Generic reference and social ontology in Vietnamese conversation

Signs of Deference, Signs of Demeanour: Interlocutor Reference and Self-Other Relations across Southeast Asian Speech Communities. , 2023

In Djenar, D. N. and J. Sidnell (Eds.) Signs of Deference, Signs of Demeanour: Interlocutor Reference and Self-Other Relations across Southeast Asian Speech Communities. National University of Singapore (NUS) Press.

2018

This study investigates the cultural logic underpinning interactions in Vietnamese language and culture, adopting the ethnopragmatic research paradigm originating within the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) framework. The study draws on a variety of data sources, including two sets of original survey data and Vietnamese folk sayings and proverbs. First, the study seeks to elaborate the semantic and pragmatic content of key words for Vietnamese cultural conceptualisation in the forms of semantic explications and cultural scripts, using metapragmatic survey data. In this exploration, two overarching cultural schemas, namely quan hệ ('relationship') and thứ bậc ('hierarchy'), are identified and several intertwined social categories, normative values and communicative virtues, underpinning the cultural logic of interaction explained. The study then seeks to discover how this cultural logic illuminates Vietnamese ideas about the management of 'disagreement' in ...

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2013

In Vietnamese, address (second-person reference) is typically accomplished by the use of a kin term regardless of whether the talk’s recipient is a genealogical relative or not. All Vietnamese kin terms encode a specification of either relative age or relative generation of participants, and there are no reciprocal terms akin to English ‘brother’ or ‘sister’; rather, a speaker must select between terms such as ‘older brother’ (anh) or ‘younger sibling’ (em). Since generation is normatively associated with a difference in age, the result is a ubiquitous indexing of age and status hierarchies in all acts of address. This results in a problem for peers. How, in such a system, should they address one another (and also self-refer)? In this article, we describe the various practices that speakers use to subvert the system and thus avoid indexing differences of age or station. Specifically, we describe four practices: (1) the use of true pronouns in address and self-reference; (2) the use of proper names in address and self-reference; (3) the use of kin terms in address and pronouns in self-reference; and (4) the ironic use of kin terms in address. We conclude that the Vietnamese system well illustrates what is likely a universal tension between hierarchy and equality in acts of address and self-reference, by showing how speakers deconstruct the vector of age and indicate that they consider one another peers. We further suggest that although the literature in this area has focused on the ways in which languages convey differences of status and rank, social order is built as much upon relations of parity and sameness – on identification of the other as neither higher nor lower than me – as it is upon relations of hierarchy.

Journal of Asian Linguistic Anthropology, 2020

FULL VERSION HERE: https://jala.pub/v2-i3-a1/ The study of honorific pronouns largely grew out of work on European languages (Brown and Gilman 1960; Friedrich 1966; Paulston 1976; Slobin 1963) and has developed into a prodigious, and in many ways, fertile literature on so-called "address systems" (Brown & Ford 1961; Braun 1988). Nevertheless, some 60 years after the publication of Brown and Gilman‟s (1960) foundational essay, “The Pronouns of Power and Solidarity,” it is perhaps time to imagine how the same discursive phenomena would have been framed with a different empirical point of departure. Here we reconceptualize this domain by focusing on the social pragmatics of speaker- and addressee-reference in Southeast Asian, as well as some East Asian, languages. Reimagined from this vantage point, pronominal address emerges as but one half of a more encompassing domain – the social pragmatics of interlocutor reference. Southeast Asian languages provide speakers with a much wider range of formal resources and functional mechanisms for signaling the relationship between speech act participants (and between these participants and third parties) than do European languages. Formally, Southeast Asian languages are notable for the range of non-pronominal, open-class nouns which can be employed in speaker- and addressee-reference. Functionally, the social indexing of the relationship between speaker and addressee is not only grammaticalized in forms that are employed to refer to the addressee. On the contrary, these languages are notable for elaborating social pragmatic distinctions in speaker-reference as well as addressee-reference. Because Southeast Asian languages recruit a much more expansive range of forms in denoting speech act participants, and because they are not functionally restricted to addressee-reference in activating social pragmatic alternations, they offer the kind of maximally differentiated systems which enable the construction of typological generalizations and implicational universals.

2015

This paper reports the findings of an in-progress study into the cultural logic of Vietnamese interaction. In particular, it elaborates a dichotomy between two social categories in Vietnamese interpersonal relationships. Drawing on two data sets, namely folk data and metapragmatic data, the findings indicate that in Vietnamese interpersonal relationships there is a clear-cut distinction between ngươi nha (‘family people’) and ngươi ngoai (‘outsiders’). Whereas the kinship-related category of ngươi nha (‘family people’) is confined with one’s tie to shared experience in the same (extended) family, the category of ngươi ngoai (‘outsiders’) is heterogeneous since it is broadly related to all non-kinship people. The interpersonal relationships in this category are affected by several socio-cultural variables, predominantly the mutual “knowledge” about each other and the frequency of contact, creating a dyad of subcategories: ngươi quen (‘acquaintances’) vs. ngươi lạ (‘strangers’). Withi...

2012

Journal of South East Asian Linguistic Society, 2022

This note discusses the fact that in Vietnamese, speakers and hearers can refer to themselves by pronouns, proper names, or relational nouns. This makes Vietnamese different from English and many other languages which require discourse participants to refer to themselves by pronouns only. We sketch an account for this difference which involves a syntactically represented speech act level, a parameterization of Rule I with respect to its candidate set, and a well-formedness principle concerning the structure of bound nominals.

This is a PowerPoint presentation given at the NACCL-29 at Rutgers University on June 16, 2017. It reviews lexical and sociopragmatic aspects of the Vietnamese system of terms of reference and address, including pronouns, kin-derived terms, titles, and names, and considers the impact that Chinese has historically had from the Han Dynasty up through the pre-modern era. While lexical and pragmatic aspects clearly have Chinese influence, Southeast Asian regional influence and internal innovation have also been major parts of the process of development of the overall system. Periods of timing are considered, partly based on historical phonological patterns in Sino-Vietnamese and partly based on historically documented periods of more intense Chinese language contact. Phan's 2013 hypothesis of Annamese Chinese is supported as the data requires a large bilingual population for such vocabulary and sociopragmatics to spread. Notes are embedded in the PDF.

The aim of this paper is to raise certain issues and problems in regard to the negotiation of the manifestations of globalization that the native speaker of a globally " non-mainstream " language has to engage in, particularly in the practical domains of the everyday lived experience of large numbers of people for whom the fruits of globalization seem, at best, to be of uncertain attainability. It begins with the premise that such practical domains of experience are common to both the Indian and the Vietnamese social and sociolinguistic situations: for vast numbers of people, access to a " dominantly globalizing " language such as English and (especially in the Vietnamese case) French remains remote, while the potential for the use of the native languages in the domains of technological and political interventions remains largely untapped. This has the danger of translating into the imposition – onto the native speakers of our countries – of conceptions of what are to be positively valued in life as encoded in the value-systems of the speakers of the " dominantly globalizing " languages, at the serious cost of not only the loss of the existing value-systems encoded in the native speakers' languages, but also the possibility of the rise of fundamentalist identity politics that is essentially anti-people and runs counter to the aspirations of social justice that exist on a wide scale among the people of both India and Vietnam.