VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES

V THU H NEGATIVE PRAGMATIC TRANSFER
IN COMPLAINING BY VIETNAMESE EFL LEARNERS

NGHIÊN CỨU VỀ CHUYỂN DI NGỮ DỤNG TIÊU CỰC
TRONG HNH ĐỘNG NGÔN TỪ PHÀN NÀN
CỦA NGƯỜI VIỆT NAM HỌC TIẾNG ANH
M.A COMBINED PROGRAMME THESIS
Field: English Linguistics
Code: 60 22 15
HANOI – 2013

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Candidate‘s statement i
Acknowledgement ii
Abstract iii
Table of Contents v
List of Abbreviations viii
List of Tables ix
List of Figures x

PART A: INTRODUCTION 1
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

3.1.1.1. In higher power context (+P) 49
3.1.1.2. In lower power context (-P) 51
3.1.1.3. In equal power context (=P) 52
3.1.1.4. In unfamiliar context (+D) 54
3.1.1.5. In familiar context (-D) 55
3.1.2. In the choice of external modifications 56
3.1.2.1. In different power contexts (+P, =P, -P) 56
3.1.2.2. In different distance contexts (+D, -D) 58
3.1.3. In the choice of internal modifications 59
3.1.3.1. In different power contexts (+P, =P, -P) 59
3.1.3.2. In different distance contexts (+D, -D) 61
3.1.4. Summary 62
3.2. Negative Sociopragmatic Transfer 63
3.2.1. With regard to social power (P) 63
3.2.1.1. In the choice of complaint strategies 63
3.2.1.2. In the choice of external modifications 65
3.2.1.3. In the choice of internal modifications 66
3.2.2. With regard to social distance (D) 67
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
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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


ix

LIST OF TABLES
Table a : Assessment of social variables by native speakers of English
Table b : Assessment of social variables by Vietnamese learners of English
Table 1 : Choice of complaint strategies with respect to +P
Table 2 : Choice of complaint strategies with respect to –P
Table 3 : Choice of complaint strategies with respect to =P
Table 4 : Choice of complaint strategies with respect to +D
Table 5 : Choice of complaint strategies with respect to –D
Table 6 : Choice of external modification with respect to P
Table 7 : Choice of external modification with respect to D
Table 8 : Choice of internal modification with respect to P
Table 9 : Choice of downgraders with respect to P
Table 10 : Choice of upgraders with respect to P
Table 11 : Choice of internal modification with respect to D
Table 12 : Choice of downgraders with respect to D
Table 13 : Choice of upgraders with respect to D
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LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1 : Choice of complaint strategies with respect to +P
Figure 2 : Choice of complaint strategies with respect to –P
Figure 3 : Choice of complaint strategies with respect to =P
Figure 4 : Choice of complaint strategies with respect to +D
Figure 5 : Choice of complaint strategies with respect to -D
Figure 6 : English speakers‘ choice of complaint strategies across P
Figure 7 : Vietnamese speakers‘ choice of complaint strategies across P
Figure 8 : Learners‘ choice of complaint strategies across P

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
miscommunication can be attributed to many causes, among which are learners‘ incomplete
understandings of the other interlocutors‘ sociocultural values together with learners‘ falling
back on their L1 norms in realizing speech acts in communication.
This assumption has interested linguistic researchers and educators a lot, and has
drawn more of their attention to a new SLA discipline that studies learners‘ enactment of
linguistic action in the second language, namely interlanguage pragmatics (ILP). ILP 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). ILP focuses
on linguistic actions, speech acts and the realization by learners to understand what might
interfere with a learner‘s comprehension and production of pragmatic meaning. It is, thus,
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interested in identifying the obstacles to or failures of learners‘ appropriate production of
pragmatics. Pragmatic transfer, among some other concerns, can be seen as the major focus of
ILP studies. Studies on pragmatic transfer, especially negative pragmatic transfer, examine the
influence of learners‘ L1-based perceptions of politeness and appropriateness and their L1
performance of a speech act on their realization of the same speech act in L2, which might
cause pragmatic failure. Studies on pragmatic transfer, hence, will provide teachers and
learners with precious knowledge about the pragmatic errors learners might make in

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
Discourse Completion Task (DCT). The MPQ is a questionnaire in which informants, who
were native speakers of English and Vietnamese learners of English, were asked to assess the
15 given situations based on 3 criteria, namely relative social power, relative social distance
and ranking of imposition on the hearer. Out of 15 given situations, 6 situations were selected
for the DCT questionnaires. These 6 situations must satisfy the constellation of contextual
factors, including social power and social distance. The DCT questionnaires were then
administered to three groups of participants: 20 native speakers of English, 20 native speakers
of Vietnamese and 20 Vietnamese learners of English; all the learners are at intermediate
proficiency level. The DCT questionnaires were translated into Vietnamese for the group of
Vietnamese speakers and an online DCT questionnaire version was created for the group of
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English speakers. The data from DCT were then analyzed by calculating frequency of groups‘
use of complaint strategies, external and internal modifications.
5. Organization of the study
This study is divided into five chapters as follows:
Chapter 1 presents an overview of the study in which the rationale for the research, the

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
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―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).
A breakthrough in the history of pragmatic research was marked with Austin‘s (1962)
influential work, ―How to do things with words‖. In this work, his realization that ―in doing
something a person also does something‖ gave rise to a new outlook on language – the view of
language as action. His idea was widely accepted, and his categorization of speech acts into
locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts has paved the way for the development of
communicative functions. Austin‘s speech act theory was then further developed by Searle
(1969, 1975, 1976). Searle established the conditions for a speech act to be successfully
carried out, which are so-called ―felicity conditions‖, as well as made distinctions between
direct and indirect speech acts. As Rintell (1979) asserted that ―pragmatics is the study of
speech acts‖, the notion of speech acts has ever since remained of central interest in pragmatic
research. The other aspects of language that make the focuses of study in pragmatics include
―deixis‖, i.e. what the speaker means by a particular utterance in a given speech context,
―presupposition‖, i.e. the logical meaning of a sentence or meanings logically associated with
or entailed by a sentence, and ―implicature‖, i.e. the things that are communicated even though

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).
Another significant contribution that Austin made to the theory of speech act is his
classification of kinds of acts that a person simultaneously performs when he/ she says
something:
 Locutionary act: the utterance of a sentence with determinate sense and reference
 Illocutionary act: the making of a statement, offer, promise, etc. in uttering a sentence, by
virtue of the conventional force associated with it
 Perlocutionary act: the bringing about of effects on the audience by means of uttering the
sentence, such as effects being special to the circumstances of utterances
Among the three acts, illocutionary act is the focus of Austin‘s interest, and the term
―speech act‖ has come to refer exclusively to that kind of act. The illocutionary act in Austin‘s
term is related to Searle‘s notion of illocutionary point, which refers to point or purpose of
illocution (Searle, 1990a, p. 351, cited in Tam, 2005, p. 10). On the basis of purposes of acts,

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
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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
linguistic theory in that it views language as action and offers interpretation of language
through its actual use, rather than through its forms. However, due to the problems above, it
can provide a theoretical and methodological framework for investigation into the actual
realization of speech acts only when speech acts are examined in a unit other than isolated
sentences and the socio-cultural values are concerned.
1.3. Politeness Theories
Speech acts, as discussed above, are one of the most compelling notions in the study of
language usage, and as claimed by Brown and Levinson (1978), their modes of performance
appear to be ruled by universal principles of cooperation and politeness. The theory of
politeness thus plays a crucial role in the study of speech acts. It was formulated in 1978 by

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
5. Don’t do FTA
On Record
4. Off Record
1. Bald, without Redress
With Redress
3. Positive Politeness
2. Negative Politeness
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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
strategies lead the requester (in the speech act of requesting) to appeal to common goal and
even friendship via such expressions as “How about letting me use your pen?” or “Hey,
buddy, I’d appreciate it if you’d let me use your pen”. In the same fashion as positive
politeness strategies, negative politeness strategies are responsive with the hearer‘s negative
face and hence emphasize the avoidance of imposition on the hearer. By means of negative
politeness strategies, the speaker can satisfy the hearer‘s desires to be unimpeded, which are
directly challenged by the FTA. The speaker, therefore, has to be conventionally indirect,

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;
(2) Holtgrave and Yang (1990) examined the influence of P and D on politeness choices
among American and Korean subjects, and the results turned out to be contrary to Brown and
Levinson‘s prediction, i.e. the least polite strategies being used by the subjects in perceptions
of the greatest distance.
From what discussed above, it cannot be denied that the three social variables

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
communicative acts and appropriate strategies to implement them‖. From other points of view,
pragmatic competence is a part of ―communicative competence‖ (Kasper, 1997). Given
Canale & Swain‘s 1980 model (Trosborg, 1995, p. 10), communicative competence is

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.