Left dislocation and right dislocation in english versus vietnamese equivalents in some english and vietnamese short stories from 1990 until now

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST- GRADUATE STUDIES  NGUYỄN THỊ NGỌC MAI LEFT DISLOCATION AND RIGHT DISL

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

FACULTY OF POST- GRADUATE STUDIES 

NGUYỄN THỊ NGỌC MAI

LEFT DISLOCATION AND RIGHT DISLOCATION IN ENGLISH VERSUS VIETNAMESE EQUIVALENTS IN SOME ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE SHORT STORIES FROM 1990 UNTIL NOW

Cấu trúc dịch chuyển thông tin sang trái và dịch chuyển thông tin sang phải trong tiếng Anh và tương đương trong tiếng Việt trong một số truyện ngắn tiếng Anh và tiếng Việt từ năm 1990 đến nay

MA MINOR THESIS

Major: English Linguistics Code : 60220201

HÀ NỘI – 2016

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

FACULTY OF POST- GRADUATE STUDIES 

NGUYỄN THỊ NGỌC MAI

LEFT DISLOCATION AND RIGHT DISLOCATION IN ENGLISH VERSUS VIETNAMESE EQUIVALENTS IN SOME ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE SHORT STORIES FROM 1990 UNTIL NOW

Cấu trúc dịch chuyển thông tin sang trái và dịch chuyển thông tin sang phải trong tiếng Anh và tương đương trong tiếng Việt trong một số truyện ngắn tiếng Anh và tiếng Việt từ năm 1990 đến nay

MA MINOR THESIS

Major: English Linguistics Code : 60220201

Supervisor: Dr Huỳnh Anh Tuấn

HÀ NỘI – 2016

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DECLARATION

I certify that this minor thesis entitled “Left dislocation and right dislocation in English versus Vietnamese equivalents in some English and Vietnamese short stories from 1990 until now”is the result of my own research and all the

materials used in this study has been identified and acknowledged This M.A thesis has not been submitted for any degree to any other universities or institutions

Ha Noi, 2016

Nguyen Thi Ngoc Mai

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My minor thesis has been completed thanks to the assisstance and guidance of

my teachers, my family as well as my friends

First of all, I would like to express my most sincere gratitude to my supervisor,

Dr Huynh Anh Tuan for his enthusiastic assistance, academic guidance, good suggestions and critical comments on my study, without which the work would not have been completed

Secondly, I am greatly indebted to my lecturers in the faculty of post- graduate studies for their useful lectures and contribution to my study

Last but not least, I would like to acknowledge the considerate support and indispensable assistance of my family, my friends and my colleagues while the work was being done

One more thing I would like to say is that in spite of all the efforts I have made and the advice and assistance I have received, I am sure my minor thesis is far from perfect Therefore, it is my responsibility for any inadequacies and shortcomings that arise in my minor thesis

Hanoi, October 2016

Nguyen Thi Ngoc Mai

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ABSTRACT

This research is carried out to investigate the similarities and differences in the use of Left dislocation and Right dislocation in English and Vietnamese short stories The analytical data is collected from ten English and ten Vietnamese short stories from 1990 until now In the research, Left dislocation and Right dislocation in English is compared and contrasted with Vietnamese equivalents

in terms of their structure and function The result of the research shows that there are similarities and differences in the use of these constructions in English

and Vietnamese short stories The most prominent similarity in the use of LD

and RD in English and Vietnamese short stories is that in terms of structure, these constructions can be realized by a Noun phrase moved leftward or rightward is coreferential with a resumptive pronoun in the same sentence And the most significant difference is that LD realized in English short stories can perform the function of contrasting while Vietnamese LD does not On the other hand, Vietnamese RD can function to focus whereas English RD does not

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Declaration i

Acknowledgments ii

Abstract iii

Table of contents iv

List of abbreviations……… ………

List of figures………

PART A: INTRODUCTION 1 Rationale 1

2 Aims of the study 2

3.Research questions………

4 Scope of the study 2

5 Method of the study 3

6 Design of the study 3

PART B: DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 1 LITERATURE REVIEW………

1.1 Review of previous studies………

1.2 Canonical and non-canonical structures………

1.3 Left dislocation in English………

1.3.1 Definition………

1.3.2 Realizations……….………

1.3.3 Structural features ……….…

1.3.4 Functional features ………

1.4 Right dislocation……….……

1.4.1 Definition………

1.4.2 Realizations………

1.4.2.1 Right dislocation and post- posing………….………

1.4.2.2 Right dislocation and afterthought………

1.4.3 Structural features………

1.4.4 Functional feature………

1.5 English vs Vietnamese sentence structures and sentence elements………

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1.6 Left dislocation and right dislocation in

Vietnamese………

1.6.1 Left dislocation in Vietnamese………

1.6 2 Right Dislocation in Vietnamese………

CHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGY………

2 1 Research questions……… ………

2 2 Research methods………

2 3 Selection of samples………

2 4 Data analysis………

CHAPTER 3: DATA ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSIONS………

3.1 Data analysis………

3.1.1 The percentages of LD and RD in English and Vietnamese short stories………

3.1.1.1 The percentages of LD and RD in English short stories……

3.1.1.2.The percentages of LD and RD in Vietnamese short stories

3.1.1.3 The percentages of LD and RD in English and Vietnamese short stories………

3.1.2 The Structures and functions of LD in English and Vietnamese short stories ………

3.1.2.1 The Structures of LD in English and Vietnamese short Stories………

3.1.2.2 The functions of LD in English and Vietnamese short Stories………

3.1.3 The Structures and functions of RD in English and Vietnamese short stories………

3.1.3.1 The Structures of RD in English and Vietnamese short stories

3.1.3.2 The functions of RD in English and Vietnamese short stories………

3.2 Discussions………

3.2.1 Left dislocation in English and Vietnamese short stories

3.2.1.1 Similarities………

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3.2.1.2 Differences………

3.2.2 Right dislocation in English and Vietnamese short stories…

3.2.2.1 Similarities………

3.2.2.2 Differences………

PART C: CONCLUSION 1 Concluding remarks… ………

1.1 Left dislocation in English and Vietnamese short stories………

1.1.1 Similarities………

1.1.2 Differences………

1.2 Right dislocation in English and Vietnamese short stories ……

1.2.1 Similarities……….…

1.2.2 Differencies………

1.3 The frequency of using LD and RD in English and Vietnamese short stories………

2 Limitations of the study………

3 Pedagogical implications………

4 Suggestions for further study………

References……….……… ………

Appendix I……… ………

Appendix II………

Appendix III……… …

Appendix IV………

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LIST OF FIGURES IN THE STUDY

1 Frequency of LD and RD in English short stories 24

2 Frequency of LD and RD in Vietnamese short stories 25

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Frequency distribution of LD and RD in English and

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Distribution of LD performing the functions of Topicalizing,

Focusing and Contrasting in English short stories 27

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Distribution of LD performing the functions of Topicalizing

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Distribution of LD performing the functions of Topicalizing,

Focusing and Contrasting in English and Vietnamese short

stories

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Distribution of RD performing the functions of Identifying

the referent, Reintroducing the topic and Adding attributive

meaning in English short stories

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Distribution of RD performing the functions of Identifying

the referent, Reintroducing the topic, Adding attributive

meaning and Focusing in Vietnamese short stories

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Distribution of RD performing the functions of Identifying

the referent, Reintroducing, Adding attributive meaning and

focusing in English and Vietnamese short stories

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In linguistics, word order is to the study of the order of the syntactic constituents of a language, and each language may employ a different order The connection between word orders in different languages is of interest to linguistics They found that among natural languages with a word order preference, SVO is the second most common order by number of known languages, after SOV, including English

However, English speakers are provided with a variety of non canonical syntactic

means for expressing a given proposition ―Although these non canonical-word-order utterances may be truth-conditionally equivalent to the corresponding canonical variant, they differ in their relationship to the discourse context‖ (Birner, 1994)

The interaction between structures and functions has been an interesting and inspiring topic for many past scholars, who have already done a number of researches on it They have studied, for instance, the functions of different moods, different interrogative forms and so on and so forth However, studies on dislocated structures, which we refer to as non-canonical constructions here, are relative few These non-canonical constructions are, however, quite common found in colloquial usages as they seem to serve a wide range of functions The present study is thus interested in systematically studying the structural and functional features of two specific non-

canonical constructions, namely left dislocation (LD) and right dislocation (RD) in English and Vietnamese

2 Aims of the study

The study aims at:

+ Investigating the use of Left dislocation and Right dislocation in English and in Vietnamese short stories in terms of their structure and function

+ Working out the similarities and differences in the use of these two constructions as revealed in some English and Vietnamese short stories in terms of their structure and function

3 Research questions

In order to realize the aims, the study purports to answer the following research questions:

1 How are the structure and function of Left dislocation and Right dislocation realized

in English and in Vietnamese short stories?

2 What are the similarities and differences in the use of Left dislocation and Right dislocation in English and Vietnamese short stories in terms of their structure and function?

4 Scope of the study

The study is carried out and concerned especially with the two non-canonical constructions: LD and RD The study focuses on the exploration of two following aspects of these constructions: the structural features and pragmatic functions Because

of the limitation of a minor thesis the study just collects data and investigates ten English short stories and tenVietnamese ones from 1990 until now to analyze and find out the similarities and differences between these constructions in English and Vietnamese equivalents

5 Method of the study

In order to achieve the aims of the study, both quantitative and qualitative approach are used

In using qualitative method, the author sets up criteria for selecting LD and RD in short stories and deciding which certain function the dislocation construction performs

In using quantitative method, the frequencies of the use of left dislocations and right dislocations in English and Vietnamese short stories to perform a certain function is shown

Finally, a contrastive analysis is carried out in order to find out the similarities and differences on the use of LD and RD in English and Vietnamese short stories in terms

of their structure and function

6 Design of the study

The paper is divided into three main parts: introduction, development, and conclusion Part A: Introduction, briefly introduces the rationale of the study, the aims and objectives of the study, research questions, scope of the study, the method of the study, and the significance

Part B: Development, is the focus of the study, consists of 3 chapters:

Chapter one , Literature Review deals with the literature relevant to the topic

Chapter two, Left dislocation and Right dislocation in English and Vietnamese, provides with the structural and functional features of these constructions

Chapter three, Methodology, presents the subjects, the research questions, study methods and the procedures of data collection and data analysis

Chapter four, Findings and discussion, analyses and discusses the findings which were gained from the data collected

Part C: Conclusion, concerns with the summaries of main points, the limitation, the implication and some suggestions for further study

PART B: DEVELOPMENT

CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW

Before carrying out the study, it is very crucial for the author to establish the theoretical framework so that readers have good background knowledge of the relevant issues This will shed light for the nature of this study In this chapter, the previous studies will be reviewed to offer a panorama of what is going to be investigated After that, some conceptions or notions are given to introduce the reader the requisite background for understanding the remainder of the theoretical model, including: review of previous studies, canonical and non-canonical constructions, Left Dislocation, Right Dislocation, the comparison between English and Vietnamese Dislocation constructions in terms of their structure and function

1.1 Review of previous studies related to the research area

There have been a fair number of researches that have been done preliminarily on LD and RD Among the pre-eminent authors who discuss LD in great details are Lambrecht (1984, 2001); Prince (1981, 1992, 1998); Ward and Birner (2001); and Tizón-Couto (2012) Discussions about RD can be found in Rodman (1998); Lambrecht (1984); Ward and Birner (2001); Grosz and Ziv (1998) And The research

on LD and RD in English carried out by European scholars up to now can be considered thorough and deep

In Vietnamese, there have been a few studies on the dislocation constructions which can be found in Nguyen Kim Than (1997); Diep Quang Ban (2004); Nguyen Huu Quynh (2001); Nguyen Lan Trung (2009); Nguyen Thi Thanh Huyen (2011) Although there are a lot of researches related to other noncanonical constructions in Vietnamese

in comparison with English, such as passive voice (Thuy, 2006), Fronting (Anh, 2011), Information packaging constructions i.e Inversion, Cleft, Existential, Extraposition (Nhat, 2013); a contrastive study of dislocations between English and Vietnamese has

not been carried out yet As a result, the author would like to carry out a study on this matter to fill this gap as well as provide language learners an overview of the differences and similarities in the use of left and right dislocations in English and Vietnamese short stories in term of their structure and function

1.2 Canonical and Non-canonical structures

Halliday and Matthiessen (2004) states that sentential subject can be classified into three types in accordance with its function: grammatical, psychological and logical The subject is which followed by a predicate in a subject –predicate structure is called grammatical one Psychological subject is understood as the first thing appearing in the mind of the speaker in producing a sentence Logical subject refers to the doer of the action

Accordingly, Constructions in English beginning with a grammatical subject are canonical constructions (Halliday & Mathiessen, 2004; Quirk et al, 1985) Quirk et al (1985:721) classified the canonical structures into seven types: SV, SVC, SVO, SVA, SVOO, SVOC, and SVOA

SV The boy is running

SVC Your mother seems angry

SVO My brother bought a house

SVA My house is on the third floor

SVOO She gave me an apple

SVOC John‘s son made him sad

SVOA He kicked the ball into the goal

On the other hand, Non canonical constructions are those which do not begin with a grammatical subject except for conversing

Eg: John and his two siblings benefited from the farm

The farm benefited John and his two siblings

In the above examples, both sentences with convertible orders are acceptable

Therefore, both of them are viewed as bearing a non-canonical pattern even though they begin with a grammatical subject

Like canonical, there are 7 non-canonical constructions (Ward & Birner, 2001; Quirk

et al, 1985): Fronting, Left-dislocation, Argument reversal (inversion & passivization), Cleft structure, Post-posing (existential there- and presentational there-sentences), Right-dislocation and Conversing

In this thesis, left dislocation and right dislocation are considered as the focus for investigating

1.3 Left dislocation in English

a The man my father works with in Bostoni, he's going to tell the police that the

traffic expert has set that traffic light on the corner of Murk Street far too low (Ross 1967:6.128a)

b My father, he’s Armenian, and my mother, she's Greek ( Ross 1967:6.129)

c My wife, somebody stole her handbag last night (Ross 1967:6.137)

According to Lambrecht (2001), left dislocation is defined as ―a sentence structure in which a referential constituent which could function as an argument or adjunct within

a predicate-argument structure occurs instead outside the boundaries of the clause containing the predicate to its left”

1.3.2 Realizations

LD is often mistaken as pre-posing due to the fact that an item is preposed i.e moved leftwards in the construction:

E.g The cheese they made there, they sold most of it to the miners (Brown,

1983:321)

The canonically constructed sentence would have been:

They sold most of the cheese they made there to the miners

However, the differences related to structure and functions of the two constructions are

indicated in the studies conducted by Ward and Birner (2001), Erteschic-Shir (2007) , and Prince (1997) pointed out as follows

Regarding to the structure, the canonical position of the item is left unoccupied in posing whereas a resumptive coreferential pronominal element appears in the marked constituent‘s canonical position in left-dislocation In the above example, co-referential

pre-with the sentence-initial item the cheese they made there is the direct object pronoun it

What‘s more, left dislocation is also different from pre-posing in terms of function While the preposed constituent ―represents information standing in a contextual relationship with information either discourse old or evoked or inferable based on prior discourse‖, the left-dislocated item ―introduces discourse-new (or maybe hearernew) information‖ In the above example, ‗the cheese they made there‘ has never before

appeared in the discourse

Regarding to the intonation, Douglas (2004) stated that left dislocation has a falling intonation in the main clause whereas topicalization has a slight rise at the end of it The level of intonation of left dislocation is illustrated in the following examples:

The Saturns, you can get air bags in them

And heavy metal, it‘s noisy

Well, my car, it‘s an eighty six

Left dislocation (Douglas, 2004)

1.3.3 Structural features

LD is generally identified by the presence of a referential constituent that could function as an argument or adjunct within the predicate-argument structure of the clause but, instead, occurs outside the left-peripheral boundaries of the clause containing the predicate

Lambrecht (1984) considers left dislocated elements as an extra- clausal consituents which do not partake in the semantic and syntactic dependency relations between predicates and their arguments This results in the syntactic property of optionality with respect to dislocated constituents Lambrecht also makes a distinction between the dislocated constituents and the grammatico-semantic category adjunct The term adjunct, like argument,or complement refers to a grammatical or semantic relation between a denotatum and a predication In contrast, the term 'dislocated phrase' refers

to a constituent in a specific syntactic position that serves a particular pragmatic function Furthermore, adjuncts, unlike dislocated constituents, may occur in various syntactic positions inside the clause and may possess either a topic or a focus relation to the main predication This is not the case with dislocated constituents which cannot stand in a topic or focus relation to the proposition since they do not occupy a syntactic position inside the clause (Lambrecht,1984)

cognitive-Typical left dislocated element is usually taken on by a noun phrase And according to

Lambrecht (2001:1061), noun phrases are ―by far the most commonly found category

of left-dislocated in the world languages.‖

a This kind of discourse, I kind enjoy of it.( Ha et al, 2006)

b."The first time was 1968, just to get out of my dad's house," she says "Second guy, I just met him and didn't have anything else to do Didn't work out Third and fourth

times were business partners We got married for business reasons."' (Ellen, F., 1997)

In addition to this common type, there is a variety of left-dislocations in language in the world, such as: adjective phrases, prepositional phrases, infinitive verb phrase, and clausal units, as the following examples:

That you’re not coming tonight, I can‘t believe it (Lambrecht, 2001:1063)

Me worry, that‘s ridiculous! (Lambrecht, 2001: 1061)

John a doctor, I don‘t believe it! (Lambrecht, 2001: 1061)

Any questions that are not answered here, you can call the White House staff member and they will be directed to answer any questions on an informal basis.' (Ellen,

According to Lambrecht (1981) observes that the use of LD typically functions to mark

a shift with respect to the previously established topic, or when no previous topic was established, to create a new topic

Barnes (1985) provides a detailed study of the functions of LD in Spoken Standard French He indicates the contexts the pragmatic factors motivating the use of LD in various discourse contexts, as follows:

First, are contexts in which the referent has just been mentioned (usually as an object) The use of LD in these contexts serves to mark the textually evoked referent as

a discourse topic

Second, LD serves to mark a shift in attention the contexts in which the referent is one

of two or more given discourse topics

Third, referents that possessed the status of DT in a remote part of the discourse but has since lost its status The use of LD therefore serves to reintroduce the earlier topic Lastly are referents which are not only evoked as discourse topic, but are also given

Barnes explains the use of LD in these particular contexts "gives special emphasis to

an entity already under discussion" ( Lambrecht, 1984)

According to Geluykens (1988), the majority of referents of dislocated constituents in English LD constructions are irrecoverable That is to say, they are not mentioned before in the discourse, or are re-introduced after a fairly long stretch of discourse in which it was not mentioned Therefore the main function of LDs is said to be referent-introducing In addition, LDs function to mark a contrastive relation between a set of opposites

Prince‘s (1992) studies of LD are backed by strong empirical evidence She tried to show that no single function can account for all the LD data in English She claims that

LD has at least three different functions as follows:

Simplifying Discourse Processing- 'Simplifying' LDs: simplifying the processing of discourse-new entities by removing them from syntactic positions which are disfavored for discourse-new entities and creating a separate processing unit for them

'It's supposed to be such a great deal The guy, when he came over and asked me if I wanted a route, he made it sound so great Seven dollars a week for hardly any work

And then you find out the guy told you a bunch of lies.' (Terkel 1974:13)

Set-inference Triggering Function of LDs- 'Poset' LDs: this is a ―listing‖ function, which informs the hearer that the initial NP stands in a salient partially-ordered set relation to some entity or entities already evoked in the discourse-model

Eg: She had an idea for a project She’s going to use three groups of mice One, she’ll feed them mouse chow Another, she’ll feed them veggies And the third she’ll feed

junk food (Ellen, F, 1997:8)

Amnesty an island-violation: 'Resumptive pronoun' LDs

These are considered instances of "topicalization in disguise" wherein the resumptive pronoun occurs "because the extraction site is one from which it is difficult or impossible to extract" (Prince, 1998)

Eg: 'The only one we could see her figure was Number 2.' (Kitty Carlisle, To Tell the

I don‘t like them at all, the cops

According to Cheung (1997), ―Right dislocation refers to the phenomenon in which a sentence possesses a component standing to the right of what we normally take to be sentence final boundary.‖

Unlike LDs, RDs have not received as much attention in the literature as other canonical constructions since they have been regarded by some authors as performance errors, as ―afterthoughts‖ (Laia.M., 2006) However, most of the researchers agree that this kind of dislocation greatly contribute to the packaging of the information

non-1.4.2 Realizations

1.4.2.1 Right dislocation and post- posing

Right dislocation at first sight seems to be a counterpart of left dislocation, in that a NP

is dislocated to the end and outside of the main clause, leaving a resumptive pronoun co-referential in the main clause

As mentioned above, LD is similar to the pre-prosing in terms of their structural and functional features Similarly, language users may find it difficult to distinguish between right dislocation and post-posing Structurally, both constructions involve the non-canonical placement of a complement of the verb in post verbal position These structures only differs form each other in terms of the given-new status of the information expressed by the noncanonically positioned elements RD does not require the post verbal noun phrase to present new information In other word, the right-dislocated constituent represents information that has been either explicitly or implicitly evoked in the prior discourse A following example is given for illustration:

Below the waterfall (and this was the most astonishing sight of all) a whole mass of enormous glass pipes were dangling down into the river from somewhere high up in

the ceiling! They real ly were ENORMOUS, those pipes

(Dahl, R Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, 1964)

In this example, ‗those pipes‖ has been previously mentioned The phrase represents information that has been explicitly evoked in the prior discourse

1.4.2.2 Right dislocation and afterthought

Early studies of RD in other languages treated RD as a form of afterthought or repair device in other words, as a performance issue However, RD should not be considered

to be mere instances of sentence repair or afterthoughts as has been suggested in a few cases (Geluykens, 1987) but rather the assumption that they serve a specific purpose in

discourse is crucial to a full understanding of them

Ziv and Grosz (1993) point to three main differences between RD and afterthoughts

First, The position may also count as a distinguish property Right dislocated elements always appear at the end of the utterance, while the corresponding entity in afterthoughts can appear in other positions in the sentences, as in:

I met him, your brother, I mean, two weeks ago

Second, Right dislocated elements are always coreferential with a noun phrase or pronoun in the main clause, while afterthought may contain corrections of reference, such as in:

I met John yesterday, Bill, I mean

Third, intonationally, RD have a single intonation contour with no pause preceding the final noun phrase In contrast, afterthoughts have a distinct pause before the final noun

phrase

1.4.3 Structural features

According to Kent, L (2013), a right dislocated phrase consists of a phrase after the main syntactic clause, which is typically anaphoric to a preceding NP in the main clause, as in the following examples It can be a full noun phrase, or a resumptive or reduplicated pronoun In English and other Western languages, only RD anaphors

coreferential with main clause referents would be grammatical, as those in (a-c),

a They spoke to the janitor about that robber yesterday, the cops

b The cops spoke to him about that robbery yesterday, the janitor

c The cops spoke to the janitor about it yesterday, that robbery

(Ross, 1967:236)

The author also states that right-dislocated referents can be coreferential with main clause subjects or objects As Rodman (1998) notes, in English, an RD phrase must have an anaphor in the main clause, and a coordinate NP structure cannot be right dislocated (c)

a Dogs, I like Old English and Golden Labs

b *I like Old English and Golden Labs, dogs

c *They spoke to him about that robber yesterday, the cops and the janitor (Rodman, 1998:47)

In some other cases, RD can be a complex nounphrase coming at the end of the utterance as in following examples:

a I told her to leave instantly, the woman that did an obscene imitation of me on the Merv Griffith show (Rodman, 1998:48)

b We elected him president, the most outrageously stupid and dishonest man in the entire country (Rodman, 1998:48)

1.4.4 Functional feature

In the studies of Right dislocation in French, Lambrecht (1984) supplies a very deep characterization of the discourse functions of RD (Lambrecht refers to as ‗anti-topic‘) The dislocated noun phrase which is positioned at the end of the clause functions charactically in recovering entities which are either ‗situationally evoked‘ or ‗textually evoked‘

Aijmer (1989: 150), claimed that RD is used in situations in which there is already

some common ground ―As a result the Tail [i.e RD] is not used only or mainly to identify a discourse referent, but the speaker uses it with a secondary social function to create intimacy and affection between the participants in the communication situation‖

According to Vallduví (1992), in the study of Catalan, showed that RDs are tails, pieces of old information not maximally salient at the moment of utterance that establish how the new information must be updated

Rodman (1998) indicated one function of RD is when the speaker wishes to emphasize

or contrast the content of a long noun phrase by stressing the main clause pronoun and providing additional information about the stressed item in an right dislocated phrase,

as in:

I told her to leave instantly, the woman that did an obscene imitation of me on the Merv Griffith show (Rodman, 1998:48)

Ward and Birner (1996: 477) underlined the organizational function of right

dislocations, noting that ―the dislocated NP of right-dislocation is constrained to constitute familiar, discourse-old information in context‖

Grosz and Ziv (1998) carried out some pioneering work on the study of the discourse functions of RD in English and Hebrew And they showed that RD has an organizational function in discourse: to identify and reintroduce a potential topic in cases where the referent is evokable either situationally or linguistically Moreover, the use of RDs in English is proscribed to refer to an entity which has just been mentioned unless it adds some attributive meaning

Grosz and Ziv (1998) indicated that RDs are felicitous in English when referring: (1) to an implicitly focused entity present in the discourse situation but not mentioned,

as in:

“It is beautiful, this painting!” (Lambrecht, 1984)

(2) to entities textually evoked only when:

(a) they have been mentioned in discourse, but not recently

A: I asked you to read this book for today B: I know I tried to very hard, but I was quite busy Incidentally, it is much too difficult for me, this book (Ziv, 1993)

(b) the NP adds some attributive meaning Otherwise, RDs are predicted to be unacceptable

I took my dog to the vet yesterday

a #He is getting unaffordable, my dog

b He is getting unaffordable, the old beast (Grosz and Ziv, 1998)

in the above example (a) is unaccptable and (b) is acceptable because in (b) the right dislocated element adds attributive meaning

1.5 English vs Vietnamese sentence structures and sentence elements

According to Tran Huu Manh (2008), English share common features with Vietnamese

in terms of sentence structures and sentence elements Firstly, both languages have the same sentence elements although they are named differently: Subject (S), Verb (V), Object (O), Complement (C), and Adverbial (A) in English and Chủ ngữ, Động từ, Tân ngữ, Bổ ngữ và Trạng ngữ in Vietnamese (Trần Hữu Mạnh, 2007: 394) Secondly, English has a certain number of basic sentence structures and so does Vietnamese, including: SV, SVO, SVC, SVOO, SVOC, SVA, SVOA:

The boy is running Cậu bé đang chạy

Pattern 2: SVO NP1 + V + NP2 (Chủ ngữ + Động từ + Tân Ngữ)

We love music Chúng tôi yêu âm nhạc

Pattern 3: SVC NP1+V+ NP2 (Chủ ngữ+ Động từ+ Bổ ngữ)

He will become a doctor Anh ấy sẽ trở thành bác sĩ

Pattern 4: SVA NP1 + V + NP2 (Chủ ngữ + Động từ + Trạng ngữ

The Book is on the table Quyển sách ở trên bàn

Pattern 5: SVOO NP1 + V + NP2 + NP3 (Chủ ngữ + Động từ + Tân

ngữ 1 + Tân ngữ 2)

She sent me a letter Cô ấy gửi cho tôi một bức thư

Pattern 6: SVOC NP1 + V + NP2 + NP3 (Chủ ngữ + Động từ + Tân

ngữ + Bổ ngữ)

We elected him our monitor Chúng tôi bầu anh ấy làm lớp trưởng

Pattern 7: SVOA NP1 + V + NP2 + Prep + NP3 (Chủ ngữ + Động từ

+ Tân ngữ + Trạng ngữ)

He put his books on the shelf Anh ấy đặt những cuốn sách của mình lên trên giá sách

These basic types of sentences are also called canonical structures in which the grammatical subject appears at the beginning of the sentence Additionally, Vietnamese, like English also have some kinds of non-canonical structures which do not follow the syntactic rule above The most typical one of non-canonical structure that is mostly referred in English and Vietnamese is fronting These structures are given in order to emphasize on a certain element of a sentence such as object, subject, adverbial Besides, there are other types (Ward & Birner, 2001; Quirk et al, 1985) such

as Left-dislocation, Argument reversal (inversion & passivization), Cleft structure, Post-posing (existential there- and presentational there-sentences), Right-dislocation and Conversing In comparison with English, Vietnamese also have similar types of non-canonical structures In this thesis, the researcher only takes investigation into left and right dislocations

1.6 Left dislocation and Right dislocation in Vietnamese

As mentioned above, dislocations have been studied in many languages like Japan, German, Cantonese, Korean However, this issue has not received enough attention from the investigators in the context of Vietnamese languages

1.6.1 Left dislocation in Vietnamese

In Vienamese, there is a similar process of moving an element toward the initial position of the sentence as in English The different Linguists use various terms to refer

to this process, such as: ―đề ngữ‖ (Diep Quang Ban, 2004), ―thành phần khởi ý‖ (Hoang Trong Phien, 1980), ―khởi ý‖ (Nguyen Huu Quynh, 2001), ―chủ đề‖ (Truong Van Chinh and Nguyen Hien Le, 1963), or ―từ-chủ đề‖ (Nguyen Tai Can, 1975) And the element undergoing this process is often termed as ―khởi ngữ‖ (Nguyễn Minh Thuyết and Nguyễn Văn Hiệp, 1998; Nguyen Kim Than, 1997; Nguyen Lan Trung, 2009)

In English, this leftward movement can result in two kinds of noncanonical

constructions named Fronting and Left Dislocation The difference between these two

constructions is that whether the preposed element is coreferential with a resumptive pronoun in the clause or not However, in Vietnamese, according to Nguyen Lan Trung (2009), any part of a sentence displaced from its normal position toward the beginning

of the sentence whether it is repeated or not can be regarded as Khởi ngữ

Nguyen Lan Trung (2009) proposed that ―Khởi Ngữ‖ is an extra- clausal constituent; However, it has close semantic and syntactic relationship with predicate and their arguments And ―Khởi ngữ‖ can be classified into two main types depending on whether or not it plays a role as sentence element in the sentence

In this study, we only consider the type of ―Khởi ngữ‖ which is repeated or coreferential with a resumptive pronoun in the same sentence is equivalent to Left dislocation in English

In term of syntactic features, most of ―khởi ngữ‖ structures are realized with Noun Phrases, Adjective Phrases and Verb Phrases They usually stand independently or separately from the other sentence elements They can be followed by a comma or not

In some cases, adding a comma to separate it from the other elements is acceptable as the following example:

Ông Bu Sơn, ông ấy trả hết

In term of function, ―Khởi ngữ‖ is used to set focus on the part which is pushed to the initial position of the sentence or to raise the topic of the sentence The two functions

of ―khởi ngữ‖ usually overlap and interact with each other (Nguyen Lan Trung, 2009)

1.6.2 Right Dislocation in Vietnamese

RDs have not received as much attention in the literature as other non-canonical constructions; Therefore, In Vietnamese, there have been few studies on this construction

In the study of focus information construction in English and Vietnamese, Nguyen Thi Thanh Huyen (2011) indicated that in Vietnamese, RD is the construction in which the dislocated element following the predicate of the sentence add attributive information

for an element in the sentence

In Vietnamese, RD performs the functions of adding attributive meaning, contrasting and focusing on a sentence element (Huyen 2011)

In short, our understanding of RD is nevertheless still limited, in the sense that there is

a dearth of research on two aspects First of all, little is known about the structural features and the frequency of use of right dislocations, and secondly the functions of right dislocation used by Vietnamese speakers have not been fully investigated

CHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGY

The purpose of this study is to examine the use of LD and RD in English and Vietnamese short stories regarding their structures and functions and then find out the similarities and differences between them The purposes of this chapter are to (1) reintroduce the research questions (2) describe the research methods of this study, including the procedure used in collecting the data, and an explanation of the statistical

procedures used to analyze the data

2 1 Research questions

In order to realize the aims, the study purports to answer the following the research questions:

1 How are the structure and function of Left dislocation and Right dislocation realized

in English and in Vietnamese short stories?

2 What are the similarities and differences in the use of Left dislocation and Right dislocation in English and Vietnamese short stories in terms of their structure and function?

Finally, a contrastive analysis is carried out in order to find out the similarities and differences on the use of LD and RD in English and Vietnamese short stories in term

of their structure and function

2 3 Selection of samples

First, in the selection of LD and RD, I manually found LD and RD based on the following criteria:

Left dislocation: the sentence structures in which a referential constituent which could

function as an argument or adjunct within a predicate-argument structure is moved leftwards, and a resumptive coreferential pronominal element appears in the marked constituent‘s canonical position

Right Dislocation: the sentence structures in which a referential constituent which

could function as an argument or adjunct within a predicate-argument structure is moved rightwards, and a resumptive coreferential pronominal element appears in the marked constituent‘s canonical position

Second, based on the database, I can generalize a set of function that LD and RD perform in English and Vietnamese short stories

Functions of LD in short stories

LD in English performs the following functions in certain contexts:

Topicalizing: the contexts in which the referent localizes and determines the area of certain circumstances, where something happened or will happen

Contrasting: the contexts in which left dislocated element mark a contrastive relation between a set of opposites given in the discourse

Focusing: the contexts in which referent is moved to the initial postion in order to draw the reader‘s attention

Functions of RD in short stories

Indetifying the referent: RD refers to an entity has not been textually mentioned in the discourse

Reintroducing the topic: RD refers to an textually evoked entity but it has not been mentioned recently