EXPRESSING GRATITUDE IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE: A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF THE SPEECH ACT OF THANKING

This study offers a contrastive analysis of the speech act of thanking in English and Vietnamese, examining it on three planes: semantic content, pragmatic strategy, and cultural motivation. Thanking is treated as an expressive speech act in the sense of Austin (1962) and Searle (1975), through which the speaker conveys a positive psychological state towards a benefit conferred by the hearer. Drawing on examples from everyday conversation, literary works, and film dialogue in the two languages, the study finds four substantive similarities: the core propositional content of gratitude, the dominance of direct conventionalised strategies, the use of address terms as politeness devices, and the use of intensifiers to upgrade the force of the act. It further identifies five systematic differences: the semantic scope and frequency with which thanks are verbalised, the preference for concise versus expanded strategies, the degree of structural fixedness, the range of intensifying and affective devices, and the way thanks are used in response to compliments. These differences are explained with reference to positive versus norm-based politeness (Brown & Levinson, 1987), individualist versus collectivist orientations (Hofstede, 2001), and the interpersonal richness of Vietnamese grammar (Halliday, 1994). The paper closes with pedagogical implications for developing intercultural pragmatic competence in Vietnamese learners of English and in learners of Vietnamese.