A STUDY ON DEONTIC MODALITY EXPRESSING MEANS IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE DECLARATIVE AND INTERROGATIVE SENTENCES NGHIÊN cứu các PHƯƠNG TIỆN DIỂN đạt TÌNH THÁI CHỨC PHẬN TRONG c

As Palmer 2003: 4 says “modality isrealized by linguistic terms from a wide range of grammatical classes,covering not only modal auxiliaries and lexical verbs, but also nouns,adjectives,

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI

UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

DEPARTMENT OF POSTGRADUATE STUDIES

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI

UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

DEPARTMENT OF POSTGRADUATE STUDIES

Supervisors: 1 Prof Dr Trần Hữu Mạnh

2 Dr Nguyễn Đức Hoạt

HANOI – 2014

1 Background to the study

Modality as an important component of linguistics has been extensivelystudied from syntactic, grammatical, semantic and pragmaticperspectives The study of modality expressions within linguistics is one

of the complicated problems As Palmer (2003: 4) says “modality isrealized by linguistic terms from a wide range of grammatical classes,covering not only modal auxiliaries and lexical verbs, but also nouns,adjectives, adverbs, idioms, particles, mood, and prosody in speech.”

There are three types of modality that can be distinguished in the modalsystem of English i.e., epistemic, deontic and dynamic that can beinterpreted in terms of possibility and necessity (Palmer, 2003: 7) This

research will focus on one important type of modality i.e deontic modality The term deontic modality “is a cover term for a range of

semantic notions such as ability, possibility, hypotheticality, obligation,and imperatives” (van der Auwera & Plungian, 1998: 81) In Vietnamese,

deontic modality is rendered as “tình thái chức phận/ đạo nghĩa”

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

A large number of studies have focused on theories of modality in generaland deontic modality in particular such as the works by Chung &Temberlake (1985), Palmer (1979, 1986, 1990, 1994, 2003, 2004, 2005),Lyons (1977), van der Auwera & Plungian (1998), (Wymann, 1994), and

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(Li, 2004) In Vietnam, many scholars have also studied modality ingeneral and types of modality in particular such as Nguyễn Thị Lương(1996), Cao Xuân Hạo (1999), Nguyễn Văn Hiệp (2001, 2008), NgũThiện Hùng (2003), Phạm Thị Ly (2003), Nguyễn Thị Cẩm Thanh(2003), Bùi Trọng Ngoãn (2004), Võ Đại Quang (2009).

However, no attempt has been made to conduct a contrastive study onlinguistic means of indicating deontic modality in English andVietnamese Therefore, this study is carried out to address that researchgap in order to provide a more articulate insight into similarities anddifferences of deontic expressing means in the two languages, and toserve as a framework for implicational purposes, which can be boththeoretical and practical

2 Aim of the study

This study is aimed at finding the similarities and differences in deontic

expressing means in English and Vietnamese In order to achieve the

proposed aim, the objectives of the study are set as follows:

- To analyze and describe linguistic means of expressing deontic modality

in English and Vietnamese

- To compare and contrast linguistic means of expressing deonticmodality in terms of grammatical and lexical features and frequencies

of usage in expressing deontic meanings in English and Vietnamese

To achieve the above objectives, the following research questions are to

be addressed:

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(i) What are the linguistic means of expressing deontic modality inEnglish and in Vietnamese?

(ii) What are the similarities and differences in linguistic means used inthe three types of deontic modality in terms of the syntactic andsemantic features and the frequencies of usage in English andVietnamese?

3 Scope of the study

This study is focused on the descriptive account of syntactic and semanticfeatures of linguistic means of indicating three types of deontic modality

in English and Vietnamese based on the classification of Palmer (1994)

They are commissives, directives and volitives with the seven sub-types of directives (deliberatives, imperatives, jussives, obligatives, permissives, precatives, prohibitives) and the two sub-types of volitives (imprecatives and optatives).

Modality is realized either by lexical or semantic means such as modalauxiliaries, adverbs, adjectives, nouns, modal words, particles, etc Interms of syntactic and semantic features, the author will describe and

analyze deontic expressing means in English and Vietnamese i.e modal auxiliaries, hedge verbs, performative verbs, modal words, adverbs, adjectives, nouns, particles, modal idioms, expletives, and modal conditionals.

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

important means of expressing deontic modality It also means that, to

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some extent, sentence types including the declaratives and interrogativescan also be considered means of expressing modality in general anddeontic modality in particular Therefore, the main focus of this thesis isnot on comparing and contrasting how linguistic means of expressing

deontic modality operate in the two sentence types: declaratives vs interrogatives Declarative and interrogative sentences are then used to

provide samples of linguistic means used within these two sentence types

In this study, the main criteria to recognize declarative and interrogativesentences in English are based on the theory of Palmer (1986: 26- 30) The criteria to recognize declaratives and interrogatives in Vietnamese arebased on the work of Cao Xuân Hạo (1991: 128)

In this thesis, the author compares and contrasts deontic expressing meanstaken from 421 declarative and interrogative sentences found in 50English stories and 422 declarative and interrogative sentences found in

50 Vietnamese stories

4 Methodology

4.1 Methods of the study

According to Saville-Troike (1982), one of the best methods of getting to

know one’s own “ways of speaking” is by comparing and contrasting

with those of others This process will reveal the shared and unsharedfeatures of linguistic patterns and their meanings Thus, contrastivelinguistics with its associated research method – Contrastive analysis(CA) - will be used as the primary research framework for this study

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For the comparison of the frequencies of usage in the two languagesunder study, a quantitative analysis of the corpus is adopted Corpus basedmethods prove to be very effective in cross-language comparative study.

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

4.2 Data collection procedures

4.2.1 Description of corpus

The corpora used in this study are built on the following general

principles regarding size, number of languages, sources : (i) The size of the corpus: The two corpora used in this research consist of 50 English

stories, a total of 2060389 words and 50 Vietnamese stories, a total of

2003486 words (ii) The number of languages: The corpus in this

research is considered as a bilingual corpus; hence it contains the two

languages: English and Vietnamese (iii) The sources of the corpus: The

stories in this research are taken from e-books of contemporary works ondifferent sources (see appendix A & B)

4.2.2 Corpus compilation procedure

As clarified in details the eleven types of deontic linguistic means in thetheoretical framework, the author lists all the devices used in those means,

such as can, could, may, might, shall, will, etc belonged to the first means (modal auxiliaries); think, believe, know, etc is the second means (hedge

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

The corpus supplies the number of words in each means, in each category

of sorted devices and shows a general overview of the distribution ofmodal linguistic means quickly and accurately so that the researcher canextract all of the declaratives and interrogatives used in each means aswell as all of the means used in the stories An illustrated example of ameans of modal auxiliary is shown in Fig 1 and Fig 2 below:

Fig 1 String matching of CAN in the English corpus

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Fig 2.String matching of CÓ THỂ in the Vietnamese corpus

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

in 50 Vietnamese stories

4.3 Data analysis

4.3.1 Describing the data

After extracting the data from the corpus, a descriptive method will beused at first to exploit all means and expressions of deontic modality used

in English and Vietnamese declarative and interrogative sentences interms of categories in the theoretical framework Basing on devicesprocessed in the corpus, the author distinguishes eleven means of deonticmodality within 421 declaratives and interrogatives in English and 422declaratives and interrogatives in Vietnamese and then, categorizes them

at three different types of meanings: commissives, directives and volitives.

This type of analysis is emphasized throughout the contextual translation

in the stories with various types of illocutionary forces

4.3.2 Comparing the two sources of data

In this dissertation, a contrastive analysis is carried out together with aqualitative analysis in the analytical framework and a quantitative analysisfrom the corpus in an effort to understand how contextual variables of thiscorpus may influence deontic modal expressions in order to determine the

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similarities and differences of deontic expressing means used in Englishand Vietnamese stories To compare eleven means of deontic modality

with regards to the three types of meanings: commissives, directives and volitives, the author takes the English language as the base language and

Vietnamese as the comparative language The examples analyzed aretaken from declarative and interrogative sentences in English andVietnamese stories

The statistical calculations are made and classified by the figures for eachpattern The results in English are then compared to those in Vietnamesebasing on the computation of various percentages in the corpus Thesimilarities or differences will be analysed in details with specific dataand then to indicate any conclusions

5 Structure of the study

Apart from the introduction and conclusion, the dissertation consists of

three chapters: The introduction presents the theoretical background, aim, objectives, the scope, methods of the study Chapter one provides a

brief of previous research, the general concepts of modality and, thespecific framework of deontic modality.Chapter two is concerned with a

detailed description and comparative analysis on commissives and

volitives in English and Vietnamese Chapter three explores the similarities and differences of directives in English and Vietnamese The

conclusion provides the summary of the results of the study with research

implications, contributions and suggestions for future research

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CHAPTER I: LITERATURE REVIEW 1.1 Historical perspectives of modality

Like most of theoretically-based historical studies, modality has beenpursued from the perspectives of both semantic and grammatical theories

of linguistics The term “modality” derives from the postclassical Latin

words modalitas or modus in more than one sense that was used by

scholars in the Middle Ages The history of English modal auxiliaries ingeneral and of modality in particular had prestigious place in studies sincethe nineteenth century such as the works of Chomsky (1957), Denison(1993), Beninca and Poletto (1997) in Italian, Peyraube (1999) inChinese, Van der Auwera & Plungian (1998), Hopper and Traugott(2003), Palmer (1979, 1986, 1990, 1994, 2003, 2005), Palmer &

Facchinetti (2003), Van der Auwera et al (2009)

For non-western languages, Wymann (1994) surveys modal constructions

in Korean and Japanese Li (2004) compares modality types in terms ofgrammatical features, semantic functions, pragmatic variation, logicalrepresentation, and diachronic development in English under a typologicalperspectivein comparison with Chinese

In Vietnamese, Nguyễn Thị Lương (1996) describes the uses of particles

in question with various illocutionary forces Nguyễn Văn Hiệp (2001/2008) explores the semantics and syntax of modality and sentences inVietnamese He discusses theoretical issues relating to main types ofmodality such as subjective and objective, deontic and epistemicmodality, factuality and non-factuality in general

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A contrastive investigation of linguistic means expressing epistemicmodality in English and Vietnamese is carried out by Ngũ Thiện Hùng(2003) Phạm Thị Ly (2003) also provides a contrastive analysis on somelinguistic means of modality in Vietnamese with the reference to English

such as modal verbs, adverbs and particles Nguyễn Thị Cẩm Thanh

(2003) also compares linguistic means of expressing non-factual modality

in English and Vietnamese Bùi Trọng Ngoãn (2004) surveys the role of

modal verbs in Vietnamese such as cần, phải, nên, dám, đành, nỡ in

combination with sentence particles Võ Đại Quang (2009) also conducts

a study on linguistic means of expressing modality in English andVietnamese in terms of semantic and syntactic features within varioustypes of modality

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

1.2 Modality

1.2.1 Definitions and different viewpoints

Several linguists have different viewpoints of modality and use severalterms to distinguish types of modality such as the works of Halliday(1970 a, b), Lyons (1977: 848, 452), Chung & Temberlake (1985: 25),

Palmer (1986, 2001: 1), Quirk et al (1985: 219), Downing and Locke

(1995), Van der Auwera (2001: 1), Matthews (2005: 228) The definition

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of modality applied in this study is used most widely, agreeing with theview of Huddleston & Geoffrey(2002: 172) and Palmer (2003: 4):

“modality is as a category of meaning which, in the verbal system, isgrammaticalized by mood”

Many different definitions and viewpoints of modality have beenmentioned in English However, until now there have not been anydefinitions of modality proposed in Vietnamese According to NguyễnVăn Hiệp (2008: 86), most Vietnamese researchers set out definition ofmodality basing on theory of modality in English, and most of themdefine modality in Vietnamese from Lyons’ definition of modality (i.e.,

“quan điểm hoặc thái độ của người nói đối với mệnh đề mà câu nói biểuthị hoặc các tình huống mà mệnh đề miêu tả” (the speaker’s opinion orattitude towards the proposition that the sentence expresses or thesituation that the proposition describes.)

1.2.2 Types of modality

A modality type is a set of modal meanings attributed to an identicalsemantic basis In the studies of modality, linguists have identifiedepistemic modality, deontic modality (Lyons, 1977), dynamic modality

(Palmer, 1986, 2001, 1990), and agent-oriented modality (Bybee et al.,

1994), etc The last two types of modality have been reformed andrenamed by van der Auwera & Plungian (1998) as participant-internalmodality and participant-external modality

However, in this study the researcher has only focused on deontic modality Thus, the author gives a brief discussion of the three main

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types of modality that will be applied for this dissertation as following:

epistemic, deontic, and dynamic Vietnamese linguists propose three main types of modality for Vietnamese as tình thái nhận thức(epistemic modality) and tình thái chức phận/ đạo nghĩa (deontic modality) and tình thái trạng huống (dynamic modality).

1.3 Deontic modality

1.3.1 Definitions and various viewpoints

The term “deontic” is derived from the Greek word déon that means

“binding or duty.” (Li, 2004: 13) According to van der Auwera &Plungian (1998: 81), the term deontic modality “is a cover term for arange of semantic notions such as ability, possibility, hypothetically,obligation, and imperative meaning” Deontic modality, as Lyons (1977:823) describes, “is concerned with the necessity or possibility of actsperformed by morally responsible agents” According to Palmer (1986),

“deontic” is used in a wide sense to include those types of modality that

are characterized by Jespersen (1909) as “containing an element of will”

Vietnamese linguists consider deontic modality based on Lyons’definition: “deontic modality is concerned with the necessity or possibility

of atcs performed by morally responsible agents” Discussing on deonticmodality in Vietnamese, Duffield (1999: 4-5) claims that it isimportant to highlight one further distinction referring to the English

modal auxiliary can that can be understood in terms of deontic meanings

is that được/ được phép.

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1.3.2 Types of deontic modality

My choice has focused on the theoretical framework for classification ofdeontic modality of Palmer (1994: 181) in English and Nguyễn Văn Hiệp

(2008: 77-79) in Vietnamese i.e commissives, volitives with the two

sub-types (imprecatives and optatives), and directives with the sevensub-types (deliberatives, imperatives, jussives, obligatives, permissives, precatives and prohibitives)

1.4 Contrastive framework

In order to compare and contrast different linguistic means of expressing modal functions of three main types of deontic modality:

commissives, directives and volitives with their nine sub-types

identified above, the author bases on the typological studies and classification of Palmer (1986, 2003), van der Auwera & Plungian (1998), Li (2004), Nguyễn Văn Hiệp (2008), Bùi Trọng Ngoãn (2004), and for the purpose of this research, the following thirteen linguistic means are identified as main categories for comparison between English and Vietnamese However, due to the nature and limitations of the data collection method, the prosodic element as an important means of expressing modality has been left out, and inflection/ mood is traditionally expressed in verbal morphology According to Palmer (1986: 21), mood is formally a morphosyntactic category of the verb like tense and aspect, and mood is a grammar category that is found in some, but not all, languages Vietnamese language is an isolated language, therefore it does not include inflection/ mood Thus, inflection and mood are

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considered non-equivalences in Vietnamese For this reason, the eleven (out of a total of thirteen) linguistic means are identified as main categories for comparison between English and Vietnamese in terms of frequencies of usage: modal verbs, hedge verbs, performative

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

CHAPTER 2 COMMISSIVES AND VOLITIVES IN ENGLISH

AND VIETNAMESE

This chapter is to identify, describe and contrast linguistic means ofexpressing of the two types of deontic modality in English and

Vietnamese i.e commissives and volitives, with particular focus on what

syntactic - semantic features of commissive and volitive expressions inEnglish and Vietnamese have in common and how they differ in terms ofsemantic - syntactic features and the frequencies of occurrences

Of the eleven means of expressing deontic modality as set from thetheoretical framework in Chapter one, only seven means of expressing

commissives in English (i.e modal verbs, hedge verbs, performative verbs, modal adverbs, modal adjectives, expletives, modal conditionals) and three means of expressing commissives in Vietnamese (i.e modal verbs, performative verbs and modal conditionals) are used In terms of

volitives, both in English and Vietnamese, only one means of linguistic

expressions (i.e modal conditionals) is used Examples for each means

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