VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POSTGRADUATE STUDIES

NGUYỄN THỊ HỒNG NHUNG A CROSS-CULTURAL STUDY OF PAUSES AND TIME-FILLERS IN
SOME AMERICAN AND VIETNAMESE FILMS

(Nghiên cứu giao văn hóa về việc sử dụng các quãng lặng và các yếu tố
khỏa lấp trong một số bộ phim Việt Nam và Mỹ)
M.A. MINOR THESIS FIELD: ENGLISH LINGUISTICS
CODE: 60 22 15
HA NOI - 2010 iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABSTRACT
TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF TABLES
ABBREVIATIONS
Part A. INTRODUCTION
I. Rationale 1
II. Scope of the study 2
III. Aims of the study 2
IV. Methodology 2
V. Design of the study 3
Part B. DEVELOPMENT
Chapter I. Theoretical preliminary
1.1. Language, culture and communication 4
1.1.1. Language and communication 4
1.1.2. Language and culture 5
1.1.3. Communication 5
1.2. High-context culture vs. low-context culture 9
1.2.1. Definitions and main differences 9
1.2.2. Entering high and low context situations 10
1.3. Non-verbal communication 12
1.4. Paralanguage 13

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LIST OF TABLES

Vietnamese findings:
Table 1: Number of pauses and time-fillers (between colleagues)
Table 2: Number of pauses and time-fillers (boss to employee)
Table 3: Number of pauses and time-fillers (employee to boss)
Table 4: Duration of pauses and time-fillers (boss to employee)
Table 5: Duration of pauses and time-fillers (employee to boss)
Table 6: Duration of pauses and time-fillers (between colleagues)
American findings:
Table 7: Number of pauses and time-fillers (between colleagues)
Table 8: Number of pauses and time-fillers (boss to employee)
Table 9: Number of pauses and time-fillers (employee to boss)
Table 10: Duration of pauses and time-fillers (between colleagues)

High Context LC
Low Context NVC
Nonverbal Communication TF(s)
Time-filler(s) ( )
Pause


worldwide. It can be seen that, because of the heavy demand of cross-cultural interaction,
the development of telecommunications, and the appearance of communicative
approaches in language teaching and learning, the study of speech acts in
communication appears inevitable.
The last few decades have witnessed a great change for the better in the
relationship between Viet Nam and the US. Many cross-cultural activities have been
performed between the American and the Vietnamese. However, it is observed that, in
cross-cultural interaction, people tend to focus much more on linguistic factors than on
cultural factors. For example, it is customary for the Vietnamese to extend such
greeting routines as „Bác/ cô/ chú/ anh/ mày đang làm gì đấy?‟, „Bác/ cô/ chú/ anh/
mày đang đi đâu đấy?‟; so, when communicating with their Anglophone friends, they
simply transfer their cultural practices into „What are you doing?‟ or „Where are you
going?‟. In the English-speaking cultures, such greeting routines are considerably
embrassing, especially in the initial meeting. The lack of appropriateness in language
use may lead to misinterpretation, misunderstanding and miscommunication.
Communication breakdown might very much be the case. Therefore, the study of
Vietnamese-American cross-cultural differences in speech acts is obviously necessary.
Silence/Pauses and time-fillers exist in all social interactions in any culture. They
are used to show respect, anger, hostility, disinterest, or any other emotions. However, 2
when and how to use time-fillers or silence/pauses are not the same in different
languages and cultures. Therefore, the study of similarities and differences of using
silence/pauses and time-fillers in interaction would help not only for the success of
American-Vietnamese cross-cultural communication but also in communicative
language teaching/learning.
II. SCOPE OF THE STUDY
Although intralinguistic (vocabulary, grammatical rules, phonetic rules ) and
extralinguistic (facial expressions, postures, proximity ) factors, to a great extent, play a

communication, high-context and low-context culture, non-verbal communication and
paralanguage.
Chapter 2. Silence/pauses and Time-fillers. This chapter reviews the issues
relevant to the study including silence/ pauses and time-fillers. Then the notions of
silence/ pause and time-filler definitions and usages are discussed.
Chapter 3. Findings and Discussions. The strategies of using silence/pauses and
time-fillers are identified and major cross-cultural differences and similarities discussed.
Part III. Conclusion, in which the main findings are reviewed, the implications for cross-
culture interactions, the limitations of the study pointed out and suggestions for further
research offered.
4
PART B. DEVELOPMENT
Chapter 1. Theoretical preliminaries

1.1. Language, culture and communication

communication is through language. It could naturally take a number of forms. It could
be unvarnished, workaday prose, it could be poetry, it could be drama; but all of these
are forms of language, written, spoken and read. The way in which the language is being
used is making it pretty. Thus, a successful communicator must own a good command of
language at first.
1.1.2. Language and culture
Culture (from the Latin cultura stemming from colere, meaning “to cultivate”) is
a term that has different meanings. And, the word “culture” is most commonly used in
three basic senses:
 excellence of taste in the fine arts and humanities, also known as high culture
 an integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends
upon the capacity for symbolic thought and social learning
 the set of shared attitudes, values, goals and practices that characterizes an
institution, organization or group.
(
Of all aspects of culture, it is a fair guess that language was the first to receive a
highly developed form and that its essential perfection is a prerequisite to the
development of culture as a whole.
1.1.3. Communication
Communication is a process of transferring information from one entity to
another. Communication processes are sign-mediated interactions between at least two
agents which share a repertoire of signs and semiotic rules.
All communication is cultural - it draws on ways we have learned to speak and
give nonverbal messages. We do not always communicate the same way from day to day,
since factors like context, individual personality, and mood interact with the variety of
cultural influences we have internalized that influence our choices. Communication is
interactive, so an important influence on its effectiveness is our relationship with others. 6


7
knowledge about how and when to use utterances appropriately. The term was coined by
Hymes (1966), reacting against the perceived inadequacy of Chomsky's distinction
between competence and performance. To address Chomsky's abstract notion of
competence, Hymes undertook ethnographic exploration of communicative competence
that included communicative form and function in integral relation to each other. The
approach pioneered by Hymes is now known as the ethnography of communication.
The notion of communicative competence is one of the theories that underlies the
communicative approach to foreign language teaching. Canale and Swain (1980: 1-47)
define communicative competence in terms of four components:
1. Grammatical competence: including vocabulary, word formation, sentence
formation, pronunciation, spelling and linguistic semantics;
2. Sociolinguistic competence: addressing the extent to which utterances are
produced and understood appropriately in different sociolinguistic contexts depending
on contextual factors such as status of participants, purposes of the interaction, and
norms or conventions of interaction;
3. Discourse competence: concerning mastery of how to combine grammatical
forms and meanings to achieve a unified spoken or written text in different genres.
4. Strategic competence: composed of mastery of verbal and non-verbal
communication strategies that may be called into actual situations or to sufficient
competence in one or more of the other areas of communicative competence and to
enhance the effectiveness of communication.
A more recent survey of communicative competence by Bachman (1990) divides it
into the broad headings of "organizational competence," which includes both
grammatical and discourse (or textual) competence, and pragmatic competence, which
includes both sociolinguistic and illocutionary competence. Through the influence of
communicative language teaching, it has become widely accepted that communicative
competence should be the goal of language education, central to good classroom practice.
The understanding of communicative competence has been influenced by the field of

implying a message through that which is not uttered. This includes the situation,
behavior, and para-verbal cues as integral parts of the communicated message. These 9
terms such as “high-context and low-context culture”, “non-verbal communication” and
“paralanguage” will be investigated in the following sections.
1.2. High-context culture vs. Low-context culture
1.2.1. Definitions and differences
High-context (HC) culture and the contrasting low-context (LC) culture are
terms presented by Hall in his book Beyond Culture (1976). Hall states that HC
transactions feature pre-programmed information that is in the receiver and in the setting,
with only minimal information in the transmitted message. LC transactions are the
reverse. Most of the information must be in the transmitted message in order to make up
for what is missing in the context.
High-context culture refers to a culture's tendency to use high-context messages
over low-context messages in routine communication. This choice of communication
styles translates into a culture that will cater towards in-groups; an in-group being a
group that has similar experiences and expectations, from which inferences are drawn.
In a high-context culture, many things are left unsaid, letting the culture explain. Words
and word choice become very important in higher context communication, since a few
words can communicate a complex message very effectively to an in-group (but less
effectively outside that group), while in a lower context culture, the communicator needs
to be much more explicit and the value of a single word is less important.
LC culture refers to a culture‟s tendency to cater towards in-groups. Low context
cultures, such as Germany or the United States make much less extensive use of such
similar experiences and expectations to communicate. Much more is explained through
words or verbalization, instead of the context.
Viet Nam and most Asian countries are classified as HC cultures. The U.S.A and
Canada, along with Northern European countries, are classified as LC. This is, of course,

sports where rules are clearly laid out, a motel.
While these terms are sometimes useful in describing some aspects of a culture,
one can never say a culture is "high" or "low" because societies all contain both modes.
"High" and "low" are therefore less relevant as a description of a whole people, and
more useful to describe and understand particular situations and environments.
1.2.2. High and low context situations 11
Every culture and every situation has its high and low aspects. Often one
situation will contain an inner HC core and an outer LC ring for those who are less
involved.
For instance, a PTA (parent-teacher association) is usually a low-context
situation: any parent can join, the dates of the meetings, who is president, what will be
discussed, etc. are all explicitly available information, and it is usually fairly clear how
to participate in the meetings. However, if this is a small town, perhaps the people who
run the PTA all know each other very well and have many overlapping interests. They
may "agree" on what should be discussed or what should happen without ever really
talking about it, they have unconscious, unexpressed values that influence their
decisions. Other parents from outside may not understand how decisions are actually
being made. So the PTA is still low-context, but it has a high-context subgroup that is in
turn part of a high-context small town society.
When we enter a HC situation, it does not immediately become a LC culture just
because we came in the door. It is still a high-context culture and we are just ignorant.
Also, even low context cultures can be difficult to learn: religious dietary laws, medical
training, written language all take years to understand. The point is that that information
has been made conscious, systematic, and available to those who have the resources to
learn it.
High contexts can be difficult to enter if we are an outsider (because we do not
carry the context information internally, and because we can not instantly create close

group members' true feelings about an issue.
In The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, nonverbal communication is defined
as communication without the use of spoken language.
Many scholars indicate that NVC is usually understood as the process of
communication through sending and receiving wordless messages. NVC can be
communicated through gestures and touch, by body language or posture, by facial
expressions and eye contact. NVC can be communicated through object communication
such as clothing, hairstyles or even architecture, symbols and inforgraphics. Speech
contains nonverbal elements known as paralanguage, including voice quality, emotion
and speaking style, as well as prosodic features such as rhythm, intonation and stress. 13
Dance is also regarded as a nonverbal communication. Likewise, written texts have
nonverbal elements such as handwriting style, spatial arrangement of words, or the use
of emoticons.
As can be seen from many definitions shown above, paralanguage and body
language are considered as NVC; however, object language and environmental
language, which are very important and can not be denied in communication, have not
been clearly pointed out by those researchers. Therefore, the author prefers the definition
given by Nguyen Quang (2008):
NVC is all the constituents of communication which are not verbally coded, but
vocally and/or nonvocally channeled. It includes paralanguage (nonverbal-
vocal) such as: speed, volume, vocal flow, and extra-language (nonverbal-
nonvocal) grouped into body language such as gestures, postures, facial
expressions, object language such as clothes, jewellery, and environmental
language as conversational distance, setting.
The proverb “Actions speak louder than words” underscores the importance of
nonverbal communication. NVC is especially significant in cross-cultural situations.
Probably nonverbal differences account for typical difficulties in communicating.

The paralinguistic properties of speech play an important role in human speech
communication. There are no utterances or speech signals that lack paralinguistic
properties, since speech requires the presence of a voice that can be modulated. This
voice must have some properties, and all the properties of a voice as such are
paralinguistic. However, the distinction “linguistic vs. paralinguistic” applies not only to
speech but to writing and sign language as well, and it is not bound to any sensory
modality. Even vocal language has some paralinguistic as well as linguistic properties
that can be seen and even felt.
In text-only communication such as email, chatrooms and instant massaging,
paralinguistic elements can be displayed by emoticons, font and color choices,
capitalization and the use of non-alphabetic or abstract characters. Nonetheless,
paralanguage in written communication is limited in comparison with face-to-face
conversation, sometimes leading to misunderstandings.
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CHAPTER II. SILENCE/PAUSES AND TIME-FILLERS

2.1. Silence/ Pauses
According to Clark (1996), pauses are powerful cues for what is happening in a
conversation. To use them as a basis for analyzing culture-specific behavior, we
first have to check carefully what purposes pauses may serve in conversations and how
the usage differs across cultures. As we want to build a computational model for
American English and Vietnamese, those two cultures are of special interest.
In the book of Conversational organization – Interaction between speakers and
hearers, Charles Goodwin (1981) describes his research on gaze behavior and
manipulation. According to him, gaze is used to manage turn taking and to signal
understanding or attentiveness. If attention signals of the listener are missing, pauses are
used by the speaker to regain attention. In this case the duration of the silence is

Pauses in speech can either be used as control mechanism to control the flow of the
conversation, as well as for cognitive processes, as decision making.
Another usage of pauses is described in the book Politeness: Some universals
in language use by Brown and Levinson (1987), where politeness strategies are
constituted as an aspect of social interaction. The authors describe some
parallelisms in the linguistic construction of utterances with which people express
themselves in different languages and cultures. One motive of these parallels is isolated –
politeness. They claim the existence of conversational structure sequences and with it
the intentional usage of pauses for politeness purposes. Note that a carefully located
pause can on the one hand mean acceptance and on the other hand refusal. In their
example (where A is a man, and W is his friend‟s new bride) the silence conveys
acceptance:
A: Do you sing?
W: (silence)
A: Hooray! Give us a song
Whereas silence can also be a polite refusal like in a situation, where A
asks B for a favor and B falls into silence. Thus, pauses can be used to express refusal or
acceptance in a polite way. But the interpretation of the pause remains a challenge to 17
the interlocutor. Another common use of pauses in conversations is to initiate turn-
taking behavior. It is one of the basic mechanisms in all types of dialogues and that it
is also a crucial mechanism in human system interaction.
2.2. Time-fillers
Time-fillers (TFs) are prevalent in Vietnamese and English spontaneous speech
and pose a major problem in Vietnamese and English speech recognition.
TFs are parts of speech which are not generally recognized as purposeful or
containing formal meaning, usually expressed as pauses such as uh, like and er, but also
extending to repair ("He was buying a black uh, I mean a blue, a blue shirt"), and

are differences in the usage of silence/ pauses in speech. But where do they come from?
Some are evoked by gender or age, others by personal relationships. The utilization of
pauses also varies across cultures.
When keyword outlines (not full-text, word-for-word) are used as speaking notes,
speakers do not have everything they want to say in front of them. Therefore,
silence/pauses in speaking may result while the speaker is processing the next thought in
his/her head. Because of the social token that seems to be attached to silence/ pauses,
speakers tend to fill the silence/ pauses with time-fillers.

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CHAPTER III. FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION
Much work has been devoted to the treatment of hesitations in
particular time-fillers. The way in which people hesitate may to some extent
be language-specific. This study will not only concentrate on silence/pauses
and time-fillers but also on their actual operations in some Vietnamese and