Some major ways to give and interpret english compliments

THANH HOA DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING NGUYEN MONG TUAN COMPREHENSIVE SCHOOL EXPERIENCED INITIATIVE SOME MAJOR WAYS TO GIVE AND INTERPRET ENGLISH COMPLIMENTS Writer: Le Thi Ngoc

THANH HOA DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING

NGUYEN MONG TUAN COMPREHENSIVE SCHOOL

EXPERIENCED INITIATIVE

SOME MAJOR WAYS TO GIVE AND INTERPRET

ENGLISH COMPLIMENTS

Writer: Le Thi Ngoc Anh School's post: Teacher School: Nguyen Mong Tuan comprehensive school Experienced initiative: English

THANH HOA 2016

TABLE OF CONTENT Page

1: INTRODUCTION

1.1 Rationale 4

1.2 Aims of the study 5

1.3 Scope of the study 5

1.4 Significance of the study 6

1.5 Method of the study 6

2: DEVELOPMENT

2.1: LITERATURE REVIEW 9

2.1.1 Definition of compliments 9

2.1.2 Types of compliments 10

2.1.3 Some syntactic and semantic features 10

of formulae compliments 2.1.4 Implicit compliments and indirectness 11

2.1.5 Critical Approaches to Translation 12

2 2: INTERPRETING FORMULAIC COMPLIMENTS 14

2.2.1 Discrepancies in the translation of compliments: 14

different syntactic structures and lexis, different pragmatic effects 2.2.2 Omissions and reductions in translation 16

2.3: INTERPRETING IMPLICIT COMPLIMENTS

2.3.1 Compliments not concerning the addressee directly 18

2.3.2 Compliments involving a comparison 2 0 3 : CONCLUSION 3.1 Recapitulation 22

3.2 Concluding remarks 22

3.3 Limitations of the study 23

3.4 Suggestions for further studies 24

4: REFERENCES 25

1: INTRODUCTION

1 1.Rationale

Compliments are speech acts that are primarily aimed at maintaining, improving, or supporting the addressee’s face (Goffman 1967) They can in fact be used for a variety of reasons: to express admiration or approval of someone’s work/ appearance/ taste; to establish/ confirm/ maintain solidarity; to replace greetings/ gratitude/ apologies/ congratulations; to soften face-threatening acts such as apologies, requests and criticism; to open and sustain conversation; to reinforce desired behavior

As Winston Brembeck points out, “to know another’s language and not his culture is a very good way to make a fluent fool of one’s self” (as cited in Nguyen, 1996, p.38) This comment has highlighted the importance

of the understanding of a culture beside a good command of its language

In that sense, students of English should be aware of Anglicist cultures apart from the learning of their language Compliment-giving and responding behavior is used to negotiate social identities and relations As

a consequence, inappropriate choice of responses can lead to a loss of face The preferred sequel to compliments is acceptance, but in American English, for instance, two thirds of the time respondents to compliments do something other than overtly and fully accept them (e.g mitigate, deflect

or reject, request interpretation; Herbert 1990)

The study aims to investigate the interpretation of some aspects relating to the texture of linguistic politeness in compliments Starting from the premise that critical approaches “would not be concerned so much with issues such as mistranslation in itself but rather the politics of translation, the way in which translating and interpreting are related to concerns such

as class, gender, difference, ideology and social context” (Vo, 2007)

All the aforementioned reasons have encouraged the researcher to work on this issue in hope of gaining insights into the compliment issue

1.2 Aims of the study

Firstly, the researcher would like to explore the ways to give compliments

of British and Americans

Secondly, the success of these compliments with the addressees would be measured

Finally, interpreting of these compliments is compared to the original ones This paper concentrates on compliments in some British and American conservation in order to answer two essential research questions:

1) What are the popular ways to give compliments in Britain and America? 2) To what extent are these speech acts successful with the addressees (i.e speech acts that achieve the aim of creating good rapport and solidarity, or even, in some cases, some other more covert illocutionary aims)?

3) How are these speech acts translated in interlingua conversations?

1.3 Scope of the study

* Field of study

The main focus of this study is on “critical approaches to interpreting compliments” This means that the study covered only compliment, not other dimensions of linguistics or culture

* Number of targeted languages

To draw an interpretation of compliments, research would be central to these two target languages: English and Vietnamese

1.4 Significance of the study

Once having been finished, this research would bring about decent benefits First, the research can shed the light on some major ways to give and interpret English compliments Thus, it provides an insight into Vietnamese and English-speaking cultures, contributing to the mutual understanding between those countries Moreover, the research would serve as a precious reference for any subject related to Vietnamese and American culture in general and Vietnamese and American punctuality in particular

1.5 Method of the study

*Approach

The research was conducted as an application of contrastive approach The

contrastive approach, as defined by Wikipedia “the systematic study of a

pair of languages with a view to identifying their structural differences and

similarities Historically it has been used to establish language genealogies.” Contrastive Analysis was used extensively in the field of

Second Language Acquisition (SLA) in the 1960s and early 1970s, as a method of explaining why some features of a Target Language were more difficult to acquire than others According to the behaviorist theories prevailing at the time, language learning was a question of habit formation, and this could be reinforced or impeded by existing habits Therefore, the difficulty in mastering certain structures in a second language (L2) depended on the difference between the learners' mother language (L1) and the language they were trying to learn

*Data collection instruments

This study employed conversation studying and interpreting as the main sources for data collection

*Data collection procedure

To collect the necessary data, the researchers followed the procedure below

Step 1: Search the conversations

The conversations, after being found, were piloted by two American participants The American student were working in AIESEC Hanoi AIESEC, the world's largest student organization, is the international platform where researcher spent time doing voluntary work

Step 2: Revise the conversations

After the piloting conversations, an amendment was made to enhance the accuracy of compliments in terms of linguistics

Step 3: Interpret the conversations

Finally, the researcher search for the interpretation of the compliments in Vietnamese through experiences in teaching at Nguyen Mong Tuan high school

*Data analysis

The collected data was processed with the application of interpretive methods, which was used to discuss the results

Procedures:

The researcher followed the following procedures to collect and analyze data

Step 1: search the conversations

Step 2: revise the conversations

Step 3: interpret the conversations

Step 4: code the conversations

Step 5: analyze the conversations

2: DEVELOPMENT

2 1: Literature Review

2.1.1 Definition of compliments

Compliments are a simple, yet powerful, relationship building tool There are many different reasons to give a compliment It is an expression of praise, congratulation or encouragement Compliments are primarily aimed at maintaining, enhancing, or supporting the addressee’s face (Goffman, 1967) and are used for a variety of reasons, the most significant of which is perhaps to express admiration or approval of someone’s work/appearance/taste On the basis of several socio-pragmatic studies (Wolfson, 1981, 1984; Manes & Wolfson, 1980; Wolfson & Manes, 1980; Herbert, 1991; Holmes 1988), it is evident that compliments are routine formulae and tend to use a few syntactic patterns and a limited vocabulary that are instrumental in the expression of admiration and praise

Compliment-giving and responding behavior is used to negotiate social identities and relations As a consequence, inappropriate choice of responses can lead to a loss of face

Furthermore, it might also be argued that compliments, although primarily polite speech acts or “face flattering acts” (Manno, 2005), can make complimented feel uneasy or embarrassed, thereby creating a threat for their negative face

On the basis of several socio-pragmatic studies it is evident that speech acts are subject to cultural and socio-linguistic variations (Blum-Kulka et al 1989) Apart from macroscopic cultural and linguistic differences in the giving and accepting of compliments, some interesting changes can also be observed depending on socio-linguistic variables (age, gender, status, etc.)

2.1.2 Types of compliments

On the basis of several socio-pragmatic studies (Wolfson, 1981, 1984; Manes & Wolfson, 1980; Wolfson & Manes, 1980; Herbert, 1991;

Holmes 1988), it is evident that compliments are routine formulae and tend to use a few syntactic patterns and a limited vocabulary that are instrumental in the expression of admiration and praise Therefore, it can be said that formulae compliments, which share some common patterns when being analyzed, is the first type of compliments

The second type of compliments, as Holmes correctly remarks (1988: 446-447), compliments most typically attribute a positive quality to the addressee, even when the compliment seems to refer to a third party This kind of utterance is easily interpreted as a compliment because it praises the recipient in an indirect way as illustrated below:

Mary comments on Tom – Laura’s son: What a healthy boy!

Laura: Thanks We try our best.

These ones are categorized as implicit compliments

2.1.3 Some syntactic and semantic features of formulae compliments

Research on compliments, no matter in which language, has incontrovertibly shown that they are quite formulaic in nature The most interesting results for American English are those that emerge from the studies by Manes and Wolf- son (Manes and Wolfson 1980; Wolfson and Manes 1980) With reference to the research, most patterns of the compliments are the following:

1 NP is/looks (really) ADJ Your sweater is really nice

2 I (really) like/love + Noun phrase I like your car

3 PRO + is (really) + (a) ADJ + Noun phrase That’s a good question

4 You V (a) (really) ADJ + Noun phrase You did a great job

5 You V + Noun phr + (really) ADV You sang it very well

6 You have (a) (really) ADJ + Noun phrase You have a beautiful cat

7 What (a) + ADJ + Noun phrase! What a pretty shirt!

8 ADJ + Noun phrase! Good shot!

9 Isn’t + Noun phrase + ADJ! Isn’t that ring pretty!

Formulaicity is also to be observed in the limited choice of vocabulary Manes and Wolfson observed that low specificity adjectives such as “nice” and “good”, among semantically positive adjectives, cover together 42% of adjectival occurrences in compliments If “beautiful”, “pretty” and “great” are added to the group, the percentage increases to reach two thirds of all adjectival compliments Among verbs, “like” and “love” are the most frequent and occur in 90% of verbal compliments

2.1.4 Implicit compliments and indirectness

As pointed out above, the majority of scholars agree that compliments are formulaic in nature, with frequently repeated syntactic patterns and lexical material Yet, as Boyle advocates (2000), compliments are not necessarily formulaic and in certain genres there is a marked preference for implicit forms (cf also Herbert, 1991:383) By implicit compliments Boyle means two different speech acts: one that refers to the addressee’s achievement, whose recognition strongly depends on indexical knowledge; and one that compares the addressee to someone he/she thinks highly of The expression of praise rests on a comparison, whose interpretation depends on the addressee’s knowledge of the object of the comparison

Indirectness in performing speech acts is one of the objects of Thomas’s study (1995: 120) that claimed that it was both costly and risky

It is costly because an indirect utterance takes longer for the speaker to formulate and for the hearer to process; it is risky because it is not always successful Indirect compliments include the desire to make one’s speech more interesting (in some cases also less interesting by deflecting attention from one’s speech), to strengthen the illocutionary force of one’s message and to achieve competing perlocutionary goals

2.1.5 Critical Approaches to Translation

With reference to the article “Critical Applied Linguistics: Concerns and Domains” by Assoc Prof Dr Vo Dai Quang (2007), critical approaches to translation are included in other domains of textual analysis

to critical applied linguistics “Such an approach would not be concerned

so much with issues such as mistranslation in itself but rather the politics of translation, the way in which translating and interpreting are related to concerns such as class, gender, difference, ideology and social context” (Vo, 2007) He also pointed out that critical applied linguistics “is based on

an ethics of difference and tries in its practice to move toward change” and that “the need to unsettle local cultural hegemonies through the challenges

of translation all point to the need for an approach to translation based on

an ethics of difference” (Vo, 2007)

2 2: Interpreting Formulaic Compliments

2.2.1 Discrepancies in the translation of compliments: different syntactic structures and lexis, different pragmatic effects

The translation of compliments sometimes shows discrepancies across the two languages involved This may be due to systemic differences between the languages at stake, to cultural preferences and to idiosyncratic choices In many examples, the trend seems to be towards the expression of compliment on performance in the English original and

on personal traits in the Vietnamese translation In this concern, it is perhaps fruitful to recall the results Creese (1991: 53), authors agree that the largest topic category in American English is appearance, for British English it seems to be ability As will be shown, however, it appears that

in Vietnamese compliments on appearance or on qualities are preferred to those on performance

Some examples would shed some light in this issue

Situation 1 : Mary and Peter are watching the scene that has just been performed by Julie, an actress starring as a nurse in the new film.

English

Mary: That’s great.

Peter: Yeap, you were

wonderful.

Julie: Thanks I tried my best

Vietnamese

Mary: Bạn diễn rất hay.

Peter: Ừm, bạn diễn rất tuyệt.

Julie: Cám ơn Mình đã cố gắng rất nhiều.

In the example, both “You were wonderful” and “That’s great” are compliments that refer to a scene that has just been performed by Julie Reference is therefore quite easily established The use of a pronoun is possible because reference is being made to an action or an event that is currently relevant and therefore easily accessible Participants shared the same context of situation to make sense of what their partners say The translation of the first compliment in Vietnamese also shifts the focus from the performance, the shooting of the scene, and insists instead on one of the character’s personal qualities In the Vietnamese version the compliments uttered by Mary and Peter have therefore the same syntactic pattern, whereas they differ in the original Moreover, the verbs “be” in

the original version were translate into “diễn”, an action verb in Vietnamese version

Situation 2: Peter and Mary give compliment on Hal’s successful presentation of his new proposal to implement business in the company where he works Hal is praised for his well-argumented talk and the brilliant ideas that he has put forward

English

Mary: Well done, Hal.

Peter: Nice job!

Hall: Thanks.

Vietnamese

Mary: Cậu cừ lắm , Hal.

Peter: Bài thuyết trình rất hay! Hall: Cám ơn mọi người

In the translation, instead, little importance is attached to his performance, for the first compliment (“cậu cừ lắm”) is very generic Also it is quite vague as it refers to people and not to the performance as

it does in the original version In the original, the first compliment concerns a successful performance, whereas it is turned into a recognition

of some stable personal qualities in the translation

However, the second compliment reflects rather exactly what bears in the original because both of which refer to the presentation rather than the person Vietnamese version, yet, prolongs and differs from the original It uses the full structure (N+be+adj) instead of the noun phrase as in the English version

Situation 3: Joe was on TV as singer Joe and Mary are talking

about Joe’s performance.

English

Joe: You saw me on TV?

Mary: Listen, I wish you to

know you’re doing a

fantastic job.

Vietnamese

Joe: Thấy tớ trên TV không ? Mary: Nghe này, mình muốn

bạn biết bạn hát rất hay.

In the above example as well, in the original the compliment concerns a successful performance, whereas it is turned into a recognition of some stable personal qualities in the subtitles