i
ABSTRACT
Although L2 pragmatic competence is essential in intercultural communication, many
studies show that most of language learners, even those with advanced grammatical
competence, lack necessary knowledge of performing speech acts in the target language. Lack
of L2 pragmatic knowledge has led to pragmatic failure or error, which is considered to have
more serious consequences than grammatical errors because native speakers tend to see
pragmatic errors as offensive and rude rather than simply as demonstrating lack of knowledge.
This can lead to misjudgment or miscommunication between them and native speakers.
Moreover, the findings of many studies indicate that pragmatic failure or errors are to a large
extent caused by the interference of the learners’ pragmatic knowledge in their native
language with their performance in the target language, or in other words, the negative
pragmatic transfer. Many learners, in performing speech acts in the target language, translate
social norms of their native culture or linguistic expressions of their native language into their
L2 performance, which are, in most cases, not seen appropriate by native speakers.
This study investigates the negative pragmatic transfer in the performance of the face-
threatening act of complaining by Vietnamese EFL learners at both pragmalinguistic and
sociopragmatic level. Pragmalinguistically, the study is aimed at detecting the occurrences of
negative transfer in learners’ choices of complaint strategies, external modifications and
internal modifications. Sociopragmatically, it seeks to examine the impact of learners’ L1-
based perceptions of two contextual factors, including social power (P) and social distance
(D), on learners’ realization of the speech act of complaining in the target language. The data
were collected via Discourse Completion Test (DCT) questionnaires. The DCT questionnaire
was comprised of 6 situations that were picked up based on the results of Metapragmatic
Questionnaire (MPQ) on 22 native speakers of English. DCT questionnaires were then
administered to 20 native speakers of Vietnamese, 20 native speakers of English, and 20
Vietnamese learners of English, whose English proficiency was assessed as intermediate.
The findings of the study have revealed the evidences of negative pragmatic transfer in
learners’ interlanguage complaints. At the pragmalinguistic level, negative transfer was most
strikingly evident when learners complained to people of lower and equal status. While native
ii

1. Rationale 1
2. Aims and scope of the study 2
3. Research questions 3
4. Method of the study 3
5. Organization of the study 4
PART B: DEVELOPMENT 5
CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW 5
1.1. Pragmatics 5
1.2. Speech Act Theory 6
1.3. Politeness Theories 10
1.3.1. Brown and Levinson’s Notion of Face 10
1.3.2. Social Variables 12
1.4. Interlanguage Pragmatics 14
1.5. Pragmatic Competence and Pragmatic Failure 15
1.5.1. Pragmatic competence 15
1.5.2. Pragmatic failure 16
1.6. Pragmatic Transfer in Interlanguage Pragmatics 19
1.7. Negative Pragmatic Transfer 20
1.7.1. Negative Pragmalinguistic Transfer 21
1.7.2. Negative Sociopragmatic Transfer 24
1.8. The Speech Act of Complaint 26
1.9. Modifications 30
1.10. Studies on Complaints by EFL learners 30
CHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGY 36
2.1. Research Questions 36
2.2. Participants 36
iv
2.3. Data Collection Methods 37
2.4. Data Collection Instruments 39
2.4.1. Social variables manipulated in data collection instruments 39

3.2.2.1. In the choice of complaint strategies 67
3.2.2.2. In the choice of external modifications 68
3.2.2.3. In the choice of internal modifications 69
3.2.3. Summary 70
v
PART C: CONCLUSION 71
1. Conclusions 71
1.1. Negative pragmalinguistic transfer 71
1.2. Negative sociopragmatic transfer 72
2. Implications 73
3. Limitations and suggestions for further study 74
REFERENCES 75
APPENDIXES I
Appendix 1: Metapragmatic Questionnaire (MPQ) I
Appendix 2A: Discourse Completion Task (DCT) (English Version) VI
Appendix 2B: Discourse Completion Task (DCT) (Vietnamese Version) IX
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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
SLA Second Language Acquisition
CCP Cross-Cultural Pragmatics
CP Contrastive Pragmatics
ILP Interlanguage Pragmatics
FTA Face Threatening Act
DCT Discourse Completion Test
MPQ Metapragmatic Questionnaire
L1 The first language
L2 The second language
EFL English as a Foreign Language
ENSs Native speakers of English
VLs Vietnamese learners of English

Figure 8 : Learners’ choice of complaint strategies across P
Figure 9 : Choice of external modifications across P
Figure 10 : Choice of downgraders across P
Figure 11 : Choice of upgraders across P
Figure 12 : English speakers’ choice of complaint strategies across D
Figure 13 : Vietnamese speakers’ choice of complaint strategies across D
Figure 14 : Learners’ choice of complaint strategies across D
Figure 15 : Choice of external modifications across D
Figure 16 : Choice of downgraders across D
Figure 17 : Choice of upgraders across D
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PART A
INTRODUCTION
1. Rationale
The nonstop growing globalization trends have gradually turned the world into a so-
called “Global Village”, where people from different backgrounds live, study, work and
communicate together. Such a need for intercultural communication has led to the increasing
dominance of the English language, which has always been referred to as an international
language of business, commerce and education. The English language teaching and learning
has accordingly enjoyed more attention than ever before and undergone significant changes to
meet learners’ novel demands. It is now more important for a learner to become a competent
user of English in real communication than to be a master of English grammar rules and
structures for reading and translation as in the past. Correspondingly, there has been a steady
shift of focus in the English language teaching from building up learners’ grammatical
competence to developing their pragmatic competence. Pragmatic competence, as noted by
Kasper (1997), is “knowledge of communicative action and how to carry it out, and the ability
to use language appropriately according to context”. However, intercultural communication
involves interlocutors with diverse sociocultural norms and linguistic conventions, and thus, a
clash of perceptions of appropriateness in communication is very likely unavoidable, which
also means that miscommunication in intercultural contexts can occur. Intercultural

social factors that lead to the negative transfer. Negative pragmatic transfer is chosen for the
study because negative transfer, not positive transfer, deals with the inappropriate translation
of L1 norms into interlanguage performance and it is considered as one of the main causes of
learners’ pragmatic failures. Besides, complaining is picked up as the head act in investigation
as complaining is an act that can hardly be avoided in everyday communication but it is very
likely to put both the speaker and the hearer at risk of losing their faces unless the complaint is
made with caution.
2. Aims and scope of the study
The study aims to find out the evidence of negative pragmatic transfer in the
performance of complaints by Vietnamese EFL learners. In other words, it will examine the
3
extent to which learners’ L1 pragmatic knowledge of complaining interferes with their
performance of the speech act in English. The negative transfer will be investigated at two
levels: pragmalinguistic transfer and sociopragmatic transfer. At the pragmalinguistic level,
the study seeks information about the extent to which negative transfer occurs in the learners’
preferences for complaint strategies, external modifications and internal modifications. At the
sociopragmatic level, the impact of learners’ L1 perceptions on their choices of complaint
strategies, external and internal modifications will be examined.
The study is then limited to the investigation of negative transfer seen in the
performance of complaining speech act only. Moreover, since the study focuses on the
influence of social factors, the Vietnamese learners who are to be chosen as informants will be
at the same language proficiency.
3. Research questions
The study seeks answer to the following questions:
(1) To what extent is negative pragmalinguistic transfer evident in the performance of
complaints by Vietnamese EFL learners in the context of the study?
(2) To what extent is negative sociopragmatic transfer evident in the performance of
complaints by Vietnamese EFL learners in the context of the study?
4. Method of the study
In this study data were collected via Metapragmatic Questionnaires (MPQ) and

DEVELOPMENT
CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW
The purpose of this chapter is to provide information pertaining to this thesis, which
was obtained from reviewing the related literature and studies. It begins with the overview of
pragmatics and main concerns of pragmatics, including speech act theory, politeness theory
and social variables P, D and R, and then some issues of interlanguage pragmatics, most
strikingly negative pragmatic transfer, will be discussed. Finally, literature on the FTA of
complaining and related studies on IL complaints by EFL learners will be reviewed.
1.1. Pragmatics
Pragmatics, as compared to syntax and semantics, is a relatively new discipline in the
history of linguistics and philosophy. Morris (1938) defined pragmatics as a branch of
semiotics, i.e. the study of signs (cited in Schiffrin 1994, p. 191). He also distinguished the
three ways of studying signs: syntax is the study of formal relations of signs to one another,
semantics is the study of how signs are related to the objects to which they are applicable,
whereas pragmatics is the study of the relations of signs to interpreters or users. Another way
of distinction was later provided by Levinson (1983), in which he claimed that syntax is “the
study of combinatorial properties of words and their parts”, semantics is “the study of
meaning”, and pragmatics, on the other hand, comprises “the study of language usage” (p. 5,
cited in Trosborg 1995). These distinctions signify that pragmatics copes with how the
linguistic signs or expressions are related to their users or interpreters. Similarly, Yule (1996)
shared the same view that the relationship between language usage and users is central to
pragmatics. As he put it, “pragmatics is concerned with the study of meaning as
communicated by a speaker (or a writer) and interpreted by a listener (or reader). It has,
consequently, more to do with the analysis of what people mean by their utterances than what
the words or phrases in those utterances might mean by themselves” (cited in Minh 2005, p.
6). This definition distinguishes between “semantic meaning”, which means “a property of
expressions in a given language (What does X mean?), and “pragmatic meaning”, which is
6
“relative to a speaker or user of the language” (What did you mean by X?) (Leech 1983, p. 6;
cited in Trosborg, 1995, p. 6).

something, which was considered as a breakthrough in linguistics and philosophy. He attacked
the predominant view in his time that sentences are primarily for stating facts, being “true”
when they succeed and “false” when they fail in doing so. By contrast, from his viewpoint,
many everyday declarative sentences are not intended to make true or false statements, but
they are used to “do things”, that is, to perform certain linguistic actions such as requesting,
complimenting, complaining, gripping and so on. Austin termed these sentences and the
utterances realized by them “performatives” as opposed to statements, assertions and
utterances like them which he called “constatives”. “Performatives”, as noted by him, are thus
characterized by a very significant feature that they cannot be true or false, yet they can still go
wrong. He then catalogued all the ways in which performatives can go wrong, or be
“unhappy” or “infelicitous”. For instance, a performative made by a British citizen when he
says to his wife “I hereby divorce you” can go wrong in that there is simply no such procedure
in Britain where merely by uttering divorce can be achieved. Based on different ways a
performative can fail to come off, he produced a set of conditions, which he called “felicity
conditions”, for them to meet if those performatives are to succeed or be “happy”. The felicity
conditions are divided by him into three categories:
A. (i) There must be a conventional procedure having a conventional effect
(ii) The circumstances and persons must be appropriate, as specified in the procedure
B. The procedure must be executed (i) correctly and (ii) completely
C. Often, (i) the persons must have the requisite thoughts, feelings and intentions, as
specified in the procedure, and (ii) if consequent conduct is specified, then the relevant
parties must so do.
(Austin, 1962, p. 14-15)
Searle (1979), whose theory is largely the systemization and extension of Austin’s
original theory, suggested that felicity conditions are not merely dimensions on which
utterances can go wrong, but are actually jointly constitutive of the various illocutionary
forces. He then recommended a classification of felicity conditions into four kinds, including
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preparatory conditions, sincerity conditions, propositional content conditions and Essential
conditions (Searle, 1979, p. 44).

may utter the sentence “Can you reach the salt?” and mean it not merely as a question but as a
request to pass the salt. The indirect speech acts, thus, might cause a problem, that is how it is
possible for the hearer to understand them when the sentence he hears and understands means
something else. Regarding this problem, Searle (1979) noted that the speaker communicates to
the hearer more than he actually says by way of relying on their mutually-shared background
knowledge, both linguistic and nonlinguistic, together with the general power of rationality
and inference on the part of the hearer. Searle also contends that certain linguistic forms will
tend to become conventionalized standard idiomatic forms for indirect speech acts. For
example, utterances such as “Can you reach the salt” and “Do you have the time?” are
conventionally used to make indirect requests.
Although the speech act theory has been influential in many fields, especially
pragmatics, the theory still poses some problems. The first problem deals with the unit of
analysis of a speech act in a speech act research. Many researchers criticize traditional speech
act studies for basing their findings on simulated speech in isolated and single-sentence
utterances that are divorced from the context (cited in Lin, 2005, p. 32). The second area of the
theory being criticized is the notion of indirect speech acts. According to Levinson (1983),
basically, the diversity of actual language challenges the theory that there is a simple form-
force correlation. He argued that “what people do with sentences seems quite unrestricted by
the surface form (i.e. sentence type) of the sentences uttered” (p. 264). He then proposed that
illocutionary force is entirely pragmatic and has no direct and simple correlation with
sentence-form or –meaning; there are thus simply no significance in distinguishing between
direct or indirect speech acts. Last but not least, the speech act theory does not emphasize the
fact that the realization of speech acts is culture-specific. Recent studies have proved that there
are cross-cultural differences in the realization of speech acts. Specifically, the Cross-Cultural
Speech Act Realization Patterns (CCSARP) project, examining the speech acts of requests and
apologies in Hebrew, Danish, British English, American English, German, Canadian French
10
and Australian English (Blum- Kulka et al., 1989) further shows that in spite of sharing certain
conventions of use, these languages differ in specific modes of realization.
To sum up, the speech act theory, on the one hand, has made a great contribution in the

account in the process of communication so that politeness can be achieved.
However, in everyday communication, we may unavoidably perform a speech act
which can cause another interlocutor to lose his or her face, or, in other words, we create a
face-threatening act (FTA). These acts are defined by Brown and Levinson (1987, p. 65) as
“acts that by their nature run contrary to the face wants of the addressee and/ or of the
speakers”. These FTAs impede the freedom of actions (negative face) and the wish that one’s
wants to be desired by others (positive face) – by either the speaker or the addressee or both
(Phuong, 2006, p. 9). Some examples of FTAs include refusing, criticizing, disagreeing or
complaining.
As stated above, FTAs can disturb the relationships between interlocutors, so
interlocutors often use specific strategies to minimize the threat of their FTAs. Brown and
Levinson (1987, p.60) provided a set of payoff considerations for a speaker to choose when
doing an FTA to a hearer. This set can be illustrated in the diagram bellow:
From the set of politeness strategies aforementioned, there come two concepts of
positive politeness and negative politeness strategies. First, positive politeness strategies
attempt to minimize the threat to the hearer’s positive face. It means they are used to make the
hearer feel good about himself, his interests or possessions, and are most usually used in
situations where the social distance between interlocutors is quite small. Besides avoiding
Do FTA

On Record


With Redress
 !
"#$ !
12
conflict, some positive politeness strategies also try to claim common ground between the
speaker and the hearer, express friendship and solidarity, give compliments, seek agreement
and give sympathy as well. A good example was provided by Yule (1996, p. 64), in which the

They further pointed out that the way in which the seriousness of a particular FTA is
weighed seems to be neutral as to whether it is speaker’s or hearer’s face that is threatened.
The weightiness of an FTA is calculated as follows (1987, p. 76):
Wx = D(S,H) + P(S,H) + Rx
Wx stands for the numerical value that measures the weightiness of the FTA. D(S,H)
refers to the social distance between the speaker and the hearer (the degree of familiarity and
solidarity) whereas P(S,H) indicates the relative power between them (the degree to which the
speaker can impose wants on the hearer). R is the absolute ranking of imposition (how
“threatening” the performed FTA is perceived to be within a particular culture) and x is the
performed FTA. Hence, the seriousness or weightiness of a particular FTA such as a request, a
refusal or a complaint in any given situation in a particular culture is the sum of these three
factors. Based on the outcome of this calculation, the speaker will make his choices of the
appropriate politeness strategies to use, i.e. whether to use bald-on-record, off-record, negative
politeness or positive politeness strategies or just simply avoid doing the FTA. From Brown
and Levinson’s viewpoint, increase in the hearer’s power (P), social distance (D) and the
degree of imposition (R) will increase the weightiness of a FTA, which is assumed to result in
the use of greater politeness. For example, in Olshtain and Weinbach’s study (1987), the
findings showed that Hebrew EFL learners, in realizing complaints in English, tend to opt for
less severe complaints to the hearer of higher status, and there is a tendency for severer
complaints to equal-status or lower-status hearers. Although they claimed that these three
factors are universal, Brown and Levinson (1987, p. 76) conceded that the content of each
factor is culture- and context-dependent.
However, there are still some criticisms against these three determinants of politeness
strategies. Many researchers contested their universality and their possibility to capture all the
circumstances that may influence the production of politeness. Moreover, the conclusions that
Brown and Levinson came to about the correspondence between the weightiness of the FTA
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and the amount of politeness to be used in interaction have also been challenged. Lin (2005, p.
61) provided two illustrations for this point: (1) Brown and Gilman (1989), in their study,
pointed out that, social distance is not a major factor, but “liking” is what increases politeness;

and (2) Interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) (Tam 2005, p. 35). She further discussed that while CP
compares speech acts across cultures and languages so as to understand how the linguistic
actions interlocutors engage in reflect their background, ILP focuses on linguistic actions,
speech acts and their enactment by learners to understand what might interfere with a learner’s
comprehension and production of pragmatic meaning. Therefore, ILP, rather than CP, is more
concerned with identifying the obstacles to or failures of learners’ appropriate production of
pragmatics, which is the focus of this study. ILP, however, is still a young discipline, which
as claimed by Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper (1989), is needed in order to discover “how
learners do things with words in a second language” (p.9). Trosborg (1995, p. 55) also cited
the fields of study that ILP involves, including contrasting non-native with native performance
of speech acts, learners’ inappropriate realization of speech acts, pragmatic transfer, or how
sociopragmatic factors governing speech act performance, such as age, gender, relative status
of the interlocutors and other situational constraints.
1.5. Pragmatic Competence and Pragmatic Failure
1.5.1. Pragmatic competence
It is also vital to discuss “pragmatic competence”, which has recently aroused much
attention in the field of second language acquisition. As cited in Thomas (1983), pragmatic
competence refers to “the ability to use language effectively in order to achieve a specific
purpose and to understand language in context”, as opposed to grammatical competence, i.e.
“abstract” or decontextualized knowledge of intonation, phonology, syntax, semantics, etc (p.
92). These two components, pragmatic competence and grammatical competence, are said to
make up a speaker’s “linguistic competence”. In the same fashion, in Bachman’s model
(1990), “language competence” is subdivided into two components – “organizational
competence” and “pragmatic competence” (cited in Kasper 1997). The former comprises of
the knowledge of linguistic units and the rules of joining them together at the levels of
sentence (“grammatical competence”) and discourse (“textual competence”). Meanwhile, the
latter is then subdivided into “illocutionary competence”, i.e. the “knowledge of
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communicative action and how to carry it out”, and “sociolinguistic competence”, i.e. the
ability to use language appropriately according to context and the ability to select

intended she or he should perceive it”. She used the following examples to illustrate her
definitions:
 H perceives the force of S’s utterance stronger or weaker than S intended s/he should perceive
it;
 H perceives as an order an utterance that S intended s/he should perceive as a request;
 H perceives S’s utterance as ambivalent where S intended no ambivalence;
 S expects H to be able to infer the force of his/ her utterance, but is relying on the system of
knowledge or beliefs that S and H do not share.
(Thomas, 1983, p. 94)
There is also distinction between pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic failure.
Pragmalinguistics is the linguistic ends of pragmatic – “particular resources that a given
language provides for conveying particular illocutions” whereas sociopragmatics is the
sociological interface of pragmatics – “the ways in which pragmatic performance is subjected
to specific social conditions” (Leech, 1983, p.11, cited in Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper,
1989, p. 3). Similarly, pragmalinguistics involves basically grammatical assessment of the
pragmatic force of a linguistic token, and sociopragmatics refers to judgments concerning the
size of imposition, cost/ benefit, social distance, and relative rights and obligations (Thomas,
1983, pp. 103-104). To put it another way, pragmalinguistics is language-specific while
sociopragmatics is culture-specific, reflecting the speaker’s system of values and beliefs.
Accordingly, the two categories of pragmatic failure were identified by Thomas (1983, p. 99)
as follows:
a. Pragmalinguistic failure, which occurs when the pragmatic force mapped by S onto a given
utterance is systematically different from the force most frequently assigned to it by native
speakers of the target language, or when speech act strategies are in appropriately transferred
from L1 to L2.