1

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POST – GRADUATE STUDIES

NGUYỄN THỊ TỐ LOAN
A CROSS-CULTURAL STUDY ON PRAGMATIC TRANSFER
IN COMPLIMENT RESPONSES BY LEARNERS OF ENGLISH
AT HUNG VUONG UNIVERSITY
(Nghiên cứu giao văn hoá về chuyển di ngữ dụng học trong cách đáp lại
lời khen của sinh viên học tiếng Anh ở trường Đại học Hùng Vương)

M.A. Minor Thesis Field: English Linguistics
Code: 60.22.15
HANOI – 2010

6
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Declaration
i
Acknowledgements
ii
Abstract
iii
Table of contents
iv
List of abbreviations
vi
List of tables, figures and appendices……………
vii PART A: INTRODUCTION
1
1. Background of the study
1
2. Significance of the study
2
3. Aim of the study
3
4. Scope of the study
3
5. Design of the study

15
2.2. Instruments and procedures
16 7
2.3. Administration of the questionnaires
18
2.4. Data collection procedures
18
2.5. Coding and data analysis
18
2.6. Summary
19 CHAPTER 3: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION
20
3.1. Pragmatic strategies used in responding to compliments
20
3.1.1. Strategies from acceptance to denial ……… ……………………………
21
3.1.2. Strategies along the avoidance continuum …………………………………
22
3.1.3. Frequency of pragmatic strategies used in responding to compliments by
all groups

24
3.2. A comparison of the pragmatic strategies used among the three groups
25

Appendix 2
III 8
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
Throughout this work, abbreviations and symbols are adopted for the description of
recurrent concepts and speech features.
CRs = Compliment Responses
DCTs = Discourse Completion Tests
EFL = English as a Foreign Language
FTA = Face-threatening Act
HVU = Hung Vuong University
IELTS = International English Language Testing System
ILP = Interlanguage pragmatics
L1 = First Language
L2 = Second Language
NE = English Native Speakers
NV = Vietnamese Native Speakers
NNs = Native Speakers
NNs = Non - native Speakers
Ss = Students
TL = Target Language
UQ = University of Queensland 9
LIST OF TABLES, FIGURES AND APENDICES
Tables
Table 1.1

continuum by the HVUE and NV groups (based on the number of
students who used a specific CR strategy in each group)
26
Figure 3.2
Frequency of use of CR strategies on the avoidance continuum by
the HVUE and NV groups (based on the number of students who
used a specific CR strategy in each group)
27
Figure 3.3
Frequency of use of CR strategies on the acceptance to denial
continuum by the HVUE and NE groups (based on the number of
students who used a specific CR strategy in each group)
29
Figure 3.4
Frequency of use of CR strategies on the avoidance continuum by
the HVUE and NV groups (based on the number of students who
used a specific CR strategy in each group)
29
Figure 3.5
Variation in the use of CR strategies on the acceptance to denial
continuum by the HVUE, NE and NV groups (based on the number
of CRs containing each strategy in each group)
31
Figure 3.6
Variation in the use of CR strategies on the avoidance continuum by
31 10
the HVUE, NE and NV groups (based on the number of CRs

linguistic and pragmatic competence. Whether we speak in a first or second language, we
are influenced by socio-cultural norms and constraints that affect the way we communicate.
In practice, many language learners have experienced the loss of how to do in actual
intercultural communication though they know perfectly well the phonological,
morphological, syntactic rules, and the semantic meaning of every word and sentence.
Looking back on the history of English teaching in Hung Vuong University (HVU), Phu
Tho, Vietnam, teachers‟ attention tends to focus on linguistic knowledge, while pragmatic
information is not usually stressed. Therefore, most students here are good at reading and
writing with sufficient knowledge of English grammar and vocabulary and able to score
high in tests, but they fail in communicating with foreigners. In these cases, the mistakes
they commit are not verbal or grammatical; instead, these mistakes occur because certain
social conventions or rules of interpersonal relationship have been violated. These kinds of
mistakes are defined as pragmatic failure. Pragmatic failure may cause misunderstanding,
and thus sets up barriers to successful cross-cultural communication.
Some of the foreign volunteer teachers at HVU said to me that sometimes they might
consider the way the students respond to compliments offending or bizarre, because they 12
understood only the words without the cultural rules that govern them. The problem here is
that HVU learners of English do not produce target-like compliment responses. Hence, this
study aims at finding out how HVU learners of English produce compliment responses in
English and whether pragmatic transfer can occur.
My interest in the issue of responses to compliments derives mainly from my teaching and
supervising experiences. To my knowledge, so far, there has been no systematic research
carried out on the pragmatic failures made by HVU students in the process of English
learning and cross-cultural communication. Hence, an elaborate study should be
implemented in order to develop students‟ pragmatic competence as well as teachers‟
capability in cultivating students‟ communicative competence.
2. Significance of the study

the frequency of use of the pragmatic strategies. The possibilities of pragmatic transfer
effecting of the cross-cultural competency in the responses of HVU EFL learners to
baseline responses by English and Vietnamese natives are also examined.
More specifically, the study is designed to answer the following two questions:
1. Are there any similarities and differences in strategy use of compliment responses
among those groups?
2. Is there pragmatic transfer in the communicative act of responding to compliments in
English by HVU learners of English? If there is a transfer, what is transferred?
The research questions are answered through the investigation of the following two assumptions:
1. There are significant differences and similarities in strategy use in responding to
compliments by HVU learners of English as a foreign language and NE and NV speakers.
2. There is pragmatic transfer in the communicative act of responding to compliments in
English by HVU learners of English. What is transferred can be explained by finding out
the similarities in strategy use in responding to compliments by HVU learners of English
as a foreign language and native Vietnamese speakers and the differences between HVU
learners of English as a foreign language and native English speakers‟ response choices.
4. Scope of the study
The present thesis study focuses on HVU EFL learners who are taking IELTS class to
prepare for a post-graduate course in an English-speaking country. Due to the limited
numbers of students, the limited range of speakers and speech situations, we cannot claim 14
that the results of this study show the whole picture of compliment response interaction in
Vietnamese EFL learners. Hence, its findings may not be necessarily generalized to
(a) Vietnamese EFL learners who do not have the same motivation,
(b) Vietnamese learners of English as a second language (ESL), and
(c) a larger population of L2 learners with different L1 backgrounds.
Secondly, the chosen target norm for baseline target language data in this thesis is
Australian English. Therefore, the language behavior of the NSs of Australian English in

pragmatics and communicative competence, pragmatics transfer, and the speech acts of
compliments and CRs. Finally, an overview of the comparative studies on responses to
compliments and the theoretical framework for the present investigation are presented.
1.1. Pragmatics and speech act
There are as many definitions of pragmatics as there have been attempts by pragmaticians
to shed light on the nature of the discipline which is one of the youngest in the widening
field of linguistic inquiry. Pragmatics basically comprises “the study of language usage”
according to Levinson (1983, p.5), or in a more elaborate definition from Kasper and Rose
(2001, p.2), “the study of communicative action in its sociocultural context”.
According to Yule (1996, p.3), “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.” In this sense,
pragmatics essentially focuses on language in use and users.
Pragmatics is often classified into two components, namely, pragmalinguistics, which
concerns appropriateness of form, and sociopragmatics, which involves appropriateness of
meaning in a social context (Canale, 1983; Leech, 1983; Thomas, 1983; Tamanaha, 2003).
One of the most compelling notions in pragmatics is the notion of speech act. A speech act
is a functional unit in interaction. The term “speech act” originated from the observation
that speech can produce action (Austin, 1962; Searle 1969, 1975, 1979). For example, the
spoken utterance: “I apologize” produces the action of apologizing. Examples of different
kinds of speech acts are requests, offers, commands, greetings, invitations, promises,
apologies, complaints, compliments, compliment responses, etc. According to Speech Act
Theory (Austin, 1962) and later the further systematization of this theory (Searle 1969,
1975, 1979), in making an utterance, a speaker also performs certain actions and does 16
things with words. These actions are characterized by force, (i.e. the speaker‟s intention),
and consist of the following components.

17
conversational contract view was based on the argument that politeness is an integral rather
than additional part of each conversation in which speakers negotiate their rights and
obligations in terms of convention social institutions or prevent encounters. Compared to
the social-norm and the conversational contract views, the conversational-maxim and the
face-saving views are more popular and have a stronger impact on the field.
Central to the conversational-maxim view is Grice‟s (1975) Cooperative Principle, which
states that speakers should cooperate and follow a set of maxims in order to communicate
effectively. Grice‟s maxims are Quality (i.e. Be non-spurious), Quantity (i.e. Don’t say less
than required), Relevance (i.e. Be relevant) and Manner (i.e. Be perspicuous; Avoid
ambiguity and obscurity). Although interlocutors usually desire to adhere to these maxims,
they sometimes flout or deviate from them for different reasons one of which is to be polite.
For example, one may say: “I was wondering if you have a light” to imply a request to
borrow the other‟s cigarette lighter. It‟s obviously a violation of the maxim of Quantity but
it is for the purpose of being polite. Moreover, grounded on Grice‟s Cooperative Principle,
Leech (1993) posited the Politeness Principle, which suggested that the speaker should
seek to maximize benefits to hearer in order to be polite.
The most well-established politeness theory to date is the face saving view advanced by
Brown and Levinson in 1978 (reissued 1987), who stated that politeness principles are
universal. Brown and Levinson‟s theory rests on three basic notions: face, face threatening
acts (FTAs), and politeness strategies. The most central component to this theory is the
concept of face, a dimension of social interaction initially introduced by Goffman (1967).
Face is defined as “the public self-image that every member wants to claim for him/
herself” (Brown & Levinson, 1987, p.61). They also characterize face as an image that
intrinsically belongs to the individual or to the self. Brown and Levinson first distinguish
between two kinds of face: positive and negative face (the word “negative” here does not
mean „bad‟, it is just the opposite pole from „positive‟).
Positive face is the want to be thought of as a desirable human being, while negative face is
the want not to be imposed on by others. In other words, positive face is the desire for
approval; whereas, negative face is the desire for autonomy or self-determination.

foreign language learners. This has been the focus of the studies of interlanguage pragmatics,
the branch of second language research which studies how non–native speaker understand
and carry out linguistic actions in a target language, and how they acquire second language
(L2) knowledge (Kasper, 1992). It can be said that successful and effective speaking of L2
learners is not just a matter of using grammatically correct words and forms, but also
knowing when to use them and under what circumstances (Olshtain & Cohen, 1988).
In the past two decades, a substantial body of research on interlanguage pragmatics has
intentionally been devoted to learners‟ performance within the framework of a speech act.
The ability to perform various speech acts is an important part of the development of
communicative competence. The results of much of the research have verified that speech
act realization differs cross-culturally and the transfer at the pragmatic level does exist in
L2 learners‟ language use. The L2 learners, however, tend to be faced with a great risk of
offending their interlocutors or of miscommunicating when performing speech acts
because they might not have sufficient communicative competence in their L2 and
sometimes they may transfer their L1 pragmatics to their L2 inappropriately (Tamanaha,
2003). As a result, the study of interlanguage pragmatics has been recognized as an
important subfield of research in second language acquisition. As they state, what has been
investigated in this field are overwhelmingly cross–cultural differences and transfer from
the L1; namely, researchers typically examine differences of use in the speech act sets in
the target language and the learners‟ native tongue, and then analyze the learners‟ speech
act performance in the L2 to see how closely it matches the target use (Cohen & Olshtain,
1993; Takahashi & Beebe, 1987).
Among these norms, Kasper (1992) points out that studies in interlanguage pragmatics
have investigated two aspects of speech act behavior. The former is often called
“pragmalinguistic sets”, the semantic formulas that comprise speech acts and the linguistic
forms most frequently used to realize these semantic formulas. The latter is
“sociopragmatic factors” such as the participants‟ age, gender, social power/distance, and
situation factors (imposition) such as the seriousness of the offenses. Furthermore, the
influence of learner-related factors such as attitude, proficiency learning context, length of
residence in the target community is also suspected to affect L2 learners‟ speech act

1.5.1. The speech acts of complimenting
Holmes (1988:446) states that “a compliment is a speech act which explicitly or implicitly
attributes credit to someone other than the speaker, usually the person addressed, for some
“good” (possession, characteristic, skill, etc.) which is positively valued by the speaker and
the hearer”. While a compliment may be regarded as a positive speech act, it may also be 21
regarded as a face-threatening act (FTA). Brown and Levinson (1987:247) point out that
compliments may be significant FTAs in societies where envy is very strong and where
witchcraft exists as a sanction. Holmes (1988:448) remarks, “compliments can be regarded
as face threatening to the extent that they imply the complimenter envies the addressee in
some way or would like to have something belonging to the addressee”.
Research has shown that complimenting involves a variety of linguistic functions. It is
argued that the main function of compliments is to establish solidarity between speaker and
addressee (e.g., Herbert, 1989; Holmes, 1988; Yu, 1999). By performing this speech event,
people can not only maintain mutual harmony but also re-establish reciprocal social
relationship. Furthermore, complimenting is also to alleviate the weightiness of employing
a face threatening act (FTA) in the discourse (Holmes 1986; Brown and Levinson 1987).
1.5.2. Compliment responses
According to Herbert (1986), a CR is an utterance that is used to respond another utterance
that refers to something respected by the participants and it means to express the
addresser‟s feeling to the addressee. CR was chosen because it is “a much used, yet
intricate act” (Yu, 1999, p. 102). Research has shown not only that responding to
compliments involves a complex relationship among linguistic forms, meanings, and
pragmatic prerequisites, but also that high social stakes shape speakers‟ social behavior,
which, thus, permits a variety of linguistic options and strategies.
Contrastive studies into compliment responses have shown that cross-cultural differences do
exist in the compliment response behavior of the English speakers and other languages
speakers. Ever since Pomerantz (1978) shed light on compliment responses from a pragmatic

I. Acceptances
1. Appreciation Token
2. Comment Acceptance
3. Praise Upgrade Thanks; thank you; [smile]
Thanks, it's my favorite too.
Really brings out the blue in my eyes, doesn't it?
II. Comment History
III. Transfers
1. Reassignment
2. Return
I bought it for the trip to Arizona.

My brother gave it to me.
So's yours.
B. Nonagreement
I. Scale Down
II. Question
III. Nonacceptances
1. Disagreement
2. Qualification

It's really quite old.
Do you really think so?
I hate it.
It's all right, but Len's is nicer.
IV. No Acknowledgement
[silence]

L1: Korea
L2: English

Evidence of
pragmatic
transfer in CRs
Yu (1999)
Compliments and
CRs
Written questionnaire
L1: Chinese
L2: English
Yuan (1996)
CRs
Written questionnaire
L1: Chinese
L2: English
Evidence of
pragmatic
transfer and non-
transfer
Saito and
Beecken
(1997)
CRs
Closed role-plays
L1: English
L2: Japanese
Evidence of
pragmatic

study are presented. The next chapter deals with the main study, coding, and the
categorization of responses to compliment strategies which are used in the main study and
it also deals with the research methods employed.

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CHAPTER 2: THE STUDY
This chapter is concerned with the selection of subjects and the instruments of collecting
data. It describes in some detail the design of the instruments and the descriptive
quantitative procedures that were undertaken for analysis of the data.
2.1. Subjects
A great number of previous studies, e.g. Holmes 1986; Herbert 1990, have shown that
compliment-compliment response sequences occur more frequently among people with
equal social status or acquaintances. In order to control the social variables in the present
paper, participants in the present study were primarily selected from university students,
who have similar educational background, recognize the shared socio-cultural norms.
There were thirty students who were English NSs, Vietnamese NSs and HVU EFL learners
of English. All of them were university students, ranging in age from twenty to twenty-four
years old. So they showed homogeneity in terms of age, education and profession. At the
beginning, a language background survey was conducted to ensure that participants were
suitable students.
- The English group (NE group) included 10 NSs in UQ, Melbourne, Australia. Most of

The study uses a questionnaire in the form of Discourse Completion Task (DCT) for data
collection. A DCT, which employed by numerous studies is the most widely used method of
data collection in second language speech act research. Beebe and Cummings (1996)
reported five advantages of the DCT.
Firstly, large amounts of data can be collected quickly and efficiently in a short period of
time without any need for transcription. Secondly, an initial classification of semantic
formulas and strategies in speech acts can be created and studied. Thirdly, the necessary
elements of a socially acceptable (though not always polite) response can be studied.
Fourthly, insight can be gained into social and psychological factors that are likely to affect
speech act performance. Finally, the body of rules governing given speech acts can be
discerned in the minds of speakers of a given language.
The DCT also meets the need of cross-linguistic research to control social variables for
comparability for the fact that it allows the researchers to control basic social factors of the
situations such as setting, gender, or social status and distance. For such purposes, DCT is
an effective option. 27
A DCT typically consists of a set of brief situational descriptions designed to elicit a
particular speech act (Kasper & Rose, 2001). Subjects read the situation and then respond
in writing to a prompt.
All the participants were asked to provide their compliment responding strategies in a
detailed-designed questionnaire. Furthermore, the consequences of previous studies have
suggested that participants can conduct their questionnaires more smoothly and efficiently
if the questionnaires are designed according to participants‟ native languages. Thus, in
order to ward off the phenomenon where participants are unable to conduct the
questionnaire written in English, it is essential to design questionnaires in Vietnamese so
that all participants can offer their responses in a smoother and more nature way.
In order to construct the DCT, it was first written in English and after that, the DCT was
translated into Vietnamese by the researcher (see Appendices 1 and 2). Then the translation

After the design of the situations as well as the content of the DCT was carefully thought
out and thoroughly discussed with native speakers of both languages in order to ensure
they were sufficiently natural and that they meant the same in both English and
Vietnamese the instrument was tested by six respondents: two from each group of the NE,
NV and EFL subjects. The test proved to be successful. Based on the feedback from the
participants, several minor changes were made to the questionnaires. They were then
distributed to the participants.
2.4. Data collection procedures
The questionnaires were given to students at HVU, Phu Tho, Vietnam and UQ, Australia
by the researcher and some of my friends and were conducted in the individual classrooms.
The participants were initially asked to fill out their personal information, including their
age, gender and the name of their school and faculty on the top of the questionnaire, which
could save our effort to compile statistics and analyze these data. Every question is
combined with some explanations to the relevant situation and the participants were asked
to envisage the given situation equivalent to that in the real world and provide their
reaction to such a situation. They were advised not to discuss with each other in conducting
the questionnaire and offered their responses as naturally as possible.
They were also told not to be preoccupied with grammatical accuracy when they wrote
their answers in English. This was to avoid having subjects believe that they were being
assessed for their grammatical proficiency, thus writing only what they perceived to be
grammatically correct in English. It is important to remind them to write what they would
actually say regardless of the accuracy of the grammar. The subjects were also free to ask
questions to the administrator regarding the items in the DCT. No time limits were
imposed on completing the DCT.
2.5. Coding and data analysis
Data were analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively. In the qualitative analysis, CR
data was coded according to the strategies which are mainly based on Herbert‟s (1990)
taxonomy of compliment responses. It is held that Herbert‟s classification of compliment
responses is more comprehensive than other scholars brought up. Nevertheless, it is still