Vietnamese address terms: affective meanings and translational challenges in ESL classroom contexts

2014 Linguistics Seminar Series

Presented by THOAI TON NU LINH, Linguistics UNE

10-11.30am Wednesday 20th August 2014

UNE Oorala Lecture Theatre

All Welcome

Speakers of the Vietnamese language have access to a great variety of address terms that can be utilized depending on the speaker's intentions of communication in specific contexts. This individual choice of address terms varies from one person to another and it may reflect their personal as well as social background: their age, social class, their relationship to the other interlocutor(s), and even their emotion at the time of the event or speech act. This project combines three branches of applied linguistics, namely pragmatics, translation studies and ESL teaching and uses insights from these three areas of research to contribute new empirical and theoretical ideas on how systems of address implicate emotions of speakers. It draws on Vietnamese address terms to illustrate the particular point about linkages between linguistic usages and the expression of emotions; and argues that affection is not an intrinsic property of Vietnamese address terms. Rather, it is the interlocutors' intention to express their emotions at the moment of the speech act which then ascribes affective meanings to these terms.The researcher also seeks to investigate how these terms are used to express emotion in translation works, and to help identify the awareness among English-major students in Vietnam of affective meanings of Vietnamese address terms, which could have some theoretical and practical applications in other comparable societies internationally. This is a qualitative-research study, employing ethnography of communication, ethno-pragmatics  and content analysis as major techniques of methodology.