A Cross-Cultural Study of Modality in the Speech Act of Asking for Permission

Abstract

This paper is concerned with a cross-cultural study of modality expressions in asking for permission by Vietnamese and English speakers. The study involved 209 Canadian and Vietnamese informants with the use of a Discourse Completion Task questionnaire. A total of 3000 utterances were chosen for analysis to gain insights into the frequency and types of lexico-modal markers manifested in the two languages. It is found that hearer-oriented verbal style tends to be dominant in Vietnamese while the speaker-oriented strategy is more favored in English. Vietnamese speakers tend to employ direct strategies with a dominant use of appealers which sounds intimate to the hearer. English speakers, by contrast, incline to conventionally-indirect strategies such as Can I, Could I, etc. It is also evident that Vietnamese speakers frequently use politeness markers when they communicate with the older, but they hardly use them for their peers. English speakers, however, use politeness markers for all partners with a slight variation. Another noteworthy similarity is that both Canadian and Vietnamese women modalize their language than men.