VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
(NGHIÊN CỨU CÁC PHƯƠNG TIỆN DIỂN ĐẠT TÌNH THÁI CHỨC
PHẬN TRONG CÂU TƯỜNG THUẬT VÀ CÂU HỎI TIẾNG ANH VÀ
TIẾNG VIỆT)
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A dissertation submitted in total fulfillment of the requirements for the
degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics at Vietnam National
University, Hanoi
.)-+/
VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
(NGHIÊN CỨU CÁC PHƯƠNG TIỆN DIỂN ĐẠT TÌNH THÁI CHỨC
PHẬN TRONG CÂU TƯỜNG THUẬT VÀ CÂU HỎI TIẾNG ANH VÀ
TIẾNG VIỆT)
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'()*))*+,*-+
A dissertation submitted in total fulfillment of the requirements for the
1
(Li, 2004). In Vietnam, many scholars have also studied modality in
general and types of modality in particular such as Nguyễn Thị Lương
(1996), Cao Xuân Hạo (1999), Nguyễn Văn Hiệp (2001, 2008), Ngũ
Thiện Hùng (2003), Phạm Thị Ly (2003), Nguyễn Thị Cẩm Thanh
(2003), Bùi Trọng Ngoãn (2004), Võ Đại Quang (2009).
However, no attempt has been made to conduct a contrastive study on
linguistic means of indicating deontic modality in English and
Vietnamese. Therefore, this study is carried out to address that research
gap in order to provide a more articulate insight into similarities and
differences of deontic expressing means in the two languages, and to
serve as a framework for implicational purposes, which can be both
theoretical and practical.
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This study is aimed at finding the similarities and differences in deontic
expressing means in English and Vietnamese. 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:
2
(i) What are the linguistic means of expressing deontic modality in
English and in Vietnamese?
(ii) 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
In this thesis, the author compares and contrasts deontic expressing means
taken from 421 declarative and interrogative sentences found in 50
English stories and 422 declarative and interrogative sentences found in
50 Vietnamese stories.
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According to Saville-Troike (1982), one of the best methods of getting to
know one’s own “ways of speaking” is by comparing and contrasting
with those of others. This process will reveal the shared and unshared
features of linguistic patterns and their meanings. Thus, contrastive
linguistics with its associated research method – Contrastive analysis
(CA) - will be used as the primary research framework for this study.
4
For the comparison of the frequencies of usage in the two languages
under study, a quantitative analysis of the corpus is adopted. 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,
corpus based method is also used in this study for comparative and
contrastive purposes.
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The corpora used in this study are built on the following general
principles regarding size, number of languages, sources : (i) #"D'3
%#&'10$": 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. (ii) # $<E1 '3 : !$:!": The corpus in this
research is considered as a bilingual corpus; hence it contains the two
languages: English and Vietnamese. (iii) #"'$1&"'3%#&'10$": The
stories in this research are taken from e-books of contemporary works on
used at first to exploit all means and expressions of deontic modality used
in English and Vietnamese declarative and interrogative sentences in
terms of categories in the theoretical framework. Basing on devices
processed in the corpus, the author distinguishes eleven means of deontic
modality within 421 declaratives and interrogatives in English and 422
declaratives and interrogatives in Vietnamese and then, categorizes them
at three different types of meanings: commissives, directives and volitives.
This type of analysis is emphasized throughout the contextual translation
in the stories with various types of illocutionary forces.
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In this dissertation, a contrastive analysis is carried out together with a
qualitative analysis in the analytical framework and a quantitative analysis
from the corpus in an effort to understand how contextual variables of this
corpus may influence deontic modal expressions in order to determine the
7
similarities and differences of deontic expressing means used in English
and Vietnamese stories. To compare eleven means of deontic modality
with regards to the three types of meanings: commissives, directives and
volitives, the author takes the English language as the base language and
Vietnamese as the comparative language. The examples analyzed are
taken from declarative and interrogative sentences in English and
Vietnamese stories.
The statistical calculations are made and classified by the figures for each
pattern. The results in English are then compared to those in Vietnamese
basing on the computation of various percentages in the corpus. The
similarities or differences will be analysed in details with specific data
and then to indicate any conclusions.
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Apart from the introduction and conclusion, the dissertation consists of
three chapters: # %1'$&%' presents the theoretical background,
Vietnamese. He discusses theoretical issues relating to main types of
modality such as subjective and objective, deontic and epistemic
modality, factuality and non-factuality in general.
9
A contrastive investigation of linguistic means expressing epistemic
modality in English and Vietnamese is carried out by Ngũ Thiện Hùng
(2003). Phạm Thị Ly (2003) also provides a contrastive analysis on some
linguistic means of modality in Vietnamese with the reference to English
such as modal verbs, adverbs and particles. Nguyễn Thị Cẩm Thanh
(2003) also compares linguistic means of expressing non-factual modality
in English and Vietnamese. Bùi Trọng Ngoãn (2004) surveys the role of
modal verbs in Vietnamese such as cần, phải, nên, dám, đành, nỡ in
combination with sentence particles. Võ Đại Quang (2009) also conducts
a study on linguistic means of expressing modality in English and
Vietnamese in terms of semantic and syntactic features within various
types of modality.
So far, there has been no research exclusively focusing on the contrastive
study of linguistic means of expressing deontic modality in English and
Vietnamese. Thus, this dissertation is an attempt to meet such research
need. It is also the major contribution of this study at least at the
application level.
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Several linguists have different viewpoints of modality and use several
terms to distinguish types of modality such as the works of Halliday
(1970 a, b), Lyons (1977: 848, 452), Chung & Temberlake (1985: 25),
Palmer (1986, 2001: 1), Quirk et al. (1985: 219), Downing and Locke
(1995), Van der Auwera (2001: 1), Matthews (2005: 228). The definition
10
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The term “' %&” is derived from the Greek word déon that means
“binding or duty.” (Li, 2004: 13). According to van der Auwera &
Plungian (1998: 81), the term deontic modality “is a cover term for a
range of semantic notions such as ability, possibility, hypothetically,
obligation, and imperative meaning”. Deontic modality, as Lyons (1977:
823) describes, “is concerned with the necessity or possibility of acts
performed by morally responsible agents”. According to Palmer (1986),
“deontic” is used in a wide sense to include those types of modality that
are characterized by Jespersen (1909) as “containing an element of will”.
Vietnamese linguists consider deontic modality based on Lyons’
definition: “deontic modality is concerned with the necessity or possibility
of atcs performed by morally responsible agents”. Discussing on deontic
modality in Vietnamese, Duffield (1999: 4-5) claims that it is
important to highlight one further distinction referring to the English
modal auxiliary can that can be understood in terms of deontic meanings
is that được/ được phép.
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My choice has focused on the theoretical framework for classification of
deontic modality of Palmer (1994: 181) in English and Nguyễn Văn Hiệp
(2008: 77-79) in Vietnamese. i.e. &'<<""2"J2'%2" with the two
sub-types (<01&:%2" and '0%:%2"L, and 1&%2" with the seven
sub-types (E1:%2"J <01:%2"J M$""2"J 'E!:%2"J
01<""2"J01&:%2"and 01'#E%2"L
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In order to compare and contrast different linguistic means of
expressing modal functions of three main types of deontic modality:
commissives, directives and volitives with their nine sub-types
Of the eleven means of expressing deontic modality as set from the
theoretical framework in Chapter one, only seven means of expressing
commissives in English (i.e. modal verbs, hedge verbs, performative
verbs, modal adverbs, modal adjectives, expletives, modal conditionals)
and three means of expressing commissives in Vietnamese (i.e. modal
verbs, performative verbs and modal conditionals) are used. In terms of
volitives, both in English and Vietnamese, only one means of linguistic
expressions (i.e. modal conditionals) is used. Examples for each means
14
are taken in declaratives and interrogatives in the two corpus including
100 stories in English and Vietnamese.
Based on the frequencies of lexical means in English, among 14583
devices of modal expressions, in English, declaratives and interrogatives
are normally used with 421 sentences in which commissives account for
79 sentences. Declaratives and interrogatives in Vietnamese are found at a
high frequency with 422 sentences in which commissives only account
for 11 sentences.
Most of the declaratives and interrogatives expressing commissives in
English, modal verbs are most-frequently used, with 70.89%. Hedge verbs
and modal conditionals are equally used with the same rate 7.59%. Both
modal adverbs and performative verbs rank third with 5.06%. Modal
adjectives are rarely used with 2.53%. The least frequency of commissive
expressing means is expletives, 1.27%. Modal words, modal nouns,
particles, and modal idioms are hardly used to express commissive
meanings. The distribution of English commissiveexpressing means is
shown in Fig. 2.13 below:
15
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Fig. 2.19 shows that English and Vietnamese are similar in the use of
imprecatives that expresses misfortunes, as in the sentence: “Có lẽ bạn sẽ
thắng lần sau.” (Perhaps you'll win next time); or “có lẽ em không qua
được cơn đau này.” is equivalent with “I may not overcome this pain.”
Both English and Vietnamese express optative meanings through lexical
verbs wish, hope as shown in examples above. However, in Vietnamese,
there are various ways to express optatives such as mong/ cầu/ ước/ chúc
(from examples (2.48) to (2.54)) while in English, they only use wish/
hope to indicate optatives. This is a significant difference in the usage of
lexical means in English and Vietnamese.
In summary, this part has made a contrastive analysis on commissive and
volitive expressing means in English and Vietnamese. With respective to
syntactic features, English and Vietnamese modal verbs may occur in the
same syntactic environment or simply the same construction in the
declaratives to express commissives. However, in the interrogatives, in
English, the word order of the subject and the modals is the opposite of
that in Vietnamese. Hedge verbs in the declaratives in English are similar
to those in Vietnamese. In contrast, hedge verbs in the interrogatives in
English are different from those in Vietnamese.
Most of the performative verbs in Vietnamese constructions do not have
non-finite forms and they are not inflected in the third person singular of
the present tense. A clear difference between the two patterns of
18
performative verbs is that Vietnamese structures are normally used in
combination with a final particle while English structures are not used.
The constructions of modal adverbs and modal adjectives are different
from those in Vietnamese. Modal adverbs in English are normally
followed by a bare infinitive of the verb while modal adverbs in
Vietnamese are usually followed by a clause or a modal verb that modify
very polyfunctional in the usage of the words mong/ cầu/ ước/ chúc to
express a hope or a wish. However, English speakers use modal auxiliary
may not or adverb perhaps to express imprecative sense, Vietnamese
speakers use conditional sentences “nếu …thì” to express imprecatives.
This is a significant difference in the usage of means of expressing
volitives in English and Vietnamese.
C
This chapter presents a contrastive analysis of linguistic means of
expressing directives in English and Vietnamese. From the data provided
in the English and Vietnamese corpus, the author checks and clarifies the
directive expressing means consisting of modal verbs, hedge verbs,
performative verbs, modal words, adverbs, adjectives, nouns, particles,
modal idioms, expletives, and modal conditionals taken from 421
declaratives and interrogatives in 50 English stories and 422 declaratives
20
and interrogatives in 50 Vietnamese stories with the purpose to find out
the similarities and differences among them.
From the data illustrated in the study, we can conclude that, of 421
declaratives and interrogatives in 50 English stories, there are 282
declaratives and 32 interrogatives expressing directive means, in which
modal auxiliaries are the first highest frequently used, reaching over a half
of all (171 devices with 57.6%). Hedge verbs rank second position,
accounting for 44 cases with 14.01%. Performative verbs and modal
adverbs are nearly the same frequency, ranking third and fourth position,
accounting for 28 and 22 cases with 8.92% and 7.01% respectively.
Modal conditionals and modal adjectives are frequently used (4.46% and
4.78%). Modal idioms are less normally used of all in terms of directive
meanings (2.55%). Modal nouns are the least frequently used, only 2
conditionals are less frequently used. Modal words and expletives are not
used to express directive meanings in English, whereas in Vietnamese,
hedge verbs and modal adjectives are not used. This is a considerable
difference between the two languages. A similarity is found between the
two languages that in both languages use modal nouns, only 2 cases in
English and 1 case in Vietnamese, with 0.64% and 0.25% respectively.
This is illustrated by Fig. 3.20 as following:
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: % :<"
To sum up, this part has set forth a contrastive analysis on syntactic -
semantic features of directive means in English and Vietnamese. We can
conclude that in terms of syntactic features, in English and Vietnamese,
the modal verbs combine with verbs such as “shall go” and “sẽ đi”. This
seems to be a similarity between English and Vietnamese. However, apart
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