HEDGED PERFORMATIVES IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE – A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS

Abstract

This thesis aimed to investigate the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic aspects of Hedged performatives in English and Vietnamese. We examined a variety of linguistic devices functioning to create the speaker/writer’s hedges which existed in various structures of nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs in both these languages. This qualitative study was carried out in a contrastive analysis with English as L2 and Vietnamese as L1. It was based on a theoretical framework of speech act, epistemic modality, cooperative and politeness principles. The corpus of 500 English samples and 500 Vietnamese ones randomly gathered from different sources such as novels, newspaper articles, essays, and interviews encrypted both in print and on the internet was divided into four kinds of syntactic structures mentioned above. Then they were used to discover the semantics and pragmatics of hedged performatives under the framework of epistemic modality, and politeness theory for a suitable transfer. The drawings from findings and discussions help Vietnamese learners of English use hedged performatives effectively in their particular communication situations.