Volume 3, Issue 1

The apology is a speech act which has deep and wide social and psychological significance. In both popular and academic notions of politeness it is perhaps the example par excellence of politeness at work. As Holmes (1998: 217), rightly, contends, “the apology is quintessentially a politeness strategy”. In both public and private interaction, the need for an apology signifies that something has gone wrong and needs to be put right. In terms of spoken encounters, to utter an apology involves the speaker acknowledging some perceived social transgression and the hearer receiving and dealing with this act. The apology arguably puts both speaker and hearer in a precarious relational position and necessitates remedial “facework” (Goffman 1971), usually involving some form of linguistic management. Furthermore, the nature of the apology can be very important in resolving a variety of types of conflict, ranging from uncomfortable moments in conversation through serious breaches of social and/or cultural norms by an individual to incidents with national or international political significance (See Zhang 2001; Harris et al. forthcoming; Jeffries forthcoming). As such, apologies, along with requests, have probably generated more research in the past two decades than any other form of speech act. Much of this research has emerged in relation to pragmatics and politeness theory but has also come from a variety of other disciplines, i. e., sociolinguistics, social psychology, philosophy and foreign language teaching.

Children's apologies are greatly under-researched. Though there is wealth of information available on the pragmatics of apologies generally, we know much less about whether and how children apologize. Our study explores modes of remedial work by Israeli children in peer discourse. The data were collected through ethnographic observation of Israeli preschool and preadolescents, and consist of 57 (taped and transcribed) apology events identified in natural peer interactions. The analysis of children's apology events revealed a rich range of apology strategies used by 4–6 year old children, indicating the acquisition of remedial competencies for face management at a relatively early age and showed that with age, a richer range of potential violations is identified, and more elaborate forms of repair are being used, indicating a growing sensitivity to the other's face needs. Furthermore, we found that adult intervention in children's conflictual situations serves to model remedial strategies, but is not necessarily effective for conflict resolution. Importantly, peer talk apology events index the centrality of friendship in young children's social world: breaches from expected behavior in play are taken as face threatening to the core of friendship, namely the children's shared face as friends, and hence can function to end (even if temporarily) the friendship. Consequently, in such cases, the restoration of friendship becomes a necessary precondition for the felicitous realization of an apology.

A small corpus of student e-mail apologies to academic staff was collected in order to investigate the nature and structure of the apology act. The event apologized for can vary in two independent dimensions: whether it is internal to the discourse or not, and whether it concerns a past, present, or predicated future act. Much of the data consisted of apologies occurring alongside other acts: the apology was often not the main business. Why, then, do students apologize to staff, particularly when apology is a minor function? The concepts of equity and equilibrium are used to explicate this usage: apologies are employed to pay debts/gain credit within this institutional relationship. A previously undescribed apology strategy which is focused on improving the writer's standing as a “good student” or “good person” (and thus their credit balance) is also identified. This strategy – which we have termed but-justification – is used to show that although an offence may have been committed, such behaviour is not indicative of the student's “right relationship” and “pious attitude” (Goffman 1971:118) to their institutional role qua student.

The article reports on a contrastive study of apologies in native and “nativized” varieties of English and the South African variety of Setswana. Quantitative data were elicited by means of discourse completion tasks (DCT) along the lines of the Cross Cultural Speech Act Realization Patterns (CCSARP) project's framework. Qualitative data were elicited by means of video-taped role plays. A statistical analysis of the DCT supports the prediction of significant differences in the use of pragmalinguistic resources in apologizing between, on the one hand, Setswana and the nativized variety of English, and, on the other, the native variety of English. This is especially true of the use of the responsibility strategy. There, thus, seems to be a reasonable avenue for theorizing from the speakers' predominant politeness and apology realization on language-specific patterns. Apologizing is a prime case of face-work because it is a redressive speech act to repair an offensive or face-threatening act and, thus, restore harmonious, orderly, or friendly interaction. However, our findings call for an interpretation of group- or community-based face, not an individual one. For this purpose, we offer an ethnographic analysis inspired by the “cultural scripts” framework. Finally, these findings can be used to foster awareness about different sociopragmatic features and pragmalinguistic means and the potential for pragmatic failure in different-culture same-language interaction.

While the speech act of apology has been investigated in a number of languages and cultures, there has been little research into apologies in Greek. Apology studies have tended to identify apology strategies, without taking into account the effect of the wider cultural context on apologies motivation and strategies, and have also tended not to include apology responses in their analyses. Remedial work, however, involves both apologies and replies to them (Goffman 1971). Based on data from a recent Greek TV reality game show, this paper looks at apologies and apology responses (“remedial interchanges”, Goffman 1971), analyzing in detail the context in which they occurred and the relationship between interactants. The main aims are to identify: (1) the constituent elements of an offence and the factors that determine its weightiness; (2) the degree to which face, social distance and power determine the weightiness of an offence, the recipients' responses, and the strategies and language used in the remedial interchanges, and (3) the degree to which these are culturally determined. This involves an investigation of the components of face and relations of power and solidarity in Greek society as well as of the ways the game show manipulates interpersonal relations and foregrounds Greek traditions and cultural values by explicitly attempting to contravene them.

The present paper aims (a) to reconstruct the formal peculiarities of historical Chinese apology (HCA), and (b) to apply the data gained to reexamine the concept of “discernment”. In the first part of the study I look into the interactional application of ritualised formulae of apology (apology-RF), with the aid of historical pragmatics. The examination not only reveals the characteristics of apology-RF, but also shows the fact that they and elevating/denigrating terms of address (EA/DAs, cf. Kádár 2005a; forthcoming) correlated in HCA. In the second part of the study I try to reinforce the findings of studies that deny the claim that the use of honorifics/ritualised formulae was definitely non-strategic, as is asserted according to the so-called “discernment” aspect of linguistic politeness. HCA provides a corpus that is appropriate for analysing this issue because, as the first part of the study shows, in old China apology was practiced via honorific/ritualised formulae, the contextual application of which was constrained by strict sociolinguistic rules. As the examination of the honorific formulae of HCA shows, in spite of their “fixed” contextual application schemata, in a number of cases the speakers intentionally deviated from these to attain personal discourse goals.

Chilton, Paul (2004). Analysing Political Discourse: Theory and Practice . London and New York: Routledge. Hardback ISBN 0-415-31471-2; Paperback ISBN 0-415-31472-0. 226 pp. Price: Pb £ 19.99. (Keith Green) Lakoff, Robin T. and Sachiko Ide (eds.), (2005). Broadening the Horizon of Linguistic Politeness. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Hardback ISBN 90-272-5382-X; 342 pp. Price USD $ 144 / Euro 120. (Chris Christie) Taavitsainen, Irma and Andreas H. Jucker (2003). Diachronic Perspectives on Address Term Systems . Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Hardback ISBN 90-272-5348-X (Eur.)/1-56611-310-8 (US); 441 pp. Price: Euro 130.00/USD $ 156.00. (Dániel Z. Kádár)