Apologizing in English, Polish and Hungarian: Different languages, different strategies

Abstract

Much of the cross-cultural research into the speech act of apologizing has focused on the phenomenon of non-native communicative competence and less on cross-cultural data for their own sake. This paper is an attempt at a more detailed analysis of a small portion of data from a corpus of English, Hungarian, and Polish written responses to a discourse completion test, with the goal of highlighting differences in the realizations of apologetic responses that can be found not only in the choice and sequential arrangement of strategies but also in the content and in the choice of linguistic form. It is believed that such a detailed analysis is essential in order to grasp important differences in cultural communicative styles and will be ultimately helpful in understanding different cultural values and assumptions concerning interpersonal conduct in West and Central Europe.