substitution as a grammatical cohesive device in english narrative in comparision with its translation into vietnamese = phép thế như phương tiện liên kết ngữ pháp trong văn trần thuật tiếng anh

UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST- GRADUATE STUDIES NÔNG VĂN HẢI SUBSTITUTION AS A GRAMMATICAL COHESIVE DEVICE IN ENGLISH NARRATIVE IN COMPARISON WITH I

UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

FACULTY OF POST- GRADUATE STUDIES

NÔNG VĂN HẢI

SUBSTITUTION AS A GRAMMATICAL COHESIVE DEVICE IN ENGLISH NARRATIVE IN COMPARISON WITH ITS TRANSLATION INTO VIETNAMESE

(Phép thế như phương tiện liên kết ngữ pháp trong văntrần thuật tiếng Anh so sánh với bản dịch sang tiếng Việt)

M.A Minor programme thesis

Field: English Linguistics Code: 60.22.15

HANOI, 2011

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

FACULTY OF POST- GRADUATE STUDIES

NÔNG VĂN HẢI

SUBSTITUTION AS A GRAMMATICAL COHESIVE DEVICE IN ENGLISH NARRATIVE IN COMPARISON WITH ITS TRANSLATION INTO VIETNAMESE

(Phép thế như phương tiện liên kết ngữ pháp trong văn trần thuật tiếng Anh so sánh với bản dịch sang tiếng Việt)

M.A Minor programme thesis

Field: English Linguistics Code: 60.22.15

Supervisor: Dr DƯƠNG THỊ NỤ

HANOI, 2011

TABLE OF CONTENTS CONTENTS PAGES

DECLARATION I ACKNOWLEDGEMENT II ABSTRACT III TABLE OF CONTENTS IV LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES VI

PART A: INTRODUCTION 1

1 RATIONALE 1

2 AIMS OF THE STUDY 2

3 SCOPE OF THE STUDY 2

4 METHODS OF THE STUDY 3

5 DESIGN OF THE STUDY 4

PART B: DEVELOPMENT 5

CHAPTER 1: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND 5

1.1 Discourse 5

1.1.1 The Concept of Discourse……… ……… 5

1.1.2 Spoken and written discourse ……… ……… 6

1.1.3 Narrative Discourse ……… 8

1.1.4 Discourse Analysis ……….……… 9

1.2 Cohesion 10

1.2.1 The concept of cohesion ……….……… 10

1.2.2 Cohesion vs Coherence ……… 11

1.2.3 Types of Cohesion ……… ……… 12

1.2.3.1 Grammatical Cohesion ……… ……… 14

1.2.3.2 Lexical Cohesion ……… ……… 20

1.3 Overview of translation 21

1.3.1 The Concept of Translation ……… ……… 21

1.3.2 Important factors of Translation ……… ……… 21

1.3.3 The basis of translation ……… …… 22

1.3.4 Source Language and Target Language ……… ……… 22

2.1 English Substitution Devices 23

2.2 Vietnamese Solutions to the English Substitution Devices 26

2.2.1 Cohesive Devices ……… … 28

2.2.1.1 Grammatical Cohesion Devices ……… 28

2.2.1.2 Lexical Cohesion Devices ……… 31

2.3 Translation Techniques 32

PART C: CONCLUSION 33

REFERENCE: 35

LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES

Table 1 Type of cohesion

Table 2 Grammatical and Lexical cohesion

Table 3 Occurrences and frequency of cohesive items of substitution in Corpus A Table 4 Occurrence and frequency of Vietnamese solutions to the English

substitution device

Figure 1: Reference

PART A: INTRODUCTION

1 RATIONALE

Discourse Analysis, or discourse studies, is a general term for a number of approaches to analyzing written and spoken language use or any significant semiotic event From the beginning of its appearance, Discourse Analysis has taken

up in a variety of social science disciplines It is now a rapidly expanding field, providing insights into various aspects of language in use and therefore of great importance to language teaching In the early days, language teaching has been concerned with pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary; however, it was not until Discourse Analysis turned up that our awareness of how to put this knowledge into action to gain successful communication was raised

Literature, which plays a very important role in our spiritual life, has been greatly developing as a consequence of the high living standards As a matter of fact, there have been more and more people choosing to work in the literary field and their efforts have created so many famous works It is open to questions as to which factors have to be taken into consideration to make a successful work How important are those factors to the completion of a coherent and cohesive text? Added to this, the knowledge of cohesion and coherence are actually regarded as the crucial aspects of language usage

Cohesion is considered one of the most challenging aspects of translation, as any language has its own unique manners in which it employs cohesive devices in the creation of a cohesive text Each language has its own patterns to convey the interrelationships between persons and events; these patterns may not be ignored in

a language if the readers understand what the translator wants to convey The topic

of cohesion has always appeared as the most useful constituent of discourse analysis that is applied to translation English and Vietnamese have different grammars and vocabulary structures, and it is only natural that they pose great difficulties and challenges for a translator to deal with, especially in the field of literature

Those reasons mentioned above are the most important ones that have

encouraged the author to conduct the study entitled “Substitution as a Grammatical

Cohesive Device in English Narrative in Comparison with Its Translation into Vietnamese” I hope that this study may help teachers and learners of foreign

language have an overall viewpoint on grammatical cohesive devices

2 AIMS OF THE STUDY

Based on the detailed classification of cohesive devices in English of Halliday and Hasan (1976), this study provides a close analysis of a particular grammatically cohesive device employed in English and its equivalence in the Vietnamese translation This paper aims to study from a quantitative and a qualitative point of view the possible shifts of cohesion in translation in literary texts and solutions adapted to the Vietnamese translation

Furthermore, this study compares the translation strategies that translators use in transferring substitution from an English literary text to its Vietnamese translation This may pose great difficulties and problems because of the difference between the two languages

In order to achieve the aim of the study, some following research questions are raised

1 What are the possible shifts of cohesion within the text of translation in the field of literature?

2 What are the main problems that may occur in translation through the use

of substitution?

3 What are the possible solutions adopted in the Vietnamese translation of a literary text?

3 SCOPE OF THE STUDY

As Discourse Analysis has a very broad scope which has a very close relationship with many other aspects of language study, it is impossible for the author to refer to all of its characteristics Thus, within this study, the author just

mentions some background knowledge about Discourse Analysis as well as coherence and cohesion

Halliday and Hasan (1976) make a detailed classification of the cohesive devices in English These authors distinguish between grammatical and lexical cohesion According to them, grammatical cohesion embraces four different devices: Reference, substitution, ellipsis and conjunction This study will only focus on analyzing how substitution is used as a device of grammatical cohesion in English narrative and its translated version into Vietnamese

4 METHODS OF THE STUDY

To carry out this study, two literary corpora were used They were identified

as Corpus A and Corpus B The former was composed of the original texts written

in English entitled “pride and prejudice” and it was made up of 121.728 words

The latter consisted of 141.370 words which was the Vietnamese translated version

of those very same texts The literary text was chosen for analysis because it is a famous literary work of Jane Austen Added to this, I have read both the original and the Vietnamese translated version for several times and find this story very interesting to make an analysis Both corpora have a digital format and are available on the internet Detailed information about the translations was not available

In the study, both quantitative and qualitative methods were adopted for analysis And the analysis was conducted in the following steps

- Firstly, make an identification in corpus A of the substitution devices employed in English based one the classification theory of Halliday and Hasan The identification of such items was carried out with the help of a concordance programme named Antconc 3.2.3w

- Then, locate the equivalent linguistic expressions in Corpus B

- Finally, discuss and analyze the solutions adopted in the Vietnamese

translation

5 DESIGN OF THE STUDY

This study is divided into three main parts

Part A is the introduction which includes rationale, aim, scope, method and design

of the study

Then Part B is the development which consists of 2 chapters in which chapter one is about the theoretical background of the study and chapter two is the analysis of substitution as the device of grammatical cohesion in English narrative in comparison with its Vietnamese translated version

Part C is the conclusion which describes a summary of the present study with some interesting findings

PART B: DEVELOPMENT

CHAPTER 1: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

1.1 Discourse

1.1.1 The Concept of Discourse

There are different ways of understanding and defining discourse Halliday

(1985) defines “Discourse is a multidimensional process” According to Crystal (1992) discourse is seen as “a continuous stretch of language larger than a sentence, often constituting a coherent unit such as a sermon, argument, joke, or narrative” Cook (1989) has a similar perspective of discourse; he considers

discourse as “stretches of language perceived to be meaningful, unified, and purposive” In other words, as Brown and Yule state, discourse is language material, either spoken or written, in actual uses by speakers (and writers) of the language

Since its introduction to modern science the term “discourse” has taken various, sometimes very broad, meanings In order to specify which of the numerous senses is analyzed in the following dissertation it has to be defined

Originally the word “discourse” comes from Latin “discursu”' which denoted

“conversation, speech” Thus understood, however, discourse refers to too wide an area of human life, therefore only discourse from the vantage point of linguistics, and especially applied linguistics, is explained here

There is no agreement among linguists as to the use of the term discourse in that some use it in reference to texts, while others claim it denotes speech which is for instance illustrated by the following definition: "Discourse: a continuous stretch

of (especially spoken) language larger than a sentence, often constituting a coherent unit such as a sermon, argument, joke, or narrative" (Crystal 1992:25) On the other

hand, being aware of the differences between kinds of discourses indicates the unity

of communicative intentions as a vital element of each of them Consequently she suggests using terms 'text' and 'discourse' almost interchangeably betokening the former refers to the linguistic product, while the latter implies the entire dynamics

of the processes According to Cook (1994:7) novels, as well as short conversations

or groans might be equally rightfully named discourses

Seven criteria which have to be fulfilled to qualify either a written or a

spoken text as a discourse have been suggested by Beaugrande (1980) These

include:

 Cohesion - grammatical relationship between parts of a sentence essential

for its interpretation;

 Coherence - the order of statements relates one another by sense

 Intentionality - the message has to be conveyed deliberately and

consciously;

 Acceptability - indicates that the communicative product needs to be

satisfactory in that the audience approves it;

 Informativeness - some new information has to be included in the discourse;

 Situationality - circumstances in which the remark is made are important;

 Intertextuality - reference to the world outside the text or the interpreters'

schemata;

Nowadays, however, not all of the above mentioned criteria are perceived as equally important in discourse studies, therefore some of them are valid only in certain methods of the research (Beaugrande 1980: 49)

1.1.2 Spoken and written discourse

Talking and writing represent different modes of expressing linguistics meanings As stated by Halliday (1985) “Speaking does not show clearly sentence

and paragraph boundaries or signal the move into direct quotation while writing leaves out the prosodic and paralinguistic contribution” While written discourse comprises complete sentences with subordination, rich lexis and frequent modifications via adjectives and adverbs, spoken contains incomplete sentences Although spoken and written discourses share the communicative functions, they serve various functions The former is concerned with interact ional use and the latter with the transactional use (Brown and Yule, 1983: 13)

By comparison, writing language is under no temporal, spatial pressure The writer has time to choose lexical items, check words and structures to make necessary correction which is primarily concerned with the transactional use Spoken language, as stated by Brown and Yule (1983), is the kind of language which is produced under some temporal, spatial pressure with the speaker’s monitoring of what it is that he has just said, determining his current phrase and simultaneously planning his next utterance and which is primarily concerned with the interactional use

There are three prominent features that can apply to distinguish written and spoken discourse

1 Density: the density is the information volume presented Evidently, written language is dense while spoken language is sparse

2 Complexity of grammar: in spoken language grammar is not so important, but information For written language, it is important to maintain enough information, appropriate grammatical structures as well as rational organization of sentences

3 Grammatical metaphor: Written language presents rather few different verbs, whereas spoken language uses more verbs

These above characteristics are inherent in spoken and written language in whatever types of discourse Written texts can be read out and heard such as letters, stories, novels, contracts, reports, speeches Moreover, spoken discourse such as

lectures, lessons, interviews, conversations and so on can also be reserved in the form of writing

Narrative discourse typically contains characteristics of cohesion Cohesion

is a semantic concept; it refers to relations of meaning that exist within a passage, spoken or written, and define it as a passage Glosser (1993: 191) notes that discourse cohesion occurs via linguistic devices that index interconnections of multiple segments of the discourse More specifically, cohesion occurs in narrative discourse via the use of cohesive markers, which are words that direct the listener to information found outside individual sentences Therefore, cohesion is a semantic relationship between an element in the passage and some other element that is crucial to its translation The cohesive marker creates a tie with the information found outside the sentence and establishes a meaning relationship across sentences within the passage

Halliday and Hasan (1976) proposed a methodology for cohesion analysis and noted that the basic concept employed in analyzing cohesion of a passage is that

of the cohesive tie The tie includes the cohesive element in addition to that which is presupposed by the cohesive element Five categories of cohesive elements or

markers were defined by Halliday and Hasan: reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical markers or general nouns Reference consists of personal,

demonstrative, and comparative pronouns (e.g., the motorbike belongs to her)

Substitution is a relation in the wording rather than meaning Substitutions are alternate words used in the place of a repetition of a particular item (e.g., Our

television is broken We need to buy a new one) Ellipsis is the omission of an item

(e.g., Did you hear the news? No, only the weather) Conjunctions are cohesive indirectly as they express certain meanings that presuppose the presence of other discourse components

1.1.4 Discourse Analysis

Discourse analysis is a primarily linguistic study examining the use of language by its native population whose major concern is investigating language functions along with its forms, produced both orally and in writing Moreover, identification of linguistic qualities of various genres, vital for their recognition and interpretation, together with cultural and social aspects which support its comprehension, is the domain of discourse analysis To put it in another way, the branch of applied linguistics dealing with the examination of discourse attempts to find patterns in communicative products as well as and their correlation with the circumstances in which they occur, which are not explainable at the grammatical level (Carter 1993:23)

Discourse analysis is a branch of linguistics that studies language use in relation to social factors that influence our daily interactions It deals with the way people use language in its appropriate context E.e, in certain ways to have certain affects; In order to construct versions of their expressions according to Yule (1996:83): “when it is restricted to linguistic issue, discourse analysis focuses on the record (spoken and written) of the process by which language is used in some contexts to express intention.” The focus of discourse is any form of written or a spoken language such as conversation, dialog, articles, books and so on Discourse analysis is often described as “language in use” by means; the way of understanding

social interaction, and how written and spoken texts are used in a specific contexts

to make meanings “It tends to focus specifically on aspects of what is unsaid or unwritten (yet communicated) within the discourse being analyzed” (Yule, 1987:84) So discourse analysis is all what people perceive or think about any given topic

1.2 Cohesion

1.2.1 The concept of cohesion

The concept of cohesion is closely connected with text It is defined as the grammatical and lexical relationship between different elements of a text According to Yule (1996), a text is usually considered to have a certain structure which depends on factors quite different from those required in the structure of single sentence Some among those factors are described in terms of cohesion, or

the ties and connection which exist within a text

Halliday and Hasan (1976:4) also define cohesion in a similar way: "The concept of cohesion is a semantic one; it refers to relations of meaning that exist within a text, and that defines it as a text" They also point out that cohesion often occurs where the interpretation of some elements in the discourse is dependent on that of another

Baker (1992) relates cohesion to the study of textual equivalence defining it

as “the network of lexical, grammatical, and other relations which provide links between various parts of a text” The important role of cohesion is to build up sentences in any given text This comes through the linking of different parts of a text to each other so that it gives a structure to a text It helps in hanging sentences together in a logical way, for having a right meaning So, cohesion has a relation with the broader concept of coherence

1.2.2 Cohesion vs Coherence

The distinction between cohesion and coherence has not always been

clarified partly because both terms come from the same verb cohere which means

sticking together In fact, cohesion is the network of different kinds of formal relations that provide links between or among various parts of a text, and is expressed partly through the grammar and partly through the vocabulary Coherence, in contrast, can be understood as the quality of being meaningful and unified As for Nunan (1993), coherence is "the feeling that sequences of sentences

or utterances seem to hang together"

The concept of cohesion refers to relations of meaning that exist within the text, and that defines it as a text Cohesion occurs where the interpretation of some element in the discourse dependent on that of another

Cohesion is the network of lexical, grammatical, and other relations which link various parts of a text These relations or ties organize and, to some extent, create a text, for instance, by requiring the reader to interpret words and expressions

by reference to other words and expressions in the surrounding sentences and paragraphs Cohesion is a surface relation and it connects together the actual words and expressions that we can see or hear

Halliday and Hasan (1976) identify five main cohesive devices in English: reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesion

E.g American Life Inc pays the mortgage on each property from its own funds until the mortgage is paid in full The Company‟s principals have made

personal guarantees covering all debt and no debt is cross-collateralized

among the properties and partnerships

Reading this example, we can understand that there is a link between

„American Life Inc.‟ and „the Company‟’

Coherence, on the other hand, is defined as the relationships of various ideas

in a text that are linked together to create a meaningful discourse According to Nunan (1993) coherence is “the feeling that sequences of sentences or utterances seems to hang together and make sense In short, coherence means the relationships

that link the meanings of utterances in a discourse or of the sentences in a text These links may be based on the speakers’ shared knowledge

E.g The aviation business includes handling aircrafts and passengers, offering security check, services of security guard, fire fighting and other ground services

In the above example, there is a conceptual relationship among the aviation business and other terms in the text

Though cohesion and coherence, in essence, is different from each other, they are closely linked together They represent the very essential elements that make a text or discourse coherent and that make coherent text or discourse different from random sentences or utterances Cohesion is mainly used to embody coherence by a system of cohesive devices Accordingly, cohesion and coherence help consolidate the text as a complete and unified linguistics unit beyond the largest syntactic unit of sentence

1.2.3 Types of Cohesion

According to Halliday and Hasan (1976), the classification of cohesion is based on the linguistic form The type of cohesion depends either on semantic relation in the linguistic system or on lexico-grammatical relations In other words, the cohesive relation can be interpreted as being either lexico-grammatical in nature

or semantic It can be made clearer in the following description:

Nature of cohesive relation Type of cohesion

Reference; lexical reiteration, Conjunction

Table 1 Type of cohesion

(Source: Halliday and Hasan, 1976:304)

Reference, substitution and ellipsis are clearly grammatical; lexical cohesion,

as the name implies, lexical Conjunction is on the borderline of grammatical and

the lexical; the set of conjunctive expressions involve lexical selection However, it

is better to put it in the group of grammatical cohesion as it is mainly grammatical with a lexical component inside Consequently, we can refer to grammatical

cohesion and lexical cohesion as follows:

examples, the author attempts to go into detail with each type with a view to giving

an overall background of grammatical cohesion

Reference

To begin with, in the view of Halliday and Hasan (1976:32), reference is a semantic relation and "since the relationship is on the semantic level, the reference item is in no way constrained to match the grammatical class of the item it refers to"

The two authors also distinguish situational and textual reference very clearly by contrasting exophora (or exophoric reference) and endophora (i.e, endophoric reference) as follows:

(Source: Halliday and Hasan, 1976:33)

They then conclude that reference items may be exophoric or endophoric; and if endophoric, they may be anaphoric or cataphoric These two authors also indicate: "There are items in every language which have the property of reference"

In English, those items belong to anaphoric and cataphoric reference The first

consists of items which point the readers or listeners backwards to a previously mentioned entity, process or state of affairs The second, on the other hand, points the readers or listeners forward further into the text in order to identify elements to which the reference items refer

To take an example, let us look at the opening lines of a famous English

novel, Jude the Obscure The author, Thomas Hardy, shows different types of

reference at work:

The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and horse to carry

his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty miles off, such a vehicle

providing of quite sufficient size for the departing teacher's effects

In this example, there are both anaphoric and exophoric reference The followings are detailed analysis of such types of reference

+ Anaphoric Reference:

In the first sense, him in "lent him the small white tilted cart" is the schoolmaster introduced earlier, his destination is the schoolmaster's and such a links back to the cart in the previous sentence; therefore, all the expressions “him, his destination, such a” are referred to as anaphoric reference

+ Exophoric Reference:

The novel opens with "the schoolmaster" leaving "the village" We have no

information about which schoolmaster and which village that the writer is referring

to In this case, the author expects us to share a world with him, independent of the text, with typical villages and their populations (everybody), their schoolmaster and miller These ones are exophoric reference

Now consider the following example of reference with the pronoun "she":

Although she was still tired, my sister managed to go to school

In this particular text, neither anaphoric nor exophoric reference supplies the

identity of "she", we have to read on, and are given the identity in the following part

of the sentence “She” here is cataphoric reference