An investigation into syntactic and pragmatic features of asking for opinions in english and vietnamese

Abstract

This study attempts to investigate the syntactic and pragmatic features of asking for opinion (AFO) expressions in English and Vietnamese. It focuses on the ways people ask for someone’s opinion in both English and Vietnamese. The study aims at making Vietnamese learners be aware of AFO expressions and the differences in the use of both languages (English and Vietnamese) in order to have appropriate ways when it is necessary to use this kind of speech act so that they can achieve their purpose in a certain situation. To discuss the issue thoroughly, we employ the data from English and Vietnamese novels, short stories, books, magazines,… and even in some famous films. We also take into account social distance and social power to determine how they affect the ways people perform AFO expressions in English speaking countries and in Vietnamese. As regards methodology, this is a descriptive study executed in a contrastive analysis with English chosen as the source language and Vietnamese as the target language. Several strategies used in AFO expressions in English and Vietnamese are presented on the basic viewpoints about directness, indirectness and politeness by Jenny Thomas, Brown and Levinson. Also, implications about syntactic and pragmatic features of AFO expressions in English and Vietnamese have been proposed to the teaching and learning as well as achieving high communicative goals of English for Vietnamese learners.