details.

1.4.1 Context

Referring to context, Nguyen (2000) says: “context seems just to be theminimal stretch of language that helps to understand what is written or spoken.” Inother words, context is extra-linguistic factors that contribute to help everyoneunderstand the discourse

There are some features of context according to Hymes (quoted in Nguyen,

2. Audience - Unintended addressees

3. Topic - The things we talk about

4. Setting - In term of place and time and things like

posture, gesture and facial expression

5. Channel - Refers to how the context between the

participants maintained – by speech, writing, signing

or signal

6. Code - Kind of language, or the one spoken in a

region

7. Message – form - The forms intended – a chat, debate, sermon,

fairy tale, a love letter, a lecture, a radio talk, a play,etc

8. Event - The nature of the communicative event within

which a genre may be embedded

9. Key - Evaluation

10 Purpose - What outcome the participant wants to happen

Table 6: The features of context according to Hymes

Another classification of context includes physical context, epistemiccontext, linguistic context and social context (according to Pragmatic slides for thethird-year students in ULIS, VNU and from website of The University of NorthCarolina at Chapel Hill) The relationship among those types of context and Hymes’context features can be analyzed as follows

In physical context, the audience can think of this in terms of where theconversation is taking place, what objects are present, what actions are occurringand so forth As the result from it, physical context concludes setting, topic, andevent Epistemic context refers to what speaker know about the world, theknowledge of the speakers in a conversation so this type of context will coveraddressor, addressee, audience, key, purpose features In term of linguistic context,

it refers to what has been said already in the utterance It includes topic, channel,code and message- form The last types of context is social context, it talks aboutthe social relationship among speakers and hearers (or addressor, addressee andaudience) In general, all components of context affect to the speakers and thehearers’ utterances in and inferences in the conversation

For example: “Two people come into a library and they are talking really

loud They sit at your table and continue their babbling So, you look up at them and

say: ‘Excuse me, could you please speak up a bit more? I missed what you said." 11

What contributes to our understanding of why its literal meaning (i.e pleasespeak up) departs so much from what its intended meaning is (i.e shut up!)?Consider some of the contextual properties of the utterance

 physical: the conversation occurs in a library

 epistemic: libraries are quiet places

 linguistic: sarcastic tone of voice (intonation cues are linguistic)

 social context: you have the right to ask someone to be quiet in a

place where people are supposed to be quiet, especially if their rule-breaking

11 Retrieved from http://www.unc.edu/~gerfen/Ling30Sp2002/pragmatics.htm

is injurious to the needs of others, which overrides the social norm of notgiving orders to total strangers.”

For you, the other two are strangers You dare not to make a direct request;you use a declarative to make a request However, you only achieved his purposewhen you and the other two share epistemic context You want to imply that library

is place for studying not for babbling The success of utterance depends on theothers’ sensitivity to the physical context in library where everyone is studying veryhard for the final exam

1.4.2 Background knowledge

According to Nunan (1993), “the thing we know about the world assist us inthe interpretation of discourse” The relationship between the word and the text hasbeen exploited by the speakers in many ways Dealing with background knowledgeterm, there are two famous theories including frame theory, and schemata theory

Nguyen (2000) claimed that schemata are higher-level complex knowledgestructures which function as ideational scaffolding that help us make predictionabout future experience In addition, prediction/expectation plays an important role

in understanding the discourse Referring to the evolutionary of schemata theory,Ramirez says:

“Although the idea of a schema has a number of antecedents, it is not until

the 1930’s that it was properly coined by Sir Frederick Bartlett at CambridgeUniversity Bartlett (1932) was interested in how expectations play a criticalrole for people to remember and understand events in daily life In thesixties, Piaget (1967) used schemata to understand changes in children’scognition But it was in the seventies—when working on theories of memory

—that the modern versions of schemata theories appeared: Schank’s (1972)conceptual dependency theory, uses a form of schemata to representrelational concepts; Schank and Abelson (1977) proposed a form of

schemata called scripts, which contain organized sequences of stereotypical

actions; Bower et al (1979) also experimented with a similar conception of

scripts, and discussed the segmentation of them into low-level action sequences called scenes In artificial intelligence, Minsky (1975) proposed another schemata-like structure, called frames.” (p.2)

Like schemata theory, frame theory also refers to “human memory” Framesare the data structures that represent “stereotypical situations” from “human

memory” which are “constructed out of our past experience” (Nunan, 1993, p.69).These experiences help us deal with new experience quickly, “of course ourexpectations are not always fulfilled, and, when this happens, we must modify ourpre-existing frames to accommodate the experiences” Yule (1996) also says thateveryone within social group would share the same frame like a “prototypicalversion” However, the frames are “intended mainly for the representation ofconcepts, by grouping together sets of attributes and then regrouping sets of frames

in arbitrarily complex forms” (Ramirez, 1997, p.2) Yule (1996) takes an example

as a frame for an apartment: there will be assumed elements such as kitchen,bathroom, and bedroom

Furthermore, one of the main causes to create discourse humor is “frame

breaks” In The Language of Humor: Navajo by Cisneros, R E., Alexanian, J.,

Begay, J., Goldberg, M., they say that “in humor, the discussion of markedness tiesinto frame theory in that the unmarked situation is the one typified within a frame

A joke that draws the marked situation into focus will break the frame and createhumor” (p.9) Take one funny story in above paper as an example:12

“How would you fit four elephants in a VW bug? Two in the front seat, two

in the back (…) This joke violates an expected property of our commonframe of elephants, namely their size “This riddle is funny because it leadsthe hearer to try to solve a problem of incompatible sizes The punchlinecauses a salient feature of elephants to be ignored after which there solution

of the problem becomes trivial” (p.7)

Actually, background knowledge covers a wide range of areas such as socialknowledge, linguistic knowledge and even cultural knowledge In relationship withthe research topic “coherence”, background knowledge plays a very important role.For example:

“Wife: What’s the matter, Jack? Why are you getting up too early?

Husband: It’s Black Friday today, honey!

Wife: Oh, I see, good luck, honey!”

(Ngo, 2012, p.130)

12 Retrieved from The Language of Humor: Navajo by Cisneros, R E., Alexanian, J., Begay, J., Goldberg, M.,

on http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu

It is a conversation between a husband and wife at one o’clock in themorning The wife wonders why her husband gets up too early The husband’sanswer contains a culture term “Black Friday”, which is unable for his wife to catchthe meaning Black Friday is the last Friday before Christmas, which is the mostsuitable time to buy sale-off products The husband has to get up early to make aqueue to buy the products for his family According to Ngo, H H (2012), thanks tocultural background knowledge, the wife understands her husband’s implicatures bydecoding the presupposition of “Black Friday” This conversation is coherentbecause this couple shares the same cultural background knowledge Although theinformation of cultural background knowledge is not mentioned directly in thisconversation, it is the vital factor to maintain the development of this discourse

Cultural background knowledge is regarded as “hidden mechanism” toconnect the idea chain of the discourse without formal connection In somesituations, lack of cultural background knowledge can lead to misunderstand theoverall meaning as well as the coherence of the story In addition, to accesscoherence, the readers must have ability to connect the meaning of every utterancebasing on their background knowledge

Summary:

In this chapter, theoretical basis related to some linguistic foundationtheories, coherence features has been reviewed These theories will serve as thefoundation for the researcher to form and carry out the study according to specificmethodology that will be elaborated in the next chapter