THANH HOA DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING NGUYEN MONG TUAN COMPREHENSIVE SCHOOL EXPERIENCED INITIATIVE SOME MAJOR WAYS TO GIVE AND INTERPRET ENGLISH COMPLIMENTS Writer: Le Thi Ngoc Anh School's post: Teacher School: Nguyen Mong Tuan comprehensive school Experienced initiative: English THANH HOA 2016 TABLE OF CONTENT 1: INTRODUCTION 1.1 Rationale 1.2 Aims of the study 1.3 Scope of the study 1.4 Significance of the study 1.5 Method of the study Page 5 6 2: DEVELOPMENT 2.1: LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1.1 Definition of compliments 2.1.2 Types of compliments 2.1.3 Some syntactic and semantic features of formulae compliments 2.1.4 Implicit compliments and indirectness 2.1.5 Critical Approaches to Translation 9 10 10 11 12 2: INTERPRETING FORMULAIC COMPLIMENTS 14 2.2.1 Discrepancies in the translation of compliments: 14 different syntactic structures and lexis, different pragmatic effects 2.2.2 Omissions and reductions in translation 16 2.3: INTERPRETING IMPLICIT COMPLIMENTS 2.3.1 Compliments not concerning the addressee directly 2.3.2 Compliments involving a comparison : CONCLUSION 3.1 Recapitulation 3.2 Concluding remarks 3.3 Limitations of the study 3.4 Suggestions for further studies 4: REFERENCES 18 20 22 22 23 24 25 1: INTRODUCTION 1.Rationale Compliments are speech acts that are primarily aimed at maintaining, improving, or supporting the addressee’s face (Goffman 1967) They can in fact be used for a variety of reasons: to express admiration or approval of someone’s work/ appearance/ taste; to establish/ confirm/ maintain solidarity; to replace greetings/ gratitude/ apologies/ congratulations; to soften face-threatening acts such as apologies, requests and criticism; to open and sustain conversation; to reinforce desired behavior As Winston Brembeck points out, “to know another’s language and not his culture is a very good way to make a fluent fool of one’s self” (as cited in Nguyen, 1996, p.38) This comment has highlighted the importance of the understanding of a culture beside a good command of its language In that sense, students of English should be aware of Anglicist cultures apart from the learning of their language Compliment-giving and responding behavior is used to negotiate social identities and relations As a consequence, inappropriate choice of responses can lead to a loss of face The preferred sequel to compliments is acceptance, but in American English, for instance, two thirds of the time respondents to compliments something other than overtly and fully accept them (e.g mitigate, deflect or reject, request interpretation; Herbert 1990) The study aims to investigate the interpretation of some aspects relating to the texture of linguistic politeness in compliments Starting from the premise that critical approaches “would not be concerned so much with issues such as mistranslation in itself but rather the politics of translation, the way in which translating and interpreting are related to concerns such as class, gender, difference, ideology and social context” (Vo, 2007) All the aforementioned reasons have encouraged the researcher to work on this issue in hope of gaining insights into the compliment issue 1.2 Aims of the study Firstly, the researcher would like to explore the ways to give compliments of British and Americans Secondly, the success of these compliments with the addressees would be measured Finally, interpreting of these compliments is compared to the original ones This paper concentrates on compliments in some British and American conservation in order to answer two essential research questions: 1) What are the popular ways to give compliments in Britain and America? 2) To what extent are these speech acts successful with the addressees (i.e speech acts that achieve the aim of creating good rapport and solidarity, or even, in some cases, some other more covert illocutionary aims)? 3) How are these speech acts translated in interlingua conversations? 1.3 Scope of the study * Field of study The main focus of this study is on “critical approaches to interpreting compliments” This means that the study covered only compliment, not other dimensions of linguistics or culture * Number of targeted languages To draw an interpretation of compliments, research would be central to these two target languages: English and Vietnamese 1.4 Significance of the study Once having been finished, this research would bring about decent benefits First, the research can shed the light on some major ways to give and interpret English compliments Thus, it provides an insight into Vietnamese and English-speaking cultures, contributing to the mutual understanding between those countries Moreover, the research would serve as a precious reference for any subject related to Vietnamese and American culture in general and Vietnamese and American punctuality in particular 1.5 Method of the study *Approach The research was conducted as an application of contrastive approach The contrastive approach, as defined by Wikipedia “the systematic study of a pair of languages with a view to identifying their structural differences and similarities Historically it has been used to establish language genealogies.” Contrastive Analysis was used extensively in the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) in the 1960s and early 1970s, as a method of explaining why some features of a Target Language were more difficult to acquire than others According to the behaviorist theories prevailing at the time, language learning was a question of habit formation, and this could be reinforced or impeded by existing habits Therefore, the difficulty in mastering certain structures in a second language (L2) depended on the difference between the learners' mother language (L1) and the language they were trying to learn *Data collection instruments This study employed conversation studying and interpreting as the main sources for data collection *Data collection procedure To collect the necessary data, the researchers followed the procedure below Step 1: Search the conversations The conversations, after being found, were piloted by two American participants The American student were working in AIESEC Hanoi AIESEC, the world's largest student organization, is the international platform where researcher spent time doing voluntary work Step 2: Revise the conversations After the piloting conversations, an amendment was made to enhance the accuracy of compliments in terms of linguistics Step 3: Interpret the conversations Finally, the researcher search for the interpretation of the compliments in Vietnamese through experiences in teaching at Nguyen Mong Tuan high school *Data analysis The collected data was processed with the application of interpretive methods, which was used to discuss the results Procedures: The researcher followed the following procedures to collect and analyze data Step 1: search the conversations Step 2: revise the conversations Step 3: interpret the conversations Step 4: code the conversations Step 5: analyze the conversations 2: DEVELOPMENT 1: Literature Review 2.1.1 Definition of compliments Compliments are a simple, yet powerful, relationship building tool There are many different reasons to give a compliment It is an expression of praise, congratulation or encouragement Compliments are primarily aimed at maintaining, enhancing, or supporting the addressee’s face (Goffman, 1967) and are used for a variety of reasons, the most significant of which is perhaps to express admiration or approval of someone’s work/appearance/taste On the basis of several socio-pragmatic studies (Wolfson, 1981, 1984; Manes & Wolfson, 1980; Wolfson & Manes, 1980; Herbert, 1991; Holmes 1988), it is evident that compliments are routine formulae and tend to use a few syntactic patterns and a limited vocabulary that are instrumental in the expression of admiration and praise Compliment-giving and responding behavior is used to negotiate social identities and relations As a consequence, inappropriate choice of responses can lead to a loss of face Furthermore, it might also be argued that compliments, although primarily polite speech acts or “face flattering acts” (Manno, 2005), can make complimented feel uneasy or embarrassed, thereby creating a threat for their negative face On the basis of several socio-pragmatic studies it is evident that speech acts are subject to cultural and socio-linguistic variations (Blum-Kulka et al 1989) Apart from macroscopic cultural and linguistic differences in the giving and accepting of compliments, some interesting changes can also be observed depending on socio-linguistic variables (age, gender, status, etc.) 2.1.2 Types of compliments On the basis of several socio-pragmatic studies (Wolfson, 1981, 1984; Manes & Wolfson, 1980; Wolfson & Manes, 1980; Herbert, 1991; Holmes 1988), it is evident that compliments are routine formulae and tend to use a few syntactic patterns and a limited vocabulary that are instrumental in the expression of admiration and praise Therefore, it can be said that formulae compliments, which share some common patterns when being analyzed, is the first type of compliments The second type of compliments, as Holmes correctly remarks (1988: 446-447), compliments most typically attribute a positive quality to the addressee, even when the compliment seems to refer to a third party This kind of utterance is easily interpreted as a compliment because it praises the recipient in an indirect way as illustrated below: Mary comments on Tom – Laura’s son: What a healthy boy! Laura: Thanks We try our best These ones are categorized as implicit compliments 2.1.3 Some syntactic and semantic features of formulae compliments Research on compliments, no matter in which language, has incontrovertibly shown that they are quite formulaic in nature The most interesting results for American English are those that emerge from the studies by Manes and Wolf- son (Manes and Wolfson 1980; Wolfson and Manes 1980) With reference to the research, most patterns of the compliments are the following: NP is/looks (really) ADJ Your sweater is really nice I (really) like/love + Noun phrase I like your car PRO + is (really) + (a) ADJ + Noun phrase That’s a good question You V (a) (really) ADJ + Noun phrase You did a great job You V + Noun phr + (really) ADV You sang it very well You have (a) (really) ADJ + Noun phrase You have a beautiful cat What (a) + ADJ + Noun phrase! What a pretty shirt! ADJ + Noun phrase! Good shot! Isn’t + Noun phrase + ADJ! Isn’t that ring pretty! Formulaicity is also to be observed in the limited choice of vocabulary Manes and Wolfson observed that low specificity adjectives such as “nice” and “good”, among semantically positive adjectives, cover together 42% of adjectival occurrences in compliments If “beautiful”, “pretty” and “great” are added to the group, the percentage increases to reach two thirds of all adjectival compliments Among verbs, “like” and “love” are the most frequent and occur in 90% of verbal compliments 2.1.4 Implicit compliments and indirectness As pointed out above, the majority of scholars agree that compliments are formulaic in nature, with frequently repeated syntactic patterns and lexical material Yet, as Boyle advocates (2000), compliments are not necessarily formulaic and in certain genres there is a marked preference for implicit forms (cf also Herbert, 1991:383) By implicit compliments Boyle means two different speech acts: one that refers to the addressee’s achievement, whose recognition strongly depends on indexical knowledge; and one that compares the addressee to someone he/she thinks highly of The expression of praise rests on a comparison, whose interpretation depends on the addressee’s knowledge of the object of the comparison Indirectness in performing speech acts is one of the objects of Thomas’s study (1995: 120) that claimed that it was both costly and risky It is costly because an indirect utterance takes longer for the speaker to formulate and for the hearer to process; it is risky because it is not always successful Indirect compliments include the desire to make one’s speech more interesting (in some cases also less interesting by deflecting attention from one’s speech), to strengthen the illocutionary force of one’s message and to achieve competing perlocutionary goals 2.1.5 Critical Approaches to Translation With reference to the article “Critical Applied Linguistics: Concerns and Domains” by Assoc Prof Dr Vo Dai Quang (2007), critical approaches to translation are included in other domains of textual analysis to critical applied linguistics “Such an approach would not be concerned so much with issues such as mistranslation in itself but rather the politics of translation, the way in which translating and interpreting are related to concerns such as class, gender, difference, ideology and social context” (Vo, 2007) He also pointed out that critical applied linguistics “is based on an ethics of difference and tries in its practice to move toward change” and that “the need to unsettle local cultural hegemonies through the challenges of translation all point to the need for an approach to translation based on an ethics of difference” (Vo, 2007) 2: Interpreting Formulaic Compliments 2.2.1 Discrepancies in the translation of compliments: different syntactic structures and lexis, different pragmatic effects The translation of compliments sometimes shows discrepancies across the two languages involved This may be due to systemic differences between the languages at stake, to cultural preferences and to idiosyncratic choices In many examples, the trend seems to be towards the expression of compliment on performance in the English original and on personal traits in the Vietnamese translation In this concern, it is perhaps fruitful to recall the results Creese (1991: 53), authors agree that the largest topic category in American English is appearance, for British English it seems to be ability As will be shown, however, it appears that in Vietnamese compliments on appearance or on qualities are preferred to those on performance Some examples would shed some light in this issue Situation 1: Mary and Peter are watching the scene that has just been performed by Julie, an actress starring as a nurse in the new film English Vietnamese Mary: That’s great Mary: Bạn diễn hay Peter: Yeap, you were Peter: Ừm, bạn diễn tuyệt wonderful Julie: Cám ơn Mình cố gắng Julie: Thanks I tried my best nhiều In the example, both “You were wonderful” and “That’s great” are compliments that refer to a scene that has just been performed by Julie Reference is therefore quite easily established The use of a pronoun is possible because reference is being made to an action or an event that is currently relevant and therefore easily accessible Participants shared the same context of situation to make sense of what their partners say The translation of the first compliment in Vietnamese also shifts the focus from the performance, the shooting of the scene, and insists instead on one of the character’s personal qualities In the Vietnamese version the compliments uttered by Mary and Peter have therefore the same syntactic pattern, whereas they differ in the original Moreover, the verbs “be” in the original version were translate into “diễn”, an action verb in Vietnamese version Situation 2: Peter and Mary give compliment on Hal’s successful presentation of his new proposal to implement business in the company where he works Hal is praised for his well-argumented talk and the brilliant ideas that he has put forward English Vietnamese Mary: Well done, Hal Mary: Cậu cừ , Hal Peter: Nice job! Peter: Bài thuyết trình hay! Hall: Thanks Hall: Cám ơn người In the translation, instead, little importance is attached to his performance, for the first compliment (“cậu cừ lắm”) is very generic Also it is quite vague as it refers to people and not to the performance as it does in the original version In the original, the first compliment concerns a successful performance, whereas it is turned into a recognition of some stable personal qualities in the translation However, the second compliment reflects rather exactly what bears in the original because both of which refer to the presentation rather than the person Vietnamese version, yet, prolongs and differs from the original It uses the full structure (N+be+adj) instead of the noun phrase as in the English version Situation 3: Joe was on TV as singer Joe and Mary are talking about Joe’s performance English Vietnamese Joe: You saw me on TV? Joe: Thấy tớ TV không ? Mary: Listen, I wish you to Mary: Nghe này, muốn know you’re doing a bạn biết bạn hát hay fantastic job In the above example as well, in the original the compliment concerns a successful performance, whereas it is turned into a recognition of some stable personal qualities in the subtitles 2.2.2 Omissions and reductions in translation Reductions seem to be more likely than complete omissions in translating compliment, which would drastically subvert the pragmatic texture of an interaction (Hatim and Mason 2000: 438) Situation 1: English Vietnamese Mary: Tucker, what Mary: Tucker, có chuyện happened to your company? xảy với công ty cậu Tucker: uh, well, uh yeah vậy? That’s a very good query, Tucker: À, uh thì… Đấy Mary Well done câu hỏi hay Mary The original contains two compliments which are syntactically different but both of them concern Mary’s behavior, therefore a performance They are condensed in the translation, where emphasis is placed on Mary’s question Situation 2: English Vietnamese Mary: Now tell me what you Mary: Bạn thấy tranh think of this painting You nào? Bạn thích chứ? like it? Peter: Rất hấp dẫn Peter: Wow It’s very intriguing, isn’t it? The interjection “Wow” is omitted and the adjective “intriguing” is badly translated into Vietnamese The English adjective shows approval, even though something intriguing may not be fully understood or penetrated (e.g an intriguing remark) Besides, the English structure (N +be+ A) was simplified by a noun phrase 3: Interpreting Implicit Compliments Among non-conventional compliments, one should distinguish between two main sub-classes, those that use indirect phrasings to compliment the interlocutor, which can be considered cases of pragmatic ellipsis and are felicitous only if the interlocutor draws a series of bridging inferences, and those that similarly employ non-routine language and would seem to praise the addressee but turn out to have a different covert illocutionary force when projected on a macro level 2.3.1 Compliments not concerning the addressee directly These compliments in examples are centered on some outstanding deed performed by the addressee or, more loosely, on his/her qualities In these cases, the compliments are implicitly conveyed for the positive remarks that not concern the addressee directly but somehow reflect on him/her Situation 1: Mary’s mother and stepfather are talking when Mary comes The compliment is her stepfather speaking to Ted, the boy who is going to take her out English Vietnames Mary’s mother: Oh, here she comes Mẹ Mary: Ôi, bé Con yêu, Oh, honey, you look beautiful trông đẹp Mary’s stepfather: Oh shit look at that! Dượng Mary: Khỉ thật, nhìn kìa! Cậu You better be careful, boy! nên coi chừng đấy! This is the indirect compliment, which alludes to Mary’s beauty despite not mentioning anything about her The implicit compliment is exploited to warn Ted, the boy who is going to take her out, against taking advantage of her 10 Situation 2: Mr Hal first met Rosemary’s mother, Mrs Sarah English Vietnamese Mrs Sarah: Nice to meet you, Hal Mrs Sarah: Rất vui gặp ông, Hal: The pleasure is mine, Mrs ông Hal Shanahan Wow I can see whereMr Hal: Thật vinh dự cho tôi, bà Rosemary gets her beauty Sarah Giờ biết Rosemary xinh đến The praise of Rosemary’s beauty seems to be an indirect compliment paid to her mother although there is nothing about Mrs Sarah is mentioned Situation 3: Mary and Magma are talking about Mary’s boyfriend English Vietnamese Magma: Này, chàng trai may Magma: So, who’s the lucky guy? Mary: His name’s Pat I met him at a mắn ? Mary: Tên anh Pat Mình gặp party last month anh bữa tiệc tháng trước In this situation, Mary is indirectly complimented with the expression ‘the lucky guy’, which refers to the man she goes out with The expression ‘the lucky guy’ presupposes that she has a whole range of positive qualities and that the guy who she is seeing is very lucky to have such a girl 2.3.2 Compliments involving a comparison The type of implicit compliments involving a comparison between the addressee and someone he/she thinks highly of are also quite abundant, but the comparison may be either extended to someone the speaker values highly or may take the form of a relation of some different kind, for example that of group inclusion So the complimentee is shown praise because he/she is a member of a set This is the case of both examples below 11 Situation 1: Bill is a doctor, and Gayle and Bill are talking about his job English Vietnamese Gayle: Do you know what’s so niceGayle: Bạn biết làm bác sĩ có about doctors? hay không? Bill: What? Bill: Là vậy? Gayle: They always seem so Gayle: Họ thường hiểu biết knowledgeable I bet you work too Mình cá cậu học chăm hard, man The example shows how the complimentee is praised for being part of a group of people that are the object of esteem, i.e doctors The fact that Bill, the addressee of the compliment, is himself a doctor is explicitly mentioned only when Gayle switches from the general pronoun ‘they’ to the inclusive ‘you’ in ‘I bet you work too hard’ Situation 2: John and Peter are talking about Messy, an Argentina football player English Vietnamese John: Did you watch the match last Gayle: Cậu xem trận hôm qua không? night? Bill: Tất nhiên, Messy chơi hay thật Bill: Of course, Messy was great Gayle: Anh Maradonna Gayle: He is another Maradonna I betMình cá đội anh vô địch his team will be the champion The comparison is actually a compliment to praise Messy for his performance Messy is compared to Maradonna, a talented football player Being ‘another Maradonna” is a dream of every footballer However, in this case, both speaker and hearer must share the same knowledge of the compared person, or else it may lead to communication breakdown 12 3: CONCLUSION 3.1.Recapitulation The study provides a deep insight into compliments Firstly, it reveals the ways to give compliments in English i.e the types of compliments: formulaic and implicit compliments Secondly, the success of these compliments with the addressees were measured i.e what the addressee means and/or what illocutionary aims are by giving the compliment Finally, Vietnamese translations of these compliments were compared to the original ones 3.2 Concluding remarks In the sum, the present research has found some new interesting findings related to critical approaches to interpreting compliments The limited data that has been analyzed so far suggests that in the Vietnamese translations, there appears to be a preference to compliment people on their personal qualities rather than on their performance, yet English original compliments focus more on performance Besides, the verbs used in English ones are stable verb i.e to be, yet, in Vietnamese, action verbs are often exploited instead Generally speaking, there is a marked preference for omissions and reductions in translation, where any small change, compensated by the other communicative codes, does not drastically affect pragmatic meaning Implicit compliments may be more costly to understand as they require a good degree of shared knowledge between the collocutors, but they certainly reduce the potential threat to the addressee’s negative face that often emerges in the form of embarrassment in front of overt compliments, on which occasions the complimentee tends to respond so as to downplay the expressed praise On the contrary, with implicit compliments the complimentee finds it less difficult to accept the content of the assertion made by the speaker Moreover, in the examples of implicit compliments there is no verbal response because the implicit structure of the speech act allows the addressee to remain silent For the last research question, Vietnamese translations are quite similar to the original ones, especially in implicit compliments, in which the structures and word choices seem to remain the same In explicit comments, Vietnamese ranges of vocabulary and structure used are wider than the English ones More importantly, stable verbs in English compliments are often translated by action verbs in Vietnamese 13 3.3 Limitations of the study Though this research has been conducted to the best of the researcher’s efforts, there remains several limitations involving the design of data collection instrument, the participants and the scope Firstly, there are some limitations with the data collection instruments of the present study The situations in the study were just hypothetical In terms of the examples, the research involved only a small amount of situations Therefore, these ones by no means could generalize the compliments in both languages Also, the research did not take account of background variables such as their personalities, gender, age or topic, which can affect their compliments 3.4 Suggestions for further studies For studies on the same topic, there were two suggestions as follows: First, this research an be upgraded with more preeminent data collection instruments such as using survey questionnaire, observation and interviews Questionnaire may be designed based on the result of observation, which helps avoid hypothtical situations Then, interviews may help to explore further understanding Next, further studies should be conducted with broader target population to increase the generalisability of the findings Also, to enhance the validity, the background variables such as their personalities, gender, age or topic should be explored XÁC NHẬN CỦA THỦ TRƯỞNG ĐƠN VỊ Thanh Hóa, ngày tháng năm Tôi xin cam đoan SKKN viết, không chép nội dung người khác (Ký ghi rõ họ tên) 14 4: REFERENCES Boyle, R 2000 “’You’ve worked with Elizabeth Taylor!’: Phaticfunctions and implicit compliments” Applied Linguistics 21(1): 26-46 of compliments in subtitles”, Bruti, S.(forth.) “The translation Multilingual Matters Bruti, Silvia (2006), Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: The Translation of Impli- cit Compliments in Subtitles JosTrans (http://www.jostrans.org), Proce- edings of Media for all – Internaional Conference on Audiovisual Translation, Barcelona, 6th-8th June 2005 Marisa / Large, Heather / Pardo, Verónica (1995), Cordella, Complimenting Behavior in Australian English and Spanish Speech, in: “Multilin- gua” 14/3, 235-252 Goffman, Erving (1967), Interaction Ritual Garden City, Doubleday Golato, Andrea (2003), Studying Compliment Responses: A Comparison of DCTs and Recordings of Naturally Occurring Talk, in: “Applied Linguistics” Golato, Andrea (2004), Compliments and Compliment Responses Grammatical structure and sequential organization Amsterdam/Philadelphia, John Benjamins Hatim, B and I Mason 2000 “Politeness in screen translating”, in Venuti, L (ed.) 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Contrastive Pragmatics Amsterdam, John Benjamins, 3-35 10.Herbert, R.K 1990 “Sex-based differences in compliment behavior” 11 Herbert, Robert K (1991), The Socio- logy of Compliment Work: An Ethno- contrastive Study of Polish and English, in: “Multilingua” 10/4, 381-402 (1989), Compliment12.Herbert, Robert K / Straight, H Ste- phen rejection versus Compliment Avoidance: Liste- ner-based versus Speakerbased Prag- matic Strategies “Language & Com- munication” 9/1, 3547 13.Holmes, J 1988 “Paying compliments: a sex-preferential politeness strategy” Journal of Pragmatics 12: 445-465 15 14.Holmes, Janet (1986), Compliments and Compliment Responses in New Ze- aland English, in: “Anthropological Linguistics” 28/4, 485-508 15.Quang, Vo Dai 2000 Một số đặc điểm tư văn hóa phản ánh kiểu loại câu hỏi tiếng Anh Việt Hội thảo khoa học toàn quốc “Thành tố văn hóa dạy-học ngoại ngữ” 16.Thomas, J 1995 Meaning in Interaction Harlow: Longman 17.Wolfson, N essa/Manes , J oan (1980), The Compliment as a Social Strategy, in: “Papers in Linguistics: International Journal of Human Communication” 13/3, 391-410 18.Wolfson, Nessa (1983), “An Empi- rically Based Analysis of Compli- menting in English”, in: Wolfson, Nessa/Judd, Elliot (eds.) Sociolingui- stics and Language Acquisition Row- ley, Ma., Newbury House, 82-95 19.Wolfson, N 1981 “Compliments in cross-cultural perspective” TESOL Quarterly 15(2): 117-124 16 ... the light on some major ways to give and interpret English compliments Thus, it provides an insight into Vietnamese and English- speaking cultures, contributing to the mutual understanding between... requests and criticism; to open and sustain conversation; to reinforce desired behavior As Winston Brembeck points out, to know another’s language and not his culture is a very good way to make... insights into the compliment issue 1.2 Aims of the study Firstly, the researcher would like to explore the ways to give compliments of British and Americans Secondly, the success of these compliments