negative pragmatic transfer in complaining by vietnamese efl learners = nghiên cứu về chuyển di ngữ dụng tiêu cực trong hành động ngôn từ phàn nàn của người việt nam học tiếng anh

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

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
Supervisor: Dr. Hà Cẩm Tâm

HANOI – 2013

v

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

1.5.2. Pragmatic failure 16
1.6. Pragmatic Transfer in Interlanguage Pragmatics 19
1.7. Negative Pragmatic Transfer 20
1.7.1. Negative Pragmalinguistic Transfer 21
1.7.2. Negative Sociopragmatic Transfer 24
1.8. The Speech Act of Complaint 26
1.9. Modifications 30
1.10. Studies on Complaints by EFL learners 30

CHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGY 36
2.1. Research Questions 36
2.2. Participants 36
vi

2.3. Data Collection Methods 37
2.4. Data Collection Instruments 39
2.4.1. Social variables manipulated in data collection instruments 39
2.4.2. The content of the instruments 41
2.5. Data collection procedure 42
2.6. Results of the MPQ 42
2.6.1. The interpretation of the scores 44
2.6.2. Six selected situations for the DCT 44
2.7. Analytical framework 45
2.7.1. Complaint strategies 45
2.7.2. External modifications 46
2.7.3. Internal modifications 47

CHAPTER 3: RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS 49
3.1. Negative Pragmalinguistic Transfer 49
3.1.1. In the choice of complaint strategies 49

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
vii

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

REFERENCES 75

APPENDIXES I
Appendix 1: Metapragmatic Questionnaire (MPQ) I
Appendix 2A: Discourse Completion Task (DCT) (English Version) VI
Appendix 2B: Discourse Completion Task (DCT) (Vietnamese Version) IX

viii

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
SLA Second Language Acquisition
CCP Cross-Cultural Pragmatics
CP Contrastive Pragmatics
ILP Interlanguage Pragmatics
FTA Face Threatening Act
DCT Discourse Completion Test
MPQ Metapragmatic Questionnaire
L1 The first language
L2 The second language
EFL English as a Foreign Language
ENSs Native speakers of English
VLs Vietnamese learners of English
VNSs Native speakers of Vietnamese
IL Interlanguage
NL Native language
TL Target language

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
x

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

Figure 9 : Choice of external modifications across P
Figure 10 : Choice of downgraders across P
Figure 11 : Choice of upgraders across P
Figure 12 : English speakers‘ choice of complaint strategies across D
Figure 13 : Vietnamese speakers‘ choice of complaint strategies across D
Figure 14 : Learners‘ choice of complaint strategies across D
Figure 15 : Choice of external modifications across D
Figure 16 : Choice of downgraders across D
Figure 17 : Choice of upgraders across D











1

PART A
INTRODUCTION
1. Rationale
The nonstop growing globalization trends have gradually turned the world into a so-
called ―Global Village‖, where people from different backgrounds live, study, work and
communicate together. Such a need for intercultural communication has led to the increasing
dominance of the English language, which has always been referred to as an international
language of business, commerce and education. The English language teaching and learning

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,
2

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

intercultural communication and help them find ways to be more appropriate, polite and
pragmatically competent in intercultural contexts.
Pragmatic transfer has received much interest worldwide with a wide range of studies
on the realization of such speech acts as apologies, requests, complaints, chastisement, or
compliments by Japanese, Turkish, German, Arabian, Danish, Thai EFL learners and so on.
However, the number of studies on pragmatic transfer by Vietnamese EFL is very modest.
Therefore, more studies on this issue are in need in order to promote Vietnamese teachers and
learners‘ understanding of the possible influence of L1 on learners‘ interlanguage
performance.
As a response to the need to enrich the literature about the occurrences of pragmatic
transfer by Vietnamese learners, this study investigates the negative pragmatic transfer in the
performance of the face-threatening act of complaining by Vietnamese EFL learners and the
social factors that lead to the negative transfer. Negative pragmatic transfer is chosen for the
study because negative transfer, not positive transfer, deals with the inappropriate translation
of L1 norms into interlanguage performance and it is considered as one of the main causes of
learners‘ pragmatic failures. Besides, complaining is picked up as the head act in investigation
as complaining is an act that can hardly be avoided in everyday communication but it is very
likely to put both the speaker and the hearer at risk of losing their faces unless the complaint is
made with caution.
2. Aims and scope of the study
The study aims to find out the evidence of negative pragmatic transfer in the
performance of complaints by Vietnamese EFL learners. In other words, it will examine the
3

extent to which learners‘ L1 pragmatic knowledge of complaining interferes with their
performance of the speech act in English. The negative transfer will be investigated at two
levels: pragmalinguistic transfer and sociopragmatic transfer. At the pragmalinguistic level,
the study seeks information about the extent to which negative transfer occurs in the learners‘
preferences for complaint strategies, external modifications and internal modifications. At the
sociopragmatic level, the impact of learners‘ L1 perceptions on their choices of complaint

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
4

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

aims and scope of the study, the research questions, and the methods of the study as well as
the organization of the study were briefly presented.
Chapter 2 reviews the theoretical issues relevant to the study including speech acts and
the speech act of complaining. Then, the notions of politeness and indirectness in complaining
as well as some previous studies on complaining are discussed.
Chapter 3 discusses issues of methodology and outlines the study design, data
collection instruments, procedure of data collection, and analytical framework.
Chapter 4 presents the data analysis and discusses the findings on the negative
pragmatic transfer on the choices of complaint strategies, external modifications and internal
modifications at the pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic level.
Chapter 5 provides an overview of major findings and interpretations, implications,
limitations of the study and suggestions for further research.
5

PART B
DEVELOPMENT
CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW
The purpose of this chapter is to provide information pertaining to this thesis, which
was obtained from reviewing the related literature and studies. It begins with the overview of
pragmatics and main concerns of pragmatics, including speech act theory, politeness theory
and social variables P, D and R, and then some issues of interlanguage pragmatics, most
strikingly negative pragmatic transfer, will be discussed. Finally, literature on the FTA of
complaining and related studies on IL complaints by EFL learners will be reviewed.
1.1. Pragmatics
Pragmatics, as compared to syntax and semantics, is a relatively new discipline in the
history of linguistics and philosophy. Morris (1938) defined pragmatics as a branch of
semiotics, i.e. the study of signs (cited in Schiffrin 1994, p. 191). He also distinguished the
three ways of studying signs: syntax is the study of formal relations of signs to one another,
semantics is the study of how signs are related to the objects to which they are applicable,
whereas pragmatics is the study of the relations of signs to interpreters or users. Another way

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
6

―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

they are not explicitly expressed.
In addition, pragmatic principles, which generally denote some certain rules that
interlocutors are expected to obey in order to successfully converse with each other, are also of
great concern. The most influential work on these issues comprises of Paul Grice‘s
Cooperative Principle and Conversational Maxims (1975), which stresses that in
communication, ―make your contribution such as it is required, at the stage at which it occurs,
by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged‖; Leech‘s
Politeness Principles (1983), which is quite similar to Grice‘s principles and made up of six
different maxims; and Brown and Levinson‘s notion of Face (1978, 1987).
1.2. Speech Act Theory
The notion of speech acts was originated by Austin (1962). According to Austin,
speech is itself a form of action. He assumed that language is not just a passive practice of
describing a given reality, but a particular practice that can be used to invent and affect
7

realities. Accordingly, in his most influential work ―How to do things with words‖ (1962),
Austin made an interesting point that in saying something a person is actually doing
something, which was considered as a breakthrough in linguistics and philosophy. He attacked
the predominant view in his time that sentences are primarily for stating facts, being ―true‖
when they succeed and ―false‖ when they fail in doing so. By contrast, from his viewpoint,
many everyday declarative sentences are not intended to make true or false statements, but
they are used to ―do things‖, that is, to perform certain linguistic actions such as requesting,
complimenting, complaining, gripping and so on. Austin termed these sentences and the
utterances realized by them ―performatives‖ as opposed to statements, assertions and
utterances like them which he called ―constatives‖. ―Performatives‖, as noted by him, are thus
characterized by a very significant feature that they cannot be true or false, yet they can still go
wrong. He then catalogued all the ways in which performatives can go wrong, or be
―unhappy‖ or ―infelicitous‖. For instance, a performative made by a British citizen when he
says to his wife “I hereby divorce you” can go wrong in that there is simply no such procedure
in Britain where merely by uttering divorce can be achieved. Based on different ways a

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
8

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,

Searle (1976) proposed that there are just five kinds of action that one can perform in
speaking, by means of the following five types of utterance: (i) Representatives, which
commit the speaker to the truth of the expressed proposition (paradigm cases: asserting,
concluding, etc.), (ii) Directives, which are attempts by the speaker to get the addressee to do
something (paradigm cases: requesting, questioning), (iii) Commissives, which commit the
speaker to some future course of action (paradigm cases: promising, threatening, offering),
(iv) Expressives, which express a psychological state (paradigm cases: thanking, apologizing,
welcoming, congratulating), and (v) Declarations, which effect immediate changes in the
institutional state of affairs and which tend to rely on elaborate extra-linguistic institutions
(paradigm cases: excommunicating, declaring war, christening, firing from employment)
In general pragmatics research, it is also significant to distinguish between direct
speech acts, where the speaker says what he or she means, and indirect speech acts where he
or she means more than, or something other than, what he or she says (Blum-Kulka, House &
Kasper, 1989, p. 2). Similarly, according to Searle (1975), direct speech acts refer to
utterances in which the propositional content (sentence meaning) of the utterance is consistent
9

with what the speaker intends to accomplish (speaker meaning). Accordingly, in indirect
speech acts, sentence meaning and speaker meaning may be different. For instance, a speaker
may utter the sentence ―Can you reach the salt?‖ and mean it not merely as a question but as a
request to pass the salt. The indirect speech acts, thus, might cause a problem, that is how it is
possible for the hearer to understand them when the sentence he hears and understands means
something else. Regarding this problem, Searle (1979) noted that the speaker communicates to
the hearer more than he actually says by way of relying on their mutually-shared background
knowledge, both linguistic and nonlinguistic, together with the general power of rationality
and inference on the part of the hearer. Searle also contends that certain linguistic forms will
tend to become conventionalized standard idiomatic forms for indirect speech acts. For
example, utterances such as “Can you reach the salt” and “Do you have the time?” are
conventionally used to make indirect requests.
Although the speech act theory has been influential in many fields, especially

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
10

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

Brown and Levinson and has since expanded academic perception of politeness.
1.3.1. Brown and Levinson’s Notion of Face
According to Hill et al. (1986, p. 282), politeness is ―is one of the constraints of human
interaction, whose purpose is to consider other‘s feelings, establish levels of mutual comfort,
and promote rapport‖. Similarly, Lakoff (1972, p. 910) noted that politeness is what we think
is appropriate behaviour in particular situations in an attempt to achieve and maintain
successful social relationships with others. In other defintions, politeness is closely associated
with the notion of face. Mills (2003, p. 6) defined it as the expression of the speakers‘
intention to mitigate face threats carried by certain face threatening acts towards another.
Therefore, being polite involves attempting to save face for another. Goffman (1967, p. 319,
cited in Watts, 2003, p. 124) identified ―face‖ as ―the positive social value a person effectively
claims for himself‖, i.e. the public self-image. ―Face‖ is hence precisely the conceptualization
each of us makes of our ―self‖ through the construals of others in social interaction and
particularly in verbal interaction, i.e. through talk. There is a distinction between ―positive
face‖ and ―negative face‖. While ―positive face‖ refers to ―one‘s desire to be approved or
accepted by others‖, ―negative face‖ is seen as ―one‘s desire to be free from imposition from
11

others. ―Face‖, either ―positive face‖ or ―negative face‖, is ―something that is emotionally
invested, and that can be lost, maintained, or enhanced and must be constantly attended to in
interaction‖ (Brown and Levinson, 1978, p. 66). Therefore, it must be continually taken into
account in the process of communication so that politeness can be achieved.
However, in everyday communication, we may unavoidably perform a speech act
which can cause another interlocutor to lose his or her face, or, in other words, we create a
face-threatening act (FTA). These acts are defined by Brown and Levinson (1987, p. 65) as
―acts that by their nature run contrary to the face wants of the addressee and/ or of the
speakers‖. These FTAs impede the freedom of actions (negative face) and the wish that one‘s
wants to be desired by others (positive face) – by either the speaker or the addressee or both
(Phuong, 2006, p. 9). Some examples of FTAs include refusing, criticizing, disagreeing or
complaining.

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
12

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,

minimize imposition on the hearer, beg forgiveness or give deference. Moreover, these
strategies are typically in question form and used with a modal verbs like: “Could you lend me
a pen?” or “I’m sorry to bother you, but can I ask you for a pen or something?” According to
Yule (1996), in most English-speaking contexts, a face-saving act is more commonly
performed via a negative politeness strategy than via a positive one. About the whole set of
strategies provided by Brown and Levinson (1987), he also stressed that ―the choice of a type
of expression that is less direct, potentially less clear, generally longer, and with more
complex structure means that the speaker is making a greater effort, in terms of concern for
face (i.e. politeness), than is needed simply to get the basic message across efficiently‖ (Yule,
1996, p. 65).
1.3.2. Social variables
Brown and Levinson (1987) claimed that the speaker‘s choices of politeness strategies
in realizing speech acts depend on the extent to which risk of loss of face is involved. In the
figure above, the risk factor increases as one moves up the scale of strategies from 1 to 5 with
1 being the least polite and 5 being the most polite. To put it another way, the more an act
threatens speaker‘s or hearer‘s face, the more likely the speaker will be to choose a higher-
numbered strategy. According to Brown and Levinson (1987, p. 74), the degree of this risk or
weight of face-threatening is determined by the cumulative effect of three universal social
variables:
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D: the social ‗distance‘ between the participants;
P: the relative ‗power‘ between them;
R: the absolute ‗ranking‘ of imposition in the particular culture.
They further pointed out that the way in which the seriousness of a particular FTA is
weighed seems to be neutral as to whether it is speaker‘s or hearer‘s face that is threatened.
The weightiness of an FTA is calculated as follows (1987, p. 76):
Wx = D(S,H) + P(S,H) + Rx
Wx stands for the numerical value that measures the weightiness of the FTA. D(S,H)
refers to the social distance between the speaker and the hearer (the degree of familiarity and

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

introduced by Brown and Levinson (1987), regardless of some criticisms against them, still
remain the most decisive factors affecting people‘s choices of politeness strategies in
communication, and they can provide a good framework for investigating socio-pragmatic
effect on interlocutors‘ realization of speech acts. However, the extent to which they affect
people‘s politeness choices might differ a lot from what was concluded by Brown and
Levinson and demands more in-depth investigation from linguistic researchers.
1.4. Interlanguage Pragmatics
These maxims and notions were established largely based on Western or Anglo
cultural norms, but they were then claimed to be ―universal‖, or true for every culture and
every language, by their authors. Meanwhile, many empirical studies have later shown that the
realization of speech acts and politeness principles are actually culture- and context-specific.
In other words, the pragmatic principles people abide by in one language or culture are often
different in another. The growing criticism against this so-called ―universality‖ led to the
emergence of a new branch of pragmatics, cross-cultural pragmatics (CCP). According to
Kasper and Blum-Kulka (1993), it is the study of linguistic acts carried out by language users
of different cultural backgrounds. As noted by Wierzbicka (1991), the main ideas underlying
this new direction in pragmatic research are that:
In different societies and different communities, people speak differently; these differences in
ways of speaking are profound and systematic, they reflect different cultural values, or at least
different hierarchies of values; different ways of speaking, different communication styles, can
be explained and made sense of in terms of independently established different cultural values
and cultural priorities‖ (p. 69).
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Cross-cultural pragmatics investigates how social actions are translated into linguistic
forms and therefore, can be divided into two subcategories: (1) Contrastive pragmatics (CP)
and (2) Interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) (Tam 2005, p. 35). She further discussed that while CP
compares speech acts across cultures and languages so as to understand how the linguistic
actions interlocutors engage in reflect their background, ILP focuses on linguistic actions,
speech acts and their enactment by learners to understand what might interfere with a learner‘s

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

categorized into four different components: linguistic competence, sociolinguistic competence,
discourse competence and strategic competence. Based on the definitions of these
components, it is quite apparent that pragmatic competence bears great similarity to
sociolinguistic competence and strategic competence. Specifically, Trosborg (1995) further
discussed the subdivision of sociolinguistic competence upon two aspects: appropriateness of
meanings – ―sociopragmatic competence‖ and appropriateness of forms - ―pragmalinguistic
competence‖ (p. 11). Moreover, Jung (2002) identified five things that a learner needs to
acquire in order to be pragmatically competent, namely the ability to perform speech acts, to
convey and interpret non-literal meanings, to perform politeness functions, to perform
discourse functions, and to use cultural knowledge.
However, learners‘ development of pragmatic competence might be interfered due to
their lack of exposure to the target language or their lack of awareness of sociocultural
differences between their mother language and the target language. It is quite understandable
that even an advanced language learner might encounter difficulty in performing speech acts
in the target language appropriately. Thus, there is such likelihood that pragmatic failure
occurs in cross-cultural communication. The seriousness of pragmatic failure was highlighted
in both pragmatic research and second language acquisition research.
Perhaps the fascination that the study of cross-cultural pragmatics holds for language
teachers, researchers, and students of linguistics stems from the serious trouble to which
pragmatic failure can lead. No ―error‖ of grammar can make a speaker seem so
incompetent, so inappropriate, so foreign as the kind of trouble a learner gets into when
he or she doesn‘t understand or otherwise disregards a language‘s rules of use.
(Rintell – Mitchell 1989, p. 248, cited in Trosborg 1995, p. 5)


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1.5.2. Pragmatic failure
Thomas (1983) pointed out that pragmatic failure has occurred on any occasion ―on
which H (the hearer) perceives the force of S‘s (the speaker‘s) utterance as other than S

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.