A contrastive analysis of the utterances containing implicatures in english and vietnamese culture (based on utterances from funny stories)

HANOI OPEN UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF ENGLISH ------ GRADUATION THESIS B.A DEGREE IN ENGLISH STUDIES A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF THE UTTERANCES CONTAINING IMPLICATURES IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAME

HANOI OPEN UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF ENGLISH

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GRADUATION THESIS B.A DEGREE IN ENGLISH STUDIES

A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF THE UTTERANCES CONTAINING IMPLICATURES IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE CULTURE

(Based on Utterances from Funny Stories)

HANOI, 2016

CODE: 26

DECLARATION

“A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF THE UTTERANCES CONTAINING IMPLICATURES IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE CULTURE”

(Based on utterances from funny stories)

I certify that no part of above report has been copied or reproduced by me from any other’s work without acknowledgement and that the report is originally written by me under strict guidance of my supervisor

Ha Noi, 15 th April, 2016

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

At this stage of research accomplishments, I would first like to thank my supervisorMr Nguyen The Hoa of the Fulculty of English at Hanoi Open University He consistently allowed this paper to be my own work, but steered

me in the right the direction whenever he thought I needed it

I would also like to acknowledge Faculty of English, Hanoi Open University, all my teachers and the librarians for providing favorable conditions for my study to be implemented

Finally, I must express my very profound gratitude to my parents and to

my friends for providing me with unfailing support and continuous encouragement throughout my years of study and through the process of researching and writing this thesis This accomplishment would not have been possible without them Thank you

TABLE OF CONTENTS DECLARATION

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF ABBREVIATION

LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES

PART A: INTRODUCTION 1

1 Rationale 1

2 Aims and objectives of the study 3

3 Scope of the study 3

4 Research questions 4

5 Methods of the study 4

6 Design of the study 4

PART B DEVELOPMENT 6

CHAPTER I THEORETICAL BACKGROUND 6

1.1 Overview of discourse analysis 6

1.1.1 Definition of discourse 6

1.1.2 Discourse analysis 7

1.1.3 Context in discourse analysis 9

1.2 Utterance meaning 10

1.3 Contrastive analysis 11

1.4 Implicatures 12

1.4.1 The notions of implicature 12

1.4.2 Kinds of implicatures 14

1.4.2.1 Conventional implicature 14

1.4.2.2 Conversational implicature 14

1.4.3 The Cooperative principle 16

1.4.4 Maxims and flouting maxim 17

1.4.4.1 The Maxim of Quantity 17

1.4.4.2 The Maxim of Quality 18

1.4.4.3 The Maxim of Relation 19

1.4.4.4 The Maxim of Manner 19

1.5 Overview of funny stories 20

1.6 Summary 22

CHAPTER II INTERPRETATION AND ANALYSES 23

2.1 Funny stories in English 23

2.1.1 Violating the Maxim of Quantity 23

2.1.2 Violating the Maxim of Quality 24

2.1.3 Violating the Maxim of Relation 27

2.1.4 Violating the Maxim of Manner 29

2.2 Funny stories in Vietnamese 32

2.2.1 Violating the Maxim of Quantity 32

2.2.2 Violating the Maxim of Quality 34

2.2.3 Violating the Maxim of Relation 38

2.2.4 Violating the Maxim of Manner 39

2.3 Discussion 41

2.3.1 The violating of maxims in English and Vietnamese 41

2.3.2 Similarities between English and Vietnamese implicatures 43

2.3.3 Differences between English and Vietnamese implicatures 45

2.3.4 Summary 48

CHAPTER III SUGGESTION SOME STRATEGIES TO TRANSLATE THE UTTERANCES CONTAINING IMPLICATURES 49

PART C: CONCLUSION 52 REFERENCES

LIST OF ABBREVIATION

C.A.: Contrastive Analysis

C.I: Conversational Implicature

CP: Cooperative Principle

LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES

Table 1: Result of survey on breaking of maxims in English and Vietnamese

funny stories……….41

Chart 1: Result of survey on breaking of maxims in English and Vietnamese

funny stories……….42

PART A: INTRODUCTION

1 Rationale

Nobody can deny that language plays an important role in human development Language is the means to serve the purposes of communication among people who share the same nationality and social origin In other words, language exchanges the human behaviors, “language is closely related to the way

we think and to the way we behave and influence the behaviors of others” (Karmic 1998, p.79).The relationship between language and culture isa complex one due largely in part to the great difficulty in understanding people’s cognitive processes when they communicate.Each of nations has their own language and culture; therefore, Vietnamese learners of English have to encounter with a variety of issues in understanding this language Moreover, along with social exchanges, the utterances usually contain implicature, making people confused

in the communication As Geoffrey Leech (1983, p.34) argues “we cannot really understand the nature of language itself unless we understand pragmatics” Thus, melting the theory of pragmatics is the key step to improve the ability of using language

Pragmatics deals with the study of language in use in different contexts It did not appear as an independent branch of linguistics until 1960s and 1970s As

a branch of pragmatics, the theory of implicature experienced along history and can be traced back to relations with Semiotics and the Theory of Deviation However, in 1967, the theory ofimplicature was formally suggested by Herbert

Paul Grice (1913-1988), an English linguistic philosopher He introduced the technical notion of implicature in systematizing the phenomenon of meaning one thing by saying something else In introducing the notion, Grice drew a line between what is said, which he understood as being closely related to the conventional meaning of the words uttered, and what is conversationally implicated, which can be inferred from the fact that an utterance has been made

in context Since Grice’s seminal work, implicatures has become one of the major research areas in pragmatics.In particular, some of the best-known works

include “Presumptive Meanings” (The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature), by Stephen C Levinson (2000), “Pragmatics” by George Yule (1996), “Relevance Theory” bySperber & Wilson (1986)

In Vietnamese, a lot of famous linguistic philosophers researched into the characteristics of implicatures The popular works belong to Nguyen Duc Dan

(1996), Nguyen Thien Giap (2000), “Tiếng Việt – Mấy vấn đề ngữ âm, ngữ pháp

và ngữ nghĩa” by Cao Xuan Hao (1998)

Building on the theorical background of above linguistic philosophers, in particular, the writer would find out about the utterances containing implicatures

in English and Vietnamese culture in terms of funny stories Although there are a lot of works on this topic, almost of them have not to mention the similarities and differences between English and Vietnamese implicature yet Some works

focused on humor mechanism of Vietnamese funny stories, “Cơ chế tạo hàm ý

hội thoại trong truyện cười dân gian Việt Nam” by Pham Minh Luan B.A

Degree (2012), for example

Not only be valuable in daily communication, implicature also has great value in literature Implicature is used the most in funny stories that not only bringthe happiness and entertainment for people but also reflect the vice of society However, due tothe differences of people, cultureand social issues between two countries, there are also differences in mechanism making implicatures from funny stories

For the above - mentioned related problems, this study is implemented to provide the background of implicature, help Vietnamese learners understand deeply messages of funny stories and realize the value of implicatures in the funny stories

2 Aims and objectives of the study

The thesis aims at:

• Providing background knowledge of implicatures

• Comparing and contrasting English and Vietnamese implicatures in terms

of maxims

• Pointing out the value of implicatures in the funny stories

3 Scope of the study

Scopeof the study is limited to analyze implicature in some selected English and Vietnamese funny storiesin terms of Cooperative principal and

maxims.The writer studies on Vietnamese funny stories in“1001 truyện cười dân

gian xưa và nay” (Hung Danh, 2000), and English funny stories in sources from

internet

4 Research questions

• What is the role of implicature in English and funny stories?

• What are similariries and differences between English and Vietnamese implicatures?

5 Methods of the study

• Contrastive analysis

• Collecting available information, statistics from related material and sourse

• Surveying English and Vietnamese funny stories

6 Design of the study

The study consists of three parts:

Part A Introduction

Part B: Development It consists of three chapters:

Chapter 1: Theoretical Background

Chapter 2: Interpretations and analyses

Chapter 3: Suggestion some strategies to translate the utterances

containing implicatures

Part C: Conclusion

References

PART B DEVELOPMENT

CHAPTER I THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

1.1 Overview of discourse analysis

1.1.1 Definition of discourse

Since the 1960s of the twentieth century, the discourse analysis has become a scientific movement thrived in Europe and become a central concept which is widely circulated in the social sciences and humanities However, discourse analysis did not receive much attention from Vietnamese linguists until the end of the twentieth century

According to Crystal (1992, p.25) discourse is “a continuous stretch of

(especially spoken) language larger than a sentence, often constituting a coherent unit, such as a sermon, an argument, joke or narrative”

Nunan (1993),whocomesfrom amorelinguisticbackground, takes an even different cut at the definition of discourse He uses text to refer to the written or tapedrecord of a communication event and discourse to refer to the interpretation

of that event in the context in which it occurs According to him, “discourse can

be defined as a stretch of language consisting of several sentences, which are perceived as being related in some way Sentences can be related, not only in terms of the idea they share, but also in terms of the jobs they perform within the discourse – that is in terms of their functions”

“Discourse is language that is functional – language that is doing some job in some context as opposed to isolated words or sentences Discourse can be spoken, written or in any other medium of expression

Discourse is a unit of language in use It is not a grammatical unit, like a clause

or a sentence

Discourse is a semantic unit, a unit not of form but of meaning A discourse does not consist of sentences; it is realized by, or encoded in sentences.”

(Halliday M.A.K & Hasan R., 1976)

In general, discourse is defined differently but they have something in common Discourse is understood as language in use, which can reflect people’s point of view and value systems

1.1.2 Discourse analysis

Discourseanalysis is the systematic study of naturally occurring (not hypothetical) communication in the broadest sense, at the level of meaning (rather than as physical acts or features).However, a survey of the literature on discourse analysis would quickly reveal that, although some researchersemploy theterm to describe a particular kind of analysis, it is also a label that has widespread usage acrossseveral disciplines with diverse goals Consequently,it is more accurate to think of discourse analysis as a cluster of methods and approaches with some substantial common interestsrather than as a single, unitary technique

Discourse analysis began in branchesof philosophy,sociology, linguistics, and literary theory, and it is continuing to develop in additional disciplines such

as anthropology, communication, education, and psychology.One of the most prominent scholars is Yule (1997, p.139), he states in his study of language that

“In the study of language, some of the most interesting questions arise in connection with the way language is used, rather than what its components are…We were, in effect, asking how it is language - users interpret what other language-users intend to convey When we carry this investigation further and ask how it is that we, as language users, make sense of what we read in texts, understand what speakers mean despite what they say, recognize connected as opposed to jumbled or incoherent discourse, and successfully take part in that complex activity called conversation, we are undertaking what is known discourse analysis”

ForNunan (1993), what he calls discourse analysis involves language as it

is being used, whereas text analysis is concerned with patterns and regularities that occur in written language, such as phonemic or grammatical analyses In other words, discourse analysis is concerned with patterns and regularities in language but also with the people using language (what they mean and the purpose to which language is put) and the context in which it is used

In short, discourse analysis is a branch of linguistics that deals with the largest unit of language in communication – discourse or text It considers the ways that the use of language presents different views of the world and different understanding

1.1.3 Context in discourse analysis

Context plays a very important role in the interpretation of discourse As

Nunan (1993, p.7) defines “context refers to the situation giving rise to the

discourse, and within which the discourse is embedded” In his opinion, there

are two different types of context The first type is linguistic context which is the language that surrounds or accompanies the piece of discourse under analysis The second one is non-linguistic or experiential context which is the context in which the discourse takes place Non-linguistic contexts includethe type of communicative event (e.g joke, story, lecture, greeting, conversation); the topic;the purpose of the event; the setting including location, time of day, season

of year, and physical aspects of the situation, the participants and the relationships between them; and the background knowledge and assumptions underlying the communicative event

Grundy (2000, p.72) states that in the case of implicature, context helps us

to determine what is conveyed implicitly but not explicitly stated by the speaker Grundy (2000, p.107) also adds that context is not treated as given common ground, but rather as a set of more or less accessible items of information which are stored in short term and encyclopedic memories or manifest in the physical environment

Cook (1989, p.10) defines that the context is the unity of discourse withconsidering the word at large, and it is the influenced by the situation when

we receive the message, cultural and social relationship within the participant, what we know and assume the sender knows When we think about meaning, it

is also important to take into account the contribution of context In simple

terms, then, we can think about pragmatics as the study of the contribution of context to meaning

Utterances are not only dependent on the physical context for their interpretations, they are also closely related to the language surrounding them (co-text) Hence, according to Brown and Yule, the more context there is, in general, the more secure the interpretation is (1983, p.50)

In summary, context plays a vital role in discourse analysis Context makes clear interpretation and is references among words and sentences

1.2 Utterance meaning

Utterance meaning is defined as what a speaker means when he makes an utterance in a certain situation In other words, utterance meaning is context-dependent and the meaning of an utterance is determined by the context in which

it is used

According Austin, there are two kinds of utterances: constative and performative utterance A performative utterance is one that actually describes the acts that it performs It brings about a state of affairs such as bids, blessings,

promising, firings, arrests, complaints, marrying For instance, “I promise to pay

you tomorrow” is performative because in saying it the speaker actually does

what the utterance describes In constrast, a constative utterance is one which makes an assertion, i.e it is often the utterance of a declarative sentence, but is not performative

According to Nguyen Thien Giap (2014), the utterance meaning refers to what the speaker means in a particular context of situation.According to speech

act theories, every utterance has two types of meaning: propositional meaning and illocutionary meaning

In summary, aconversational utterance is considered containing implicatures when it includes:

• The explicit meaning (Literal sense) based on the words in sentence

• The implicit meaning (Figurative sense) based on the concrete context

1.3 Contrastive analysis

Contrastive analysis (C.A.) dates back to the 1950s when it was first developed and practiced as an application of structural linguistics to language teaching As regards its definition James, C (1980, p.3) declares:

“Contrastive Analysis is a linguistics enterprise aimed at producing inverted (i.e contrastive, not comparative) two-valued typologies (a C.A is always concerned with a pair of language), and founded on the assumption that languages can be compared.”

James also claims that there are three branches of two-valued (two languages are involved) interlingual linguistics: translation theory – which is concerned with the process of the text conversion; error analysis; and contrastive analysis – these last two having as the object of enquiry the means whereby a monolingual learns to be bilingual Among these branches of linguistics, C.A seems to be the most effective way in comparing between the first language and the second language as well as a pairs of languages foreign language learners are learning

Contrastive analysis is defined, according to James (1980), as a form of interlanguage study and a central concern of applied linguistics As a matter of fact, C.A has had much to offer not only to practical language teaching, but also

to translation theory, the description of particular languages, language typology and the study of language universals In relation to bilingualism, C.A is concerned with how a monolingual becomes bilingual; in other words, it is concerned with the effects exerted by the first language on the foreign language being learnt Thus, C.A has been a preferable method used by Vietnamese linguists in recent years as it enables them to contrast Vietnamese with other languages not only of the same typologies, but also of different ones It also helps bring out many interesting differences and similarities between languages, which make a great contribution to lightening the language teaching and learning burden

1.4 Implicatures

1.4.1 The notions of implicature

The notion of implicature was first introduced by Grice (1967), who defined it essentially as what is communicated less what is said A Davis (1998) defines implicature is Grice’s term for what a speaker does not say but rather communicates, suggests, implies, in virtue of saying what he does It also refers

to the fact of something’s being so communicated.An implicature, on the other

hand, is defined as “any other propositional form communicated by an

utterance; its content consists of wholly pragmatically inferred matter” (Carston

2000, p.10) This definition of implicature follows from Sperber and Wilson’s original assumption that any assumption communicated which is not explicit

must be implicit, and thus must be an implicature (Sperber and Wilson 1995, p.182)

Levinson(1981, p.98) adds the notion of implicature promises to bring the gap between what is literally said and what is actually said Yule (1996, p.36) adds that implicature is a primary example of more being communicated than is said but in order for them to be interpreted, some basic cooperative principle must first be assumed to be in operation Furthermore, Grice as quoted by Levinson (1992, p.97) explains that the term of implicature to be a general cover term to stand in contrast to what is said or expressed by the truth condition of expression, and to include all kinds of pragmatics

In Vietnamese pragmatics, some Vietnamese linguists mentioned the notion of implicature on their works or books Cao Xuan Hao (1995) considered that a sentence includes two meaning: propositional meaning and illocutionary

meaning In his opinion, “We can see that there are two different parts basing on

“content” or “meaning” A part occurs on sentence by itself (propositional meaning) separating from all of the events, the other brings another meaning (illocutionary meaning) when it is used in a particular event.” The notion of

propositional and illocutionary meaning of Cao Xuan Hao is quite similar with the notion of explicature and implicature of Nguyen Duc Dan (1998) The illocutionary meanings/ implicaturesare supposed the meaning of speech

nonconventional implicature (conversational implicature).In this research, the writer only focuses on conversational implicature because the utterances in

funny stories are calculated by maxims of conversation which means they depend on the recognizing the cooperative principle

1.4.2 Kinds of implicatures

The conventional implicature has the same implication no matter what the context is.It means that it does not have to occur in conversation, and they do not depend on specialcontexts for their interpretation The conventional implicature

is presented less explicit compared with entailment, presupposition and conversational implicature Grice (Logic and Conversation, 1975) said briefly

about conventional implicature that is “the use of a certain form of words in an

utterance would normally (in the absence of special circumstances) carry and-such an implicature or type of implicature”

Conversational implicature (C.I) is a type of indirectcommunication, first described by the English language philosopherH P Grice He proposes that in a normal conversation, speakers and listeners share a cooperative principle

Sperber & Wilson’s Relevance Theory (1986, p.28) could be regarded as

an attempt to develop Grice’s basic insight Their aim is to characterize a property of mental process which the ordinary notion of relevance approximates

“Conversational implicaturesare not tied to linguistic form To make a C.I, a listener must have already parsed the sentence, assigned it its literal interpretation, realized that additional inferences must be added to make it

conform to the Griceanmaxim, and determined what these inferences are Such activity could not reasonably affect the initial steps of parsing.”

(Clifton & Ferreira, 1989)

Nguyen Thien Giap (2000) says that in conversation, to understand what the speaker wants to communicate, the listener must be aware of not only the explicit meaning drawn from the literal meaning of the words and the structures

of the utterance, but the implicit meaning inferred from what is said

Related to conversational implicature and its reasons, Cao Xuan Hao raised a question why people avoid saying explicitly or indicating literal meaning instead of saying implicitly, which sometimes challenges the hearers He showed that conversational implicatures were produced because of the complicated requirements of social communication, of the interaction in community, of the distinctive culture and of the trends towards the beauty

Grice (1975, p.26) states C.I is triggered by “certain general features of

discourse” rather than by the conventional meaning of a specific word

Implicatures

Generalized Implicature

Grice as quoted by Levinson (1992, p.126) distinguished conversational implicature into generalized and particularized implicature He asserts that

generalized conversational implicature is implicature that arise without any particular context or special scenario being necessary

Levinson (1983, p.126) defines Generalized conversational implicatures occur without reference to any particular features of the context In other words, special background knowledge or inferences are not required in calculating the additional conveyed meaning Grice (1989, p.37) states this type of implicature

is characterized by, “the application of a certain form of words in an utterance

(in the absence of special circumstances) would normally carry such implicature”

Particularized Implicature

A particularized conversational implicature is one which depends on particular features of the context Lakoff (1993, p.107) defines particularized implicature is implicature that needs context or cultural understanding must be assumed Particularized implicature is a conversational implicature that is derivable only in a specific context

1.4.3 The Cooperative principle

The success of conversation depends on the various speakers approach to the interaction In order to explain how hearers interpret the utterance implicature, Grice introduced the Cooperative Principle (CP) The CP is a basic underlying assumption we make when we speak to one another is that we are trying to cooperate with one another to construct meaningful conversations

Grice (1975) proposes the CP which states “make your conversational

contribution such is required, as the stage at which it occurs by the accepted

purpose or the direction of the talk exchange which you are engaged” In other

words, we as the speakers should contribute meaningful, productive utterance to further the conversation It then follows that, as listeners we assume that our conversational partners are doing the same

According to the CP, both speaker and hearer converse with the willingness to deliver and interpret a message The speaker and hearer cooperate and that is why they communicate efficiently In order to illustrate how we interpret, Grice presented four conversational maxims, to show how we communicate effectively in the light of rules

1.4.4 Maxims and flouting maxim

If one of the maxims is violated by some utterances and yet we are still assuming that person is cooperating with us in communication, we can take that violation as sign that something being said indirectly This is called flouting maxim Flouting is deliberate and apparent violation of maxim Grundy (2000, p.78) states that flouting maxims particularly are salient way of getting an addressee to draw an inference and hence recover an implicature

1 Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes

of the exchange)

2 Do not make your contribution more informative than is required

Flouting the second Maxim of Quantity:

Woman to a friend: “We haven’t reached an agreement yet- I’d like a Bermuda honeymoon,and he doesn’t want a wedding”

The woman violated the maxim of quantity because she provided more information than necessary This led to humor, she mentioned “a Bermuda honeymoon”, but, as a matter of fact, her boy friend did not want a wedding at all

This maxim means that the speaker has to include all the information that the addressee requires to understand what the speaker means If the speaker leaves out a crucial piece of information, the addressee will not understand what the speaker is trying to say The meaning of this maxim is that the speaker should avoid including unnecessary, redundant information in his contribution

Try to make your contribution one that is true

1 Do not say what you believe to be false

2 Do not say that for which you lack evidence

Flouting the first Maxim of Quality (avoid falsehoods):

A: Tehran’s in Turkey, isn’t it?

B: Uh-huh, and Boston’s in Armenia

Tehran is not in Turkey B’s statement is flouting the maxim of quality because speaker B gives information which is not match with the actual fact but

B still seems to be cooperative B gives the untrue statement to B in order to

make A to introspect that his statement is not correct B’s utterance suggests that A’s is absurdly incorrect

The maxim of quality is a matter of giving the right information The speaker says nothing that he/she knows to be false or for which he/she lacks sufficient evidence The other maxims are dependent on this maxim, if a speaker does not convey the truth then theutterance is false, event if the right information

is given or the speaker is clear and orderly when speaking

Be relevant

Flouting the Maxim of Relation (be relevant):

A: What on earth has happened to the roast beef?

B: The dog is looking very happy

In the example above, A will likely derive the implicature “the dog ate the roast beef” from B’s statement This is due to A’s belief that B is observing the conversational maxim of relation or relevance in the specific context of A’s question

The maxim of relevant requires the speaker to be relevant to the context and situation in which the utterance occurs

1 Avoid obscurity of expression

2 Avoid ambiguity

3 Be brief

4 Be orderly

Flouting the first Maxim of Manner (obscurity):

A: What are you baking?

B: Be I are tea aitch deeay wyesee ay kayee

In this conversation, B does not give answer perspicuous which is clear, brief, orderly to explanation “Birthday cake” is the answer of B, B uses homonym phenomenon to creat an implicature

Flouting the third Maxim of Manner (prolixity):

A: I hear you went to the opera last night; how was the lead singer?

B: The singer produced a series of sounds corresponding closely to the score of

an aria from “Rigoletto.”(Levinson 1983, via)

B disobeys the Maxim of Manner, thereby implying that the singer was not very good

The maxim of manner is a matter of being clear and orderly when conversing The speaker describes things in the order in which they occur and avoid ambiguity and obscurity

1.5 Overview of funny stories

Jokes are common in life In which, ambiguity of language plays an active role and helps the speaker and the listener to achieve communication effectively Funny story is characterized by humorous phenomena No one can deny that funny story is brief, but full of artistic words There are many humor theories developed in the past many years Attardo compresses them to the three major groups: superiority theory, relief theory and incongruity theory They are also the foundation for modern humor analysis.In many jokes, there is an apparent incongruity between the set-up and the punch line Scientists refer to this as the

“incongruity – resolution” theory We resolve the incongruity caused by the punch line, and the accompanying feeling of sudden surprise makes us laugh

The superiority theory also explains why we laugh at certain types of jokes Many jokesmake us feel superior to other people In these types of jokes, people appear stupid becausethey have misunderstood an obvious situation, made a stupid mistake, been the hapless victim of unfortunate circumstance or have been made to look stupid by someone else

In terms of structure, the funny story includes three parts:

Part 1: Beginning: Supplying the information, the natural events

Part 2: Direction: Creating an event which is background of the ending sentence

humorous-Part 3: Conclusion: Giving the humorous factor

According to Nguyen Duc Dan,“to make a laugh, the author must create

the ambiguous situations and utterances in order that the hearer/reader

understands in the normal way but the author brings out a converse meaning, reversing all of hearer’s/reader’s prediction”

According to Oaks (1994), the factor making laugh is based on the language ambiguity, is realized in the end of stories when readers/listeners reached of the punchline of the story

Overall, funny story is defined as “a short-humorous story of oral literature, in which, the humor is concentrated on the last utterance Hence, the humor is accumulated and surprisedly broke out

1.6 Summary

Obviously, there is a close relationship between language and culture Hence, it is worth noting that different languages and cultures have different expressions of behavior and different realizations of speech acts by language users In terms of pragmatics, implicatures play an important role in communication In particular, implicature is quite popular in conversational language It has appeared since language was used as means of communication and has become the interest notion of the world-wide linguists However, implicature is also a challenge for Vietnamese learners of English who need understand the conversational language Therefore, contrastive analysis is the best way for English learners to find out the similarities and differences between English and Vietnamese implicatures And funny story is the best material to learn about implicature

CHAPTER II INTERPRETATION AND ANALYSES

2.1 Funny stories in English

2.1.1 Violating the Maxim of Quantity

The maxim of quantity, where ones tries to be as informative as one possibly can, and gives as much information as is needed, and no more This maxim is broken when the interlocutors give too much unneeded information in conversation or utter the superfluous utterances Let’s consider this English funny story:

Room For Two

For our honeymoon my fiancée and I chose a fashionable hotel known for its luxurious suites When I called to make reservations, the desk clerk inquired,

“Is this for a special occasion?”

“Yes,”I replied “It’s our honeymoon.”

“And how many adults will there be?” she asked

The desk inquired in this story violated the maxim of quantity, because he askeda stupid question It is unnecessary because the honeymoon is obvious for couple Such a stupid question is punch-line of the story

And in this situation, the character gives too much information

Forget it

“The thrill is gone from my marriage,” Bill told his friend Doug

“Why not add some intrigue to your life and have an affair?” Doug suggested “But what if my wife finds out?”

“Heck, this is a new age we live in, Bill Go ahead and tell her about it!”

So Bill went home and said, “Dear, I think an affair will bring us closer together.” “Forget it,” said his wife “I’ve tried that - it never worked.”

The wife in this story flouted the maxim of quantity by giving more

information than the situation requires If she only said “Forget it”, readers would have felt surely normal However, she continued “I’ve tried that - it never

worked.” That unintentional accused her having an affair before but their

marriage was not still better

2.1.2 Violating the Maxim of Quality

Breaking the maxim of quality is often seen in hyperbole in funny stories, which is utilized to give ostensibly false statements On the other hand, thisprinciple is also violated if the speaker lacks adequate evidence When the maxim of quality is broken, it is obvious to the interlocutor that the speaker is telling a lie

For example: