Abstract
The acts of apologizing and responding to apology are common activities in communication since using only either of these two crucial speech acts cannot itself establish fully effective communication. This article aims to examine response strategies to apology that are used in English romance and family films and find out the lexico-grammatical realizations of response utterances in English conversations. This article was qualitatively designed with the support of the researchers’ observation of the films' scripts extracted from English films, subsequently the researchers’ description of the data collection into separate categories. The results of this study revealed that English film characters were more likely to accept than reject apologies. Direct positive comments were favoured by the English, with indirect positive responses coming in second.
Highlights
It could be widely understood that the act of apology responding occurs after the act of apologizing; these two speech acts play an important role in conversations and have inter-related relationships with each other
Response Strategies to Apology in English Conversations Regarding the response strategies, the researcher applied the apology response strategies (ARSs) taxonomy proposed by Homes (1990, 1995) to examine what ARSs the characters from romance and family film contexts often utilized when communicating in English
From the exchanges extracted from English conversations in film scripts and film subtitles, the researcher found out that in some situations, the apologizees did not say anything to make a response to the apologizers; by contrast, in some different cases, the apologizees tended to take advantage of several ARSs to respond the apologizers
Summary
It could be widely understood that the act of apology responding occurs after the act of apologizing; these two speech acts play an important role in conversations and have inter-related relationships with each other. Many researchers have so far investigated a speech act of apologizing in the light of pragmatics, cross-cultural, intercultural, or sociopragmatics. Awedyk (2011) found out that Norwegian tended to employ direct strategies more often than other apology strategies. This result seems to be in accordance with Trang (2017), who investigated why students at the University of Foreign Language Studies – The University of Danang (UFLS-UD) apologized, and which apology strategies were employed. Regarding the latter, direct strategies were most frequently used, followed by a promise of forbearance and accounts, respectively.
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