VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
   BÙI THỊ ĐÀO

A STUDY ON DEONTIC MODALITY EXPRESSING
MEANS IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE DECLARATIVE
AND INTERROGATIVE SENTENCES (NGHIÊN CỨU CÁC PHƯƠNG TIỆN DIỂN ĐẠT TÌNH THÁI CHỨC PHẬN
TRONG CÂU TƯỜNG THUẬT VÀ CÂU HỎI TIẾNG ANH VÀ TIẾNG VIỆT)

Field: English Linguistics
Code: 62.22.15.01 A dissertation submitted in total fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics at Vietnam National University, Hanoi Supervisors: 1. Prof. Dr. Tran Huu Manh
2. Dr. Nguyen Duc Hoat

HANOI, February 2014

HANOI, February 2014

i

CERTIFICATE OF ORIGINALITY A dissertation submitted in total fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of
Philosophy in Linguistics at Vietnam National University, Hanoi

Hanoi, February 2014 Bùi Thị Đào

My deepest gratitude also goes to Prof. Dr. Hoàng Vân Vân, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Phan Văn Quế,
Dr. Đỗ Tuấn Minh, Dr. Kiều Thị Thu Hương, Dr. Đỗ Thanh Hà, Dr. Hà Cẩm Tâm for their
enthusiastic support and invaluable remarks on my initial proposal. Their comments
significantly contributed to improving the quality of this research. I am particularly indebted to Assoc. Prof. Dr. Vũ Thị Thanh Hương, Prof. Dr. Nguyễn Văn
Hiệp, Assoc. Prof. Tôn Nữ Mỹ Nhật, Dr. Nguyễn Huy Kỷ, who generously shared the views
and materials during the process of preparing this research. I have also greatly benefited from
discussions with them. I take this opportunity to thank all the lecturers and members at CFL - VNU, Hanoi for their
whole hearted support and guidance. Thanks are also due to my colleagues, friends for their
great support and encouragement throughout my study. My special thanks and love go to my parents, my husband, my daughter and son, my brother
and sisters who have supported me in the completion of this dissertation. iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 1

1.4.2.3. Jussives 31
1.4.2.4. Obligatives 32
1.4.2.5. Permissives 33
1.4.2.6. Precatives 34
1.4.2.7. Prohibitives 34
1.4.3. Volitives 36
1.4.3.1. Imprecatives 36
1.4.3.2. Optatives 37
1.5. Types of deontic modality in Vietnamese 37
1.5.1. Commissives (tình thái cam kết/ hứa hẹn) 38
1.5.2. Directives (tình thái cầu khiến) 38
1.5.2.1. Deliberatives (yêu cầu) 38
1.5.2.2. Imperatives (mệnh lệnh) 39
1.5.2.3. Jussives (khuyến lệnh) 40
1.5.2.4. Obligatives (ép buộc) 40
1.5.2.5. Permissives (cho phép) 41
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1.5.2.6. Precatives (khẩn cầu) 41
1.5.2.7. Prohibitives (cấm đoán) 41
1.5.3. Volitives (tình thái ý nguyện) 42
1.5.3.1. Imprecatives (không mong muốn/nguyền rủa) 42
1.5.3.2. Optatives (ước vọng/ mong mỏi) 42
1.6. Contrastive framework 43
1.7. Summary 45

CHAPTER 2
COMMISSIVES AND VOLITIVES IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE 46

2.1. Commissives in English and Vietnamese 47

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

v 3.3. Performative verbs in English and Vietnamese directives 104
3.3.1. Syntactic features 104
3.3.2. Semantic features 106
3.4. Modal words 109
3.4.1. Syntactic features 111
3.4.2. Semantic features 113
3.5. Modal adverbs in English and Vietnamese directives 116
3.5.1. Syntactic features 116
3.5.2. Semantic features 117
3.6. Modal adjectives in English and Vietnamese directives 118
3.6.1. Syntactic features 118
3.6.2. Semantic features 119
3.7. Modal nouns in English and Vietnamese directives 120
3.7.1. Syntactic features 121
3.7.2. Semantic features 123
3.8. Particles 123
3.8.1. Syntactic features 125
3.8.2. Semantic features 125
3.9. Modal idioms in English and Vietnamese directives 129
3.9.1. Syntactic features 130
3.9.2. Semantic features 131


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 Vietnamese 72
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
Fig. 2.19. A contrastive analysis of volitives in English and Vietnamese 76
Fig. 3.1. String matching of MUST in the English corpus 86
Fig. 3.2. String matching of HAVE TO in the English corpus 86
Fig. 3.3. String matching of HAD TO in the English corpus 86
Fig. 3.4. String matching of PHẢI in the Vietnamese corpus 88

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

ECMC34 English commissive modal conditionals in English story 34
EDMAux4 English directive modal auxiliary in English story 4
EDHV4 English directive hedge verbs in English story 4
EDPV31 English directive performative verbs in English story 31
EDAdv25 English directive modal adverbs in English story 25
EDAdj23 English directive modal adjective in English story 23
EDMN35 English directive modal nouns in English story 35
EDP18 English directive particles in English story 18
EDMI12 English directive modal idioms in English story 12
EDMC23 English directive modal conditionals English story 23
EV2 English volitives in English story 2
VCMAux1 Vietnamese commissive modal auxiliary in Vietnamese story 1
VCPV1 Vietnamese commissive performative verbs in Vietnamese story 1
VCMC1 Vietnamese commissive modal conditionals in Vietnamese story 11
VDMAux5 Vietnamese directive modal auxiliary in Vietnamese story 5
VDPV8 Vietnamese directive performative verbs in Vietnamese story 8
VDMW42 Vietnamese directive modal words in Vietnamese story 42
VDAdv22 Vietnamese directive modal adverbs in Vietnamese story 22
(VDMN10) Vietnamese directive modal nouns in Vietnamese story 10
VDP8 Vietnamese directive particles in Vietnamese story 8
VDMI14 Vietnamese directive modal idioms in Vietnamese story 14
VDE17 Vietnamese directive expletives in Vietnamese story 17
VDMC36 Vietnamese Directive Modal Conditionals in Vietnamese story 36
EV26 Vietnamese Volitive in Vietnamese story 26
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ABSTRACT

This research is an attempt to identify, describe, compare and contrast various linguistic means
of expressing deontic modality in English and Vietnamese within the theoretical frameworks


INTRODUCTION

1. Background to the study

Modality as an important component of linguistics has been extensively studied from syntactic,
grammatical, semantic and pragmatic perspectives. The study of modality expressions within
linguistics is one of the complicated problems. As Palmer (2003: 4) says “modality is realized
by linguistic terms from a wide range of grammatical classes, covering not only modal
auxiliaries and lexical verbs, but also nouns, adjectives, adverbs, idioms, particles, mood, and
prosody in speech.”

There are three types of modality that can be distinguished in the modal system of English. i.e.,
epistemic, deontic and dynamic that can be interpreted in terms of possibility and necessity
(Palmer, 2003: 7). This research will focus on one important type of modality i.e. deontic
modality. The term deontic modality “is a cover term for a range of semantic notions such as
ability, possibility, hypotheticality, obligation, and imperatives” (van der Auwera & Plungian,
1998: 81). In Vietnamese, deontic modality is rendered as “tình thái chức phận/ đạo nghĩa”
(Nguyễn Văn Hiệp, 2008: 103) denoting obligations, duties, necessity and the need for actions
which is also chosen as the working definition for this research.

A large number of studies have focused on theories of modality in general and deontic modality
in particular such as the works by Chung & Temberlake (1985), Palmer (1979, 1986, 1990,
1994, 2003, 2004, 2005) who have studied on modality both theoretical and corpus-based:
syntactic and semantic theory figured in various contributions. Palmer’s theory is applied
widely in linguistics and in many languages. Lyons (1977) also has a great concern with
semantic related to deontic modality. Lyons’ theoretical discussion finds ample confirmation in
various examples mostly from subjective and objective modality. Still within the field of
modality, van der Auwera & Plungian (1998) identify and describe the two types of modality
i.e., participant - internal modality and participant - external modality. This classification is seen

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.
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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:

1. What are the linguistic means of expressing deontic modality in English and in
Vietnamese?
2. What are the similarities and differences in linguistic means used in the three types
of deontic modality in terms of the syntactic and semantic features and the
frequencies of usage in English and Vietnamese?

3. Scope of the study

This study is focused on the descriptive account of syntactic and semantic features of linguistic
means of indicating three types of deontic modality in English and Vietnamese based on the
classification of Palmer (1994). They are commissives, directives and volitives with the seven
sub-types of directives (deliberatives, imperatives, jussives, obligatives, permissives, precatives,

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
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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
expressing deontic modality in the declarative and interrogative sentences in English (as a


For the comparison of the frequencies of usage in the two languages under study, a quantitative
analysis of the corpus is adopted. Corpus means “a collection of texts held in electronic form,
capable of being analyzed automatically or semi-automatically rather than manually” (Baker,
1996: 225). A corpus-based method emerged in the years of 1990s and 2000s as a new area of
research in the discipline of studies. It is informed by a specific area of linguistics known as
corpus linguistics which involves the analysis of the corpora of authentic running text by means
of computer software. According to Steinberger et al. (2005: 529), a corpus can be used to
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.


the author lists all the devices used in those means, such as can, could, may, might, shall, will,
etc. belonged to the first means (modal auxiliaries); think, believe, know, etc. is the second
means (hedge verbs), etc. Then, the author uses a tool for doing lexical analysis named
TexSTAT-2 program. This program can show the string matching and the concordance to count
the frequency of a certain device in the whole 50 stories and also find related collocation of
other words together with a certain device in English or Vietnamese.

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The corpus supplies the number of words in each means, in each category of sorted devices and
shows a general overview of the distribution of modal linguistic means quickly and accurately
so that the researcher can extract all of the declaratives and interrogatives used in each means as
well as all of the means used in the stories. An illustrated example of a means of modal
auxiliary is shown in Fig. 1 and Fig. 2 below: Fig. 1. String matching of CAN in the English corpus
Fig. 2. String matching of CÓ THỂ in the Vietnamese corpus

The results of data processing are stored in the database for sorting and analyzing. From the
corpus, the researcher can collect 378 declaratives and 43 interrogatives expressing deontic

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
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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
comparison that studies languages belonging to the same period, without paying much attention
to their histories or language families.” It is more concerned with dissimilarities than
similarities.

Fisiak (1981: 2) also states that contrastive analysis was used extensively in the field of second
language acquisition in the 1960s and early 1970s, as a method of explaining an exhaustive
account of the differences and similarities between two or more languages, providing an
adequate model for the comparison, and determining how and which elements are comparable.
It is expected that once the areas of potential difficulty have been mapped out through


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.
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CHAPTER I

in Fig. 1.1 below:

Fig. 1.1. Types of modality. (Van der Auwera & Plungian, 1998: 111)
13

Still in the domain of modality, a distinction between “mood” and “modality” has been
proposed by Palmer (1979, 1986, 1990, 1994, 2003, 2005). Palmer’s work (1979) is regarded as
a “pioneer work on modality” related to the notions “epistemic’ and “deontic” modality which
is generally accepted as relevant linguistic categories. Palmer (1994) sets out a general
theoretical framework of the three types of deontic modality i.e. commissives, directives, and
volitives with its subtypes. However, he has not analyzed any deep insight these types of
deontic modality with regard to semantic and syntactic meanings. He only provides a brief
account of examples of these types in English.

Palmer & Facchinetti (2003) study and analyze the cross-linguistic features of modality in the
collection of evidence drawn from the corpus. Their works are the first one of a series fully
dedicated to corpus-based studies of languages. Corpora, in their study, have been widely
carried out in a great variety of fields, from the study of grammatical and lexical features to the
compilation of contrastive analysis and translation theory, from historical linguistics to
language acquisition. They state that the great amount of naturally occurring language applied
by the corpus shows clearly comparisons between different varieties of a language and between
languages as well. The corpus helps them count typical words and word patterns of a specific
genre.

The final paper in Palmer & Facchinetti’s work is an insightful study on the interaction of tense,
aspect and modality in English and Greek. The data are based on a corpus of written Greek (the
Hellenic National Corpus) concluding over 650 instances of modal verbs. They compare the

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
semantic perspectives in questions. Based on the forms, she divides Vietnamese particles in
questions into three groups: particle à used to greet or ask for information, particles ư, hả, sao,
phỏng, chắc, chăng used to predict what will happen or express irony, and particles chứ, nhỉ,
nhé used to ask for affirmation or remind somebody of something. She uses a descriptive
method to describe examples taken from short stories, plays, novels and recorders. The criteria
to indentify the meanings of sentence particles in her research are based on Searle theory of
speech act (1975). i.e., (i) propositional content, (ii) preparatory content, (iii) sincerity content
and (iv) essential content. She concludes that the meanings of particles are generally formed
according to contexts and attitudes of the speakers in communicating.