A cross-cultural study of pauses and time- fillers in some american and vietnamese films Nguyễn Thị Hồng Nhung Trường Đại học Ngoại ngữ Luận văn Thạc sĩ ngành: Ngôn ngữ học Anh; Mã số: 60 22 15 Người hướng dẫn: GS.TS. Nguyễn Quang Năm bảo vệ: 2012 Abstract: The present study is a comparative and exploratory study of the use of silence/pauses and time-fillers in American and Vietnamese films. Its aims are to investigate: (i) How the Vietnamese characters perform silence/pauses and time-fillers in the contexts studied, (ii) How the American characters perform silence/pauses and time-fillers in the contexts studied, and (iii) What the major differences between American and Vietnamese characters in performing silence/pauses and time-fillers are. Data are collected from four Vietnamese and four American films. They are analyzed against the three reference points of availability, proportionality and manifestability to find out major similarities and differences between American and Vietnamese characters (and hopefully, the American and the Vietnamese) in using silence/pauses and time-fillers. The results show that American and Vietnamese characters have different preferences for using silence/pauses and time-fillers in the films under investigation. They are significantly different not only in the number of pause and time-filler occurrences, but also in the duration and location. Moreover, the variables of power such as „high-to-low‟, „low-to-high‟, or „equal‟ tend to have a significant influence on the occurrence, the duration and the location of silence/pauses and time- fillers for both groups. Keywords: Giao văn hóa; Tiếng Anh; Ngôn ngữ học Content PART A. INTRODUCTION I. RATIONALE Silence/Pauses and time-fillers exist in all social interactions in any culture. They are used to show respect, anger, hostility, disinterest, or any other emotions. However, when and how to use time-fillers or silence/pauses are not the same in different languages and cultures. Therefore, the study of similarities and differences of using silence/pauses and time-fillers in interaction would help not only for the success of American-Vietnamese cross-cultural communication but also in communicative language teaching/learning. 2 II. SCOPE OF THE STUDY Although intralinguistic (vocabulary, grammatical rules, phonetic rules ) and extralinguistic (facial expressions, postures, proximity ) factors, to a great extent, play a vitally important role in communication, they are beyond the scope of this study. This study only focuses on pauses and time-fillers in some American and Vietnamese films for the discovery of major similarities and differences between the two groups. This research is confined to studying only the factor of power [colleague to colleague (equal); boss to employee (high to low); and employee to boss (low to high)] that are readily manageable and lend themselves to quantitative analyses. Similar plots, characters and scenes that involve similar communicative events/ situations are intentionally chosen for contrastive analysis. III. AIMS OF THE STUDY The aims of the study are: - To investigate the use of silence/pauses and time-fillers under the variables of power in chosen situations in some American and Vietnamese films. - To find out major American- Vietnamese cross-cultural differences and similarities in using silence/pauses and time-fillers in the situations under investigation. IV. METHODOLOGY The main method of this study is the quantitative one. All the considerations, remarks, interpretations, comments and assumptions given in the study are largely based on data analysis with due reference to publications. The data were collected from four American and four Vietnamese socio-psychological films. The instrument to construct validation is used to tap individual assessment of social power (SP). V. DESIGN OF THE STUDY The study consists of three parts: Part I. Introduction, which provides the rationale, scope, aims and methods of the sudy. Part II. Development, which consists of three chapters. Chapter 1. Theoretical preliminaries. This chapter covers the relationship between language and culture, language and communication, cross-cultural communication, high- context and low-context culture, non-verbal communication and paralanguage. Chapter 2. Silence/pauses and Time-fillers. This chapter reviews the issues relevant to the study including silence/ pauses and time-fillers. Then the notions of silence/ pause and time-filler definitions and usages are discussed. 3 Chapter 3. Findings and Discussions. The strategies of using silence/pauses and time- fillers are identified and major cross-cultural differences and similarities discussed. Part III. Conclusion, in which the main findings are reviewed, the implications for cross-culture interactions, the limitations of the study pointed out and suggestions for further research offered PART B. DEVELOPMENT Chapter 1. Theoretical preliminaries 1.1. Language, culture and communication 1.1.1. Language and communication By age four, most humans have developed an ability to communicate through oral language. By age six or seven, most humans can comprehend, as well as express, written thoughts. These unique abilities of communicating through a native language clearly separate humans from all animals. In 1994, in Time magazine, an article appeared titled ‘How man began’. Within that article was the following bold assertion: ‚No single, essential difference separates human beings from other animals”. Yet, in what is obviously a contradiction to such a statement, all evolutionists admit that communication via speech is uniquely human - so that it often is used as the singular, and most important, dividing line between humans and animals. Language is the development of the basic form of communication between human beings, and in a society. And just as it is the basic form, it is also the most developed. We can not communicate in any real sense without language, other than through gestures; we do communicate through some non-verbal forms like the visual arts - painting and sculpture - and through dance, but the culmination of true, articulate, communication is through language. It could naturally take a number of forms. It could be unvarnished, workaday prose, it could be poetry, it could be drama; but all of these are forms of language, written, spoken and read. The way in which the language is being used is making it pretty. Thus, a successful communicator must own a good command of language at first. 1.1.2. Language and culture Culture (from the Latin cultura stemming from colere, meaning ‚to cultivate‛) is a term that has different meanings. And, the word ‚culture‛ is most commonly used in three basic senses:  excellence of taste in the fine arts and humanities, also known as high culture 4  an integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for symbolic thought and social learning  the set of shared attitudes, values, goals and practices that characterizes an institution, organization or group. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture#cite_note-1) The notion of communicative competence is one of the theories that underlies the communicative approach to foreign language teaching. Canale and Swain (1980: 1-47) define communicative competence in terms of four components: 1. Grammatical competence: including vocabulary, word formation, sentence formation, pronunciation, spelling and linguistic semantics; 2. Sociolinguistic competence: addressing the extent to which utterances are produced and understood appropriately in different sociolinguistic contexts depending on contextual factors such as status of participants, purposes of the interaction, and norms or conventions of interaction; 3. Discourse competence: concerning mastery of how to combine grammatical forms and meanings to achieve a unified spoken or written text in different genres. 4. Strategic competence: composed of mastery of verbal and non-verbal communication strategies that may be called into actual situations or to sufficient competence in one or more of the other areas of communicative competence and to enhance the effectiveness of communication. A more recent survey of communicative competence by Bachman (1990) divides it into the broad headings of "organizational competence," which includes both grammatical and discourse (or textual) competence, and pragmatic competence, which includes both sociolinguistic and illocutionary competence. Through the influence of communicative language teaching, it has become widely accepted that communicative competence should be the goal of language education, central to good classroom practice. The understanding of communicative competence has been influenced by the field of pragmatics and the philosophy of language concerning speech acts. Research results from contrastive analysis of discourse and acts such as compliment, apology indicate that appropriateness in a particular situation in one culture may not become the same in another culture. So acquiring sociolinguistic norms is actually acquiring the culture in which the language is used. Savignon (1997) adds that there exists the interrelation among the four components in increasing communicative competence. 5 1. Linguistic knowledge (verbal and non-verbal elements, patterns of elements in particular speech event, range of possible variants, meaning of variants in particular situations) 2. Interacting skills (perception of salient features in communicative situations; selection and interpretation of forms appropriate to specific situations, role and relationship; norms of interaction and interpretation; strategies for achieving goals) 3. Cultural knowledge (social structure, values and attitudes, cognitive map/schema, enculturation processes) Nguyen Quang (2001: 68) states that communicative competence is the shared part of the three components mentioned above. Despite the disagreement among scholars about its components, all researchers postulate the existence of communicative competence. A popular cultural framework was proposed by Hall (1973, 1990), in which he states that all cultures can be situated in relation to one another through the styles in which they communicate. In some cultures, such as those of North America and much of Western Europe, communication occurs predominantly through explicit statements in text and speech, and they are thus categorized as low-context cultures. In other cultures, such as Asia, much of the Middle East, Africa, and South America, messages include other communicative cues such as body language and the use of silence, and thus, known as high-context cultures. Essentially, high-context communication involves implying a message through that which is not uttered. This includes the situation, behavior, and para-verbal cues as integral parts of the communicated message. These terms such as “high-context and low-context culture”, “non- verbal communication” and “paralanguage” will be investigated in the following sections. 1.2. High-context culture vs. Low-context culture 1.2.1. Definitions and differences High-context (HC) culture and the contrasting low-context (LC) culture are terms presented by Hall in his book Beyond Culture (1976). Hall states that HC transactions feature pre-programmed information that is in the receiver and in the setting, with only minimal information in the transmitted message. LC transactions are the reverse. Most of the information must be in the transmitted message in order to make up for what is missing in the context. High-context culture refers to a culture's tendency to use high-context messages over low-context messages in routine communication. This choice of communication styles translates into a culture that will cater towards in-groups; an in-group being a group that has 6 similar experiences and expectations, from which inferences are drawn. In a high-context culture, many things are left unsaid, letting the culture explain. Words and word choice become very important in higher context communication, since a few words can communicate a complex message very effectively to an in-group (but less effectively outside that group), while in a lower context culture, the communicator needs to be much more explicit and the value of a single word is less important. LC culture refers to a culture’s tendency to cater towards in-groups. Low context cultures, such as Germany or the United States make much less extensive use of such similar experiences and expectations to communicate. Much more is explained through words or verbalization, instead of the context. Viet Nam and most Asian countries are classified as HC cultures. The U.S.A and Canada, along with Northern European countries, are classified as LC. This is, of course, an oversimplification. Within a LC culture, we'll find ourselves in high-context situations and vice-versa. For example, within a LC American culture, communications among family members are generally HC because of the high level of shared experience. For our purposes, though, we will rely on the broad-brush definition. While these terms are sometimes useful in describing some aspects of a culture, one can never say a culture is "high" or "low" because societies all contain both modes. "High" and "low" are therefore less relevant as a description of a whole people, and more useful to describe and understand particular situations and environments. 1.2.2. High and low context situations Every culture and every situation has its high and low aspects. Often one situation will contain an inner HC core and an outer LC ring for those who are less involved. For instance, a PTA (parent-teacher association) is usually a low-context situation: any parent can join, the dates of the meetings, who is president, what will be discussed, etc. are all explicitly available information, and it is usually fairly clear how to participate in the meetings. However, if this is a small town, perhaps the people who run the PTA all know each other very well and have many overlapping interests. They may "agree" on what should be discussed or what should happen without ever really talking about it, they have unconscious, unexpressed values that influence their decisions. Other parents from outside may not understand how decisions are actually being made. So the PTA is still low-context, but it has a high-context subgroup that is in turn part of a high-context small town society. When we enter a HC situation, it does not immediately become a LC culture just because we came in the door. It is still a high-context culture and we are just ignorant. Also, 7 even low context cultures can be difficult to learn: religious dietary laws, medical training, written language all take years to understand. The point is that that information has been made conscious, systematic, and available to those who have the resources to learn it. High contexts can be difficult to enter if we are an outsider (because we do not carry the context information internally, and because we can not instantly create close relationships). Low contexts are relatively easy to enter if we are an outsider (because the environment contains much of the information we need to participate, and because we can form relationships fairly soon, and because the important thing is accomplishing a task rather than feeling our way into a relationship). Many researchers have found that people in high-context cultures tend to be more implicit in verbal codes, perceive highly verbal persons less attractive, tend to be more reliant on and tuned into non-verbal communication, and expect to have more non-verbal codes in communication. 1.3. Non-verbal communication Communication is the transfer of information, ideas and emotions from one person to another. Most of us spend about 75 percent of our waking hours communicating our knowledge, thoughts, and ideas to others. However, most of us fail to realize that a great deal of our communication is of a non-verbal form as opposed to the oral and written forms. The last decades have seen a tremendous upsurge in research and popular interest in the phenomena of nonverbal communication. In its narrow and accurate sense, nonverbal behavior refers to actions as distinct from speech. It thus includes facial expressions, hand and arm gestures, postures, positions, and various movements of the body or the legs and feet. It may also include the way we wear our clothes or the silence we keep. Therefore, we can say that silence/pauses are considered as one of non-verbal behaviors. In his book, Nonverbal communication, Albert Mehrabian (1972) states that nonverbal communication (NVC) is the act of imparting or interchanging thoughts, opinions, or information without the use of spoken words. Nonverbal communication is used as a key variable to determine people's attitudes, values, and beliefs. For example, an observer watching a focus group will pay special attention to the nonverbal cues of group interaction, such as body language, facial expressions, and eye contact, to identify group members' true feelings about an issue. In The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, nonverbal communication is defined as communication without the use of spoken language. 8 Many scholars indicate that NVC is usually understood as the process of communication through sending and receiving wordless messages. NVC can be communicated through gestures and touch, by body language or posture, by facial expressions and eye contact. NVC can be communicated through object communication such as clothing, hairstyles or even architecture, symbols and inforgraphics. Speech contains nonverbal elements known as paralanguage, including voice quality, emotion and speaking style, as well as prosodic features such as rhythm, intonation and stress. Dance is also regarded as a nonverbal communication. Likewise, written texts have nonverbal elements such as handwriting style, spatial arrangement of words, or the use of emoticons. 1.4. Paralanguage Paralanguage refers to the vocal and nonverbal elements of communication used to modify meaning and convey emotion. Paralanguage may be expressed consciously or unconsciously, and it includes the pitch, volume, and, in some cases, intonation of speech. Sometimes the definition is restricted to vocally-produced sounds. The study of paralanguage is known as paralinguistics. The term ‘paralanguage’ is sometimes used as a cover term for body language, which is not necessarily tied to speech, and paralinguistic phenomena in speech. The latter are phenomena that can be observed in speech but that do not belong to the arbitrary conventional code of language. Paralanguage is part of the nonverbal communication and convey emotions and attitudes. It may not only be expressed consciously or unconsciously but also include vocalizations such as hissing, hushing, and whistling, as well as speech modifications such as quality of voice or hesitations and speed in talking. Some examples of paralanguage are laughing, crying, whispering, snoring, sucking, sneezing, sighing, etc. Tone of voice plays a fundamental role in telephone interactions. According to Robbins and Langton (2001), Paralanguage is communication that goes beyond the specific spoken words. It includes pitch, amplitude, rate, and voice quality of speech. Paralanguage reminds us that people convey their feelings not only in what they say, but also in how they say it. Literature has shown that it is possible to convey the full gamut of emotions in text. The real problem is that it takes a long time and a lot of talent to do this. Consequently, it is not that text does not have emotional clues, but it is so difficult to put them in. To that end, with text, paralinguistic clues are:  Explicit: Emoticons, cartoons, call-out descriptions. 9  Style: Typography, layout, color, location.  Implicit: Rhetoric, rhythm, sound, flex, vocabulary. The paralinguistic properties of speech play an important role in human speech communication. There are no utterances or speech signals that lack paralinguistic properties, since speech requires the presence of a voice that can be modulated. This voice must have some properties, and all the properties of a voice as such are paralinguistic. However, the distinction ‚linguistic vs. paralinguistic‛ applies not only to speech but to writing and sign language as well, and it is not bound to any sensory modality. Even vocal language has some paralinguistic as well as linguistic properties that can be seen and even felt. In text-only communication such as email, chatrooms and instant massaging, paralinguistic elements can be displayed by emoticons, font and color choices, capitalization and the use of non-alphabetic or abstract characters. Nonetheless, paralanguage in written communication is limited in comparison with face-to-face conversation, sometimes leading to misunderstandings. CHAPTER II. SILENCE/PAUSES AND TIME-FILLERS 2.1. Silence/ Pauses According to Clark (1996), pauses are powerful cues for what is happening in a conversation. To use them as a basis for analyzing culture-specific behavior, we first have to check carefully what purposes pauses may serve in conversations and how the usage differs across cultures. As we want to build a computational model for American English and Vietnamese, those two cultures are of special interest. In the book of Conversational organization ” Interaction between speakers and hearers, Charles Goodwin (1981) describes his research on gaze behavior and manipulation. According to him, gaze is used to manage turn taking and to signal understanding or attentiveness. If attention signals of the listener are missing, pauses are used by the speaker to regain attention. In this case the duration of the silence is dependent from the nonverbal signals of the hearer. 2.2. Time-fillers Time-fillers (TFs) are prevalent in Vietnamese and English spontaneous speech and pose a major problem in Vietnamese and English speech recognition. TFs are parts of speech which are not generally recognized as purposeful or containing formal meaning, usually expressed as pauses such as uh, like and er, but also extending to repair ("He was buying a black uh, I mean a blue, a blue shirt"), and articulation problems such as stuttering. This is normally frowned upon in mass media such as news reports or films, but they occur regularly in everyday conversations, sometimes representing upwards of 20% 10 of "words" in conversation. TFs can also be used as a pause for thought, for example: ‚I need four um oranges and mm three apples‛. In linguistics, a TF is a sound or word that is spoken in conversations by one participant to signal to others that he/she has paused to think but is not yet finished speaking. Different languages have different characteristics of TFs; in English, the most common TFs are uh /u/, er /ə/ and um /əm/, "Like", "you know", "actually", and "basically" are more prevalent among youths; in Vietnamese we can find: ừm, anh/chị biết đấy, thực ra thì, kiểu như, đại loại là, nói thế nào nhỉ? (Nguyen Quang, 2001) A TF occurs most often when a speaker is thinking. It is a time-filler in that the speaker actually breaks off speech while continuing to articulate. However, the articulation is neither a word, nor part of a word. There are some of the common TFs that are found in most conversations. Even though it is quite alright to use these TFs once in a while during informal conversations, over a period of time they become a habit and finally are a part and parcel of our speaking style and diction. In formal situations, especially, they can become quite annoying to the listener, and the speaker could unknowingly become more and more conscious and use these TFs to make up for the awkwardness he or she feels. CHAPTER III. FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION Much work has been devoted to the treatment of hesitations in particular time-fillers. The way in which people hesitate may to some extent be language-specific. This study will not only concentrate on silence/pauses and time-fillers but also on their actual operations in some Vietnamese and American films, in which TFs such as well, er (ừ, ờ); you see (anh/chị thấy không); you know (anh/ chị biết không); oh/ er/ um let me see (ờ/ ừ/ ừm để tôi xem) appear. 3.1. Research methods 3.1.1. Subjects There are three social factors: relative power, social distance and the ranking of imposition that relate to the data analysis procedure. But only the second one is focussed on in the present study. The subjects chosen for this study includes conversations in which silence/ pauses and time-fillers are used by characters in 4 Vietnamese and 4 American films. The characters use silence/pauses and time-fillers in similar settings and with similar conversational topics. Besides, all the chosen subjects are American in American settings and Vietnamese in Vietnamese settings. Relationships between subjects are chosen with the factor of power in [...]... and American films and analyzed against the three reference points of availability, proportionality and manifestability to find out major similarities and differences between American and Vietnamese characters (and hopefully, the American and the Vietnamese) in using silence /pauses and time-fillers 3.2 Findings and discussion 3.2.1 Vietnamese findings The research was mainly based on the data collected... method and data collection instruments The strategical method used in the present study involves inductive method, which means considerations and evaluations mainly come from analyzing statistical data The theoretical background shown in chapters I and II are mostly based on the research by Vietnamese and international authors on silence /pauses and time-fillers Data are collected in some Vietnamese and American. .. important in communication and communicative language teaching/learning Cross-cultural interactants and language learners should be aware of cross-cultural differences in the use of silence /pauses and TFs for avoidance of misinterpretation and miscommunication II Limitations Shortcomings in the study are obviously unavoidable It is reasonable to say that the data collected from films are not as authentic... Northern speakers In addition, no significant effect of education on the use of silence /pauses and TFs is found The research presents initial results of a study on Vietnamese and American silence /pauses and TFs With three types of turn in terms of power (colleague-to-colleague, boss-to-employee, employee-to-boss), it reveals that, apart from uh (ừm) and mm, the Vietnamese and American characters abundantly... to appear at some common positions, such as: before a clause, a predicate VPs, before complements or within an NP (as between a modifier and a head noun) Although more research on the availability, proportionality and manifestablity of silence /pauses and TFs in social interactions is needed, the results of this study suggest that 14 how to make appropriate use of silence /pauses and TFs is considerably... chosen films, in which silence /pauses and TFs are used in Vietnamese spontaneous speech by the characters There are 22 chosen conversations, which have complete speaker information In addition, in order to see how silence /pauses and time-fillers vary across cultures, some parameters (age, sex, marital status, job, etc) are also used for identifying distinctive forms of TFs and pauses in Vietnamese 11... also examined in this study 3.2.3 Concluding remark * Major differences: As shown in the results, the occurrence, length and frequency of pauses and timefillers in Vietnamese films greatly differ from American ones across role relationships in terms of power In the Vietnamese films, it is found that speakers use pauses at highly varying rates; and they tend to use silence /pauses much more than TFs Pauses. .. the meaning the speakers wish to express PART C CONCLUSION I Summary of major findings Collected data of silence /pauses and time-fillers have been critically discussed and analyzed with three points of reference They are: availability, proportionality and manifestability Pauses and TFs have been investigated according to length, occurence and position It is discovered that different role relationships... author believes that the study of the American and Vietnamese films made in the US by American crews and in Vietnam by Vietnamese crews will offer an access to close-toauthentic speech Furthermore, the understanding of the subjects’ record is believed to be necessary for data analysis; therefore; the following parameters are taken into consideration: 3.1.2 Research questions Based on the aims set in. .. as: ah, oh, am, mm, like, you know, or, so, I mean, let see, kind of, in fact, I don”t know, well, etc.(Nguyen Quang: 110) In the previous section, we have tried to dispel or at least clarify some myths about the availability, proportionality and manifestability of silence /pauses and time-fillers in some Vietnamese films In this section, we go on examining those criteria in some American films 12 In . and American films and analyzed against the three reference points of availability, proportionality and manifestability to find out major similarities and differences between American and Vietnamese. To investigate the use of silence /pauses and time-fillers under the variables of power in chosen situations in some American and Vietnamese films. - To find out major American- Vietnamese cross-cultural. theoretical background shown in chapters I and II are mostly based on the research by Vietnamese and international authors on silence /pauses and time-fillers. Data are collected in some Vietnamese and