Abstract
This paper uses conversation analysis to examine when Vietnamese speakers explicitly mark the source of represented talk or thought (RT) and when they may omit the RTs source in narratives in dyadic and multiparty family conversations. In Vietnamese, a pro-drop, non-inflectional language, RTs may be introduced by a verb of speaking and its subject, a verb of speaking without the subject, or no verb of speaking and no subject. The analysis focuses on how these three choices are employed in the sequential organization of narrative series, narrative participation frameworks, and narrative dramatization. The findings contribute to current understandings about source marking through linguistic devices as an interactional practice in conversations in addition to other resources such as voicing and embodied actions.
About the author
Hanh thi Nguyen (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison) is associate professor of applied linguistics at Hawai‘i Pacific University, USA. Her publications include Talk-in-interaction: Multilingual perspectives (coedited with Gabriele Kasper), Developing interactional competence: A conversation analytic study of patient consultations in pharmacy, and various articles and book chapters on interactional competence, the construction of social relationships in talk-in-interaction, and Vietnamese applied linguistics.
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Appendix
Abbreviations used in gloss translation (based on Hoang, 1994)
- Conn.:
Connector (là occurs between verbs of speaking and quoted material)
- DisM:
Discourse marker (utterance-initial thôi is used to persuade recipient to stop an ongoing action)
- EmM:
Emphasis marker (cứ asserts what is said is the case regardless; cũng affirms the utterance; utterance-final đi emphasizes the utmost and highest degree of the action or state mentioned, utterance-final; thôi persuades the recipient that they do not need to consider the matter further)
- PlM:
Plural marker (các marks the following noun as plural)
- StaM:
Stance marker (chứ indicates that what is being said is opposite to what the recipient may expect; lại/lị indicates that the action or event being referred to is contrary to what is normally expected)
- QuesM:
Question marker (utterance-final à marks the utterance as a question)
- TopM:
Topic marker (thì, là mark the preceding phrase as the topic)
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