Linguistic Features Of Verbal Repairs In English And Vietnamese Conversations

Abstract

The study investigated linguistic features of verbal repairs in English and Vietnamese Conversations. The type of this research was qualitative, quantitative, deductive, descriptive and contrastive research. This study used 372 daily conversations from 23 English television films and 385 daily conversations from 39 Vietnamese television films to analyze the pragmatic, semantic and syntactic features of verbal repairs. The research used the theory of conversation analysis and repair of Schegloff et al. (1977)In addition, the cooperative principles of Grice (1975), classification of illocutionary act of Searle (1969) were used to find out the pragmatic features. Semantic and syntactic features of verbal repairs were analyzed on the basis of the viewpoints of functional grammar by Halliday (1994) and then they were concretized by Downing (2015). Some aspects such as the frequencies of the use of the repairs, the functions of the repairs, the violation of Grice’s maxims, the experiential meanings of the repairs, the techniques of the repairs were to be compared. The results revealed that for pragmatic features: English speakers used self and other-repair for the functions of representatives whereas Vietnamese speakers used self and other-repair for the functions of expressives. The findings showed that English speakers violated the maxim of cooperative principle of Grice (1975) because either they did not provide enough information or their information was not clear. Vietnamese speakers used self and other-repairs for their own communicative purposes. For semantic features, the study showed that S and S1 in the extracts of English and Vietnamese film conversations repaired the experiential meanings of 5 processes: material, mental, relational, verbal and existential processes in Downing (2015)’s classification. For syntactic features, the findings revealed that S and S1 in the extracts of English and Vietnamese film conversations used the techniques such as recycling, replacing, inserting, adding to repairs after a noun, verb, preposition, adjective and clause.