TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 1
1. Background to the study 2
2. Aim of the study 3
3. Scope of the study 3
4. Methodology 5
4.1. Methods of the study 5
4.2. Data collection procedures 6
4.2.1. Description of corpus 6
4.2.2. Compilation of a corpus procedure 7
4.3. Data analysis 9
4.3.1. Describing the data 9
4.3.2. Comparing the two sources of data 9
5. Structure of the study 11
CHAPTER I 12
LITERATURE REVIEW
1.1. Historical perspectives of modality 12
1.2. Modality 16
1.2.1. Definitions and different viewpoints 16
1.2.2. Types of modality 21
1.3. Deontic modality 24
1.3.1. Definitions and various viewpoints 24
1.3.2. Types of deontic modality 26
1.4. Types of deontic modality in English 28
1.4.1. Commissives 28
1.4.2. Directives 29
1.4.2.1. Deliberatives 29
1.4.2.2. Imperatives 30
1.4.2.3. Jussives 31
1.4.2.4. Obligatives 32
1.4.2.5. Permissives 33

2.1.3. Performative verbs in English and Vietnamese commisives 56
2.1.3.1. Syntactic features 58
2.1.3.2. Semantic features 59
2.1.4. Modal adverbs in English and Vietnamese commisives 60
2.1.4.1. Syntactic features 61
2.1.4.2. Semantic features 62
2.1.5. Modal adjectives in English and Vietnamese commisives 63
2.1.5.1. Syntactic features 64
2.1.5.2. Semantic features 64
2.1.6. Expletives in English and Vietnamese commisives 66
2.1.6.1. Syntactic features 66
2.1.6.2. Semantic features 67
2.1.7. Modal conditionals in English and Vietnamese commisives 68
2.1.7.1. Syntactic features 69
2.1.7.2. Semantic features 70
2.2. Volitives in English and Vietnamese 73
2.2.1. Syntactic features 73
2.2.2. Semantic features 74
2.3. Summary 77
CHAPTER 3 DIRECTIVES IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE 80
ii
3.1. Modal verbs in English and Vietnamese directives 80
3.1.1. Syntactic features 81
3.1.2. Semantic features 85
3.2. Hedge verbs in English and Vietnamese directives 102
3.2.1. Syntactic features 102
3.2.2. Semantic features 102
3.3. Performative verbs in English and Vietnamese directives 104
3.3.1. Syntactic features 104
3.3.2. Semantic features 106

4. Limitations of the study 149
5. Suggestions for further research 150
REFERENCES i

APPENDIX A x

APPENDIX B xxv
iv
LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. 1.1. Types of modality 12
Fig. 1.2. A spatial model tense, aspect and modality 17
Fig. 1.3. Description of modality 19
Fig. 2.1. Set model for modal verbs, auxiliary verbs and verbs 47
Fig. 2.2. String matching of WILL in the English corpus 50
Fig. 2.3. String matching of SHALL in the English corpus 51
Fig. 2.4. String matching of WOULD in the English corpus 52
Fig. 2.5. String matching of SẼ in the Vietnamese corpus 53
Fig. 2.6. String matching of THINK in the English corpus 56
Fig. 2.7. String matching of PROMISE in the English corpus 59
Fig. 2.8. String matching of CERTAINLY in the English corpus 62
Fig. 2.9. String matching of PROBABLE in the English corpus 65
Fig. 2.10. String matching of SURE in the English corpus 65
Fig. 2.11. String matching of IT in the English corpus 67
Fig. 2.12. String matching of IF in the English corpus 70
Fig. 2.13. A distribution of linguistic means of expressing commisives in English 71
Fig. 2.14. A distribution of linguistic means of expressing commisives in Vietnamese72
Fig. 2.15. A contrastive analysis of commissives in English and Vietnamese 72
Fig. 2.16. A distribution of linguistic means of expressing volitives in English 74
Fig. 2.17. String matching of HOPE in the English corpus 75
Fig. 2.18. String matching of WISH in the English corpus 75

Table 3.5. The distribution of hedge verbs in English and Vietnamese 102
Table 3.6. The distribution of performative verbs in English and Vietnamese 106
Table 3.7. Distribution of Vietnamese modal words 114
Table 3.8. The distribution of modal adverbs in English and Vietnamese 117
Table 3.9. The distribution of modal adjectives in English and Vietnamese 119
Table 3.10. Distribution of Vietnamese particles 126
Table 3.11. The distribution of modal idioms in English and Vietnamese 132
Table 3.12. The distribution of Expletives in English and Vietnamese 134
Table 3.13. The distribution of modal conditionals in English and Vietnamese 135
vi
ABBREVIATIONS
The following abbreviations are used chiefly in glossed language data examples:
Ibid the same author/ resources
Aux auxiliary
S subject
Mod modal verb
V verb
O object
MW modal word
HV hedge verb
VP verb phrase
MN modal noun
C commissive
D directive
V volitive
ECMAux1 English commissive modal auxiliary in English story 1
ECMAux4 English commissive modal auxiliary in English story 2
ECPV18 English performative verbs in English story 8
CADV23 English modal adverbs in English story 23
ECADJ34 English commissive adjective in English story 34

frameworks and typological studies by pioneering linguists, both foreign and
Vietnamese, on deontic modality. This study is both descriptive and contrastive in
nature. Its main aims are to identify, describe and compare the various linguistic
resources available in English and Vietnamese in indicating deontic modality and its
three main types i.e. commissives, volitives, directives, and their sub-types.
The main data used in this research are taken from the two corpora (421 declarative and
interrogative sentences in English), built on 50 English stories, a total of 2.060.389
words and (422 declarative and interrogative sentences in Vietnamese) in 50
Vietnamese stories, a total of 2.003.486 words. The data collected are then qualitatively
and quantitatively analyzed to show similarities and differences in terms of syntactic -
semantic features and equivalences and non-equivalences in the use of linguistic means
to express deontic modality in English as a source language and Vietnamese as a
language of reference. Statistics also show the frequencies of occurrences of various
linguistic means in the respective languages to show their relative importance in
expressing deontic modality in the two languages under study.
Research findings show that while English and Vietnamese share some main linguistic
devices i.e., modal verbs, adjectives, adverbs, hedge verbs, etc. in the declaratives, the
two languages also show major differences and non-equivalences in the interrogatives in
the availability and the extent of the usage of various means to indicate deontic
modality. While English relies more on modal verbs, modal auxiliaries and moods,
among others, Vietnamese relies more on its system of sentence particles (mood words),
modal words to indicate different meanings of deontic modality.
It is hoped that the findings from this study will contribute to further understanding
ix
linguistic resources available in English compared to Vietnamese and their shared and
unshared features in the use of linguistic devices in expressing modality in general and
deontic modality in particular.
x
INTRODUCTION
1. Background to the study

Bùi Trọng Ngoãn (2004), Võ Đại Quang (2009), who have studied modality in the Vietnamese
language.
However, no attempt has been made to conduct a contrastive study on linguistic means of
indicating deontic modality in English and Vietnamese. Therefore, this study is carried out to
address that research gap in order to provide a more articulate insight into similarities and
differences of deontic expressing means in the two languages, and to serve as a framework for
implicational purposes, which can be both theoretical and practical.
Regarding theoretical values, this dissertation is the first research into three types of deontic
modality in the English language compared with the Vietnamese language. Though deontic
expressing means have been touched upon by many reputed linguists, the description and
application of the three types of deontic modality in the study of Vietnamese have rarely been
found in the works by Vietnamese linguists.
With respect to practical purposes, a contrastive analysis on the three types of deontic modality
in English and Vietnamese helps teachers, students of English and those who are interested in
the field of linguistics understand deeply the language they deal with as well as the speakers’
attitudes or contexts that they refer to. In other words, this contrastive analysis will help EFL
(English as a Foreign Language) learners better understand of the similarities and differences in
the use of deontic expressing means in both languages. The insignts gained from the study,
hopefully, will help to find out error analysis in the English language teaching and learning.
2. Aim of the study
This study is aimed at finding the similarities and differences in deontic expressing means in
English and Vietnamese.
2
In order to achieve the proposed aim, the objectives of the study are set as follows:
• To analyze and describe linguistic means of expressing deontic modality in English and
Vietnamese.
• To compare and contrast linguistic means of expressing deontic modality in terms of
grammatical and lexical features and frequencies of usage in expressing deontic
meanings in English and Vietnamese.
To achieve the above objectives, the following research questions are to be addressed:

and deontic modality in particular. Therefore, the main focus of this research is not on
comparing and contrasting how linguistic means of expressing deontic modality operate in the
two sentence types: declaratives vs interrogatives. Declarative and interrogative sentences are
then used to provide samples of linguistic means used within these two sentence types.
In this research, the author compares and contrasts deontic expressing means taken from 421
declarative and interrogative sentences found in 50 English stories and 422 declarative and
interrogative sentences found in 50 Vietnamese stories. Based on the identification and the
descriptive accounts of deontic expressing means in the two languages, a comparative and
contrastive study on the similarities and differences of deontic expressing means in 421
declaratives and interrogatives in English and 422 declaratives and interrogatives in Vietnamese
will be conducted.
In this study, the main criteria to recognize declarative and interrogative sentences in English
are based on the theory of Palmer (1986: 26- 30). i.e., English sentences are the major
grammatical units used by speakers to make statements or ask questions. The exchange of
information is characteristically expressed by the indicative mood or the imperative mood.
Within the indicatives, making a statement is typically concerned with the declaratives, and
asking a question is associated with the interrogatives. More exactly, it is one part of the
structures concluding the subject and the finite element. In declarative structures, the subject
4
precedes the finite, and in the interrogative structures, the positions of finite operator and
subject are reversed. The finite is the element which associates with the content of the sentence
relating to time, tense, or attitudes of the speaker.
The criteria to recognize declaratives and interrogatives in Vietnamese are based on the work of
Cao Xuân Hạo (1991: 128) i.e., the basic word order of a declarative sentence in Vietnamese is
subject - verb - object. Also, a declarative can be expressed by a number of final particles đi/
nghen/ nhé. An interrogative can be expressed by a noun/ noun phrase; or an adjective/
adjective phrases; or a verb/ verb phrases or a sentence, which is realized by question marks có/
đã…… không/ chưa, có phải (là)… không?, ( có) phải không?, or question with particles
à,chứ, nhé, nào,hả,…
For the purpose of describing, comparing and contrasting the use of linguistic means for

count occurrences and frequencies for machine translation, cross-lingual information retrieval,
multilingual lexical extraction, and sense disambiguation.
Corpus based methods prove to be very effective in cross-language comparative study. It allows
us to access to a large sample of texts and compare various syntactic as well as semantic
features and frequencies of usage. Therefore, a corpus based method is also used in this study
for comparative and contrastive purposes.
4.2. Data collection procedures
4.2.1. Description of corpus
The corpora used in this study are built on the following general principles regarding size,
number of languages, sources:
• The size of the corpus: The two corpora used in this research consist of 50 English
stories, a total of 2060389 words and 50 Vietnamese stories, a total of 2003486
words. Thus, the corpus includes 50 English stories and 50 Vietnamese stories. This
corpus size is viewed as not too large or too small so that a close reading of the
whole texts can be undertaken.
6
• The number of languages: The corpus in this research is considered as a bilingual
corpus; hence it contains the two languages: English and Vietnamese. This corpus is
specialized in that it includes only written records and its samples only are
declarative and interrogative sentences found in the included English and
Vietnamese stories.
• The sources of the corpus: As mentioned in the scope of the study, the comparisons
which will be made in this study are linguistic means of expressing deontic modality
in English and Vietnamese stories. The reason, the researcher assumes, is that
conversations in stories are too frequent a way of expressing deontic modality.
Moreover, according to Van Dijk (1988), famous stories present a factual account of
events that typically contain an element of comments. Lexical choices, for example,
can reflect the attitudes towards the events described and the actors involved. For
these reasons, stories are considered as the main source of the data used in the
present study.

After extracting the data from the corpus, a descriptive method will be used at first to exploit all
means and expressions of deontic modality used in English and Vietnamese declarative and
interrogative sentences in terms of categories in the theoretical framework. Basing on devices
processed in the corpus, the author distinguishes eleven means of deontic modality within 421
declaratives and interrogatives in English and 422 declaratives and interrogatives in Vietnamese
and then, categorizes them at three different types of meanings: commissives, directives and
volitives. This type of analysis is emphasized throughout the contextual translation in the stories
with various types of illocutionary forces.
The researcher labels examples of declaratives and interrogatives in English and Vietnamese
with the different forms. Letters and numbers signal the meanings of deontic expressions and
numbers indicate the story. For example, ECMAux1 stands for English modal auxiliary
denoting commissive meanings of the story one of 50 English stories. Vietnamese examples
comprise texts labeled VCMAux1 (Vietnamese modal auxiliary expressing commissive
meanings of the story one of 50 Vietnamese stories.). All the stories will be clearly specified in
each case in the appendixes such as the writer’s name of the stories and the year of publication.
4.3.2. Comparing the two sources of data
Fisiak (1981: 2-3) explains “drawing on the findings of theoretical contrastive studies they
provide a framework for the comparison of languages, selecting whatever information is
necessary for a specific purpose.” According to Johansson and Hofland (1994: 25), “language
comparison is of great interest in theoretical as well as applied perspectives”. It reveals what is
general, what is specific and what is important both for the understanding of language in
general and for the study of the individual languages compared. They further explain that a
comparative linguistic analysis differs considerably from a contrastive linguistic analysis. “A
comparative study is a diachronic comparison of two or more linguistic systems with a view to
classifying languages into families”. It is related to the history and evolution of languages, and
involves in establishing the similarities or correspondences between languages. “A contrastive
linguistic analysis is the comparison and contrast of the linguistic systems of two or more
9
individual languages in order to bring out points of contrast as well as points of similarity
between them,” and they also argue that “a contrastive linguistic study is a synchronic

Chapter one provides the preliminaries to this study by giving a brief of previous research and
basic overview of the general concepts of modality and, in more details, the specific framework
of deontic modality with different types of deontic modality and deontic linguistic means in
English and Vietnamese under study.
Chapter two is concerned with a detailed description and comparative analysis on the two types
of deontic modality in English and Vietnamese i.e. commissives and volitives based on both the
semantic and the formal aspects of modal expressions, including a systematic inventory of
means available for expressing deontic attitudes in English and Vietnamese.
Chapter three explores the similarities and differences in terms of syntactic and semantic
features and frequencies of occurrences of various linguistic means of expressing directives in
English and Vietnamese basing on the theoretical framework and the results of corpus data
collection provided.
The conclusion provides the summary of the results of the study with research implications,
contributions and suggestions for future research.
11
CHAPTER I
LITERATURE REVIEW
1.1. Historical perspectives of modality
Like most of theoretically-based historical studies, modality has been pursued from the
perspectives of both semantic and grammatical theories of linguistics. The term “modality”
derives from the postclassical Latin words modalitas or modus in more than one sense that was
used by scholars in the Middle Ages. However, this Latin term was very rare, and its current
linguistic use was the earliest attestation in 1907. The history of English modal auxiliaries in
general and of modality in particular had prestigious place in studies since the nineteenth
century.
Chomsky (1957) devotes much of his research to syntactic structures of modality. He has
researched the grounding in different perspectives on syntax more than semantics. Functionally-
oriented views of syntactic aspects of English modality include works by Denison (1993),
Hopper and Traugott (2003), Peyraube (1999) in Chinese, Beninca and Poletto (1997) in Italian.
In these works, the study of modality has mainly focused on grammaticalization.

meanings of modal verbs. (ii) the form of modal verbs (interrogatives or negatives, present or
past. (iii) types of modal verbs (epistemic modality or agent-oriented modality). (iv) the
grammatical person of the subject. (an utterance interpreted in the third person in comparison
with the first person). Overall, studying of the Greek data from the corpus, Palmer &
Facchinetti (2003) analyze the similarities and differences as regards of semantic features of
modal verbs in English and Greek.
13
Van der Auwera et al. (2009) provide some of the papers presented at the Second International
Conference on Modality in English. There are three general themes described in their work: (i)
the definition of modality. (ii) the study of English modals. (iii) the analysis of modal
constructions. Discussing general approaches to modal notions, the authors argue that it is
important to distinguish between modality and modalization. The former is a modal system
based on the notions of possibility and necessity. The latter is divided into five types (non-
factuality vs factuality: might and may, existential modality such as “footballers can be sex
maniacs” (van der Auwera et al, 2009: 2), subjectivity vs objectivity (may, can, must, should).
In the analysis of modal constructions, they describe the structures of non-factual modality such
as until and before clauses. Authors conclude that subjective modals involve more pragmatic
than the objective uses.
For non-western languages, Wymann (1994) surveys modal constructions in Korean and
Japanese. He classifies modality using the parameters “possibility” versus “necessity” and
“situational” versus “epistemic”. Li (2004) compares modality types in terms of grammatical
features, semantic functions, pragmatic variation, logical representation, and diachronic
development in English under a typological perspective in comparison with Chinese. In his
thesis, the comparative analysis goes from lexical forms to syntactic features including
negation, voices, subjects, main verbs, aspects, tenses and styles. His research focuses on
various types of modality in general (i.e. epistemic, deontic and dynamic) in English and
Chinese.

In Vietnamese, Nguyễn Thị Lương (1996) describes the uses of particles in questions with
various illocutionary forces. It can be said that it is a research investigating particles on

modality. Bùi Trọng Ngoãn (2004) surveys the role of modal verbs on expressing modality in
Vietnamese such as cần, phải, nên, dám, đành, nỡ in combination with sentence particles. Võ
Đại Quang (2009) also conducts a study on linguistic means of expressing modality in English
and Vietnamese in terms of semantic and syntactic features within various types of modality.
However, he does not focus on linguistic means of expressing deontic modality in terms of their
semantic and syntactic features
So far, there has been no research exclusively focusing on the contrastive study of linguistic
means of expressing deontic modality in English and Vietnamese. Thus, this dissertation is an
attempt to meet such research need. It is also the major contribution of this study at least at the
application level.
15