Common connectors in argumentation in English and Vietnamese
For the past decades, linguistics has strongly developed, which is proved by more and
more branches being added and a variety of researches and studies being carried out. Among
those branches, pragmatics can be said a new and an extremely appealing area of linguistics.
According to George Yule (1986), "pragmatics is the study of the relationships between
linguistic forms and the users of those forms”. Therefore, studying and mastering pragmatics
can lay foundation to the solving of paramount problems of communication.
Pragmatics deals with many issues including conversational implication, argumentation
theory, speech act theory, politeness and so on. Among them argumentation theory is of
great importance. So far, a lot of philosophers, logicians, legal scholars speech communication
theorists have been concerned about this interdisciplinary field. Clearly, the final aim of
communication is that the listeners can grasp what the speakers mean and the aims they want
to reach. Yet, daily communication is not smooth, so problems are unavoidable. Therefore,
solving the problems of argumentation is very important and argumentation is really an
appealing area.
Argumentation can be explored in various aspects such as semantics, syntax, pragmatics,
logic...However, this study limits itself to semantic and functional aspects.
There are two subtypes of argumentation: co-orientation (supportive) and anti-
orientation (contrastive) argumentation. This study limits itself to supportive argumentation
only. The connectors expressing supportive argumentation are various such as and, also, too,
as well, similarly, in the same way, moreover, what’s more, furthermore and so on. Among
these, we choose “and”, “also”, “too” and “moreover” to study in our research for two main
reasons. First, the four connectors are very common in supportive argumentation. Second, it is
difficult for us to cover all of these connectors at the same time due to time limitation.
Therefore, we would rather study four of them instead of all.
The study is full of terminology that seems to be strange and difficult for learners at the first
time to encounter. The definition of terms is hoped to be treated as a tool for exploring the
thesis.
* Argument: a set of claims put forward offering support for a further claim. An
argument is composed of the supporting claim(s) and the supported claim. A person offers an
argument when he or she tries to justify a claim by offering reasons for it.
* Argumentation: the whole set of discursive strategies of a speaker A who addresses a
hearer B in order to alter, in a certain way, the judgment of B about a situation S.
* Premise: a supporting reason in an argument. It is put forward as being acceptable
and providing rational support for a further claim.
* Conclusion: the claim for which premises are intended as support in an argument. It
is this claim that the arguer tries to make credible.
* Operator: words and expressions that can determine argumentative orientation and
constrain the argumentative potential in arguments.

* Connector: words and expressions that can combine two or more utterances into an
argument.
* Standpoint: a type of statement, carry a burden of proof and must be defended
against criticism.
* Topos: gradual inference rules that capture "commonsense" relations, e.g. the more
difficult a class is, the less a student wants to take it.
* Illocutionary act: the communicative goal that a speaker intends to accomplish with
an utterance.
* Implicature: inferences based on the meaning of an utterance, the Cooperative
Principle and the maxims and in some cases the context.
* Proposition: the informational content of any statement or assertion. To qualify a
proposition, a statement must be capable of being true or false