Abstract
This article discusses the results of a case study on strategies used by Cameroon French speakers to apologize in situations involving friends and superiors. The data of the study were collected by means of a Discourse completion Task Questionnaire that was administered to two groups of university students. The findings show that the participants used a wide range of direct and indirect apology strategies and that the apology utterances mostly occurred in speech act sets, which generally involved combinations of direct and indirect apologies and supportive acts. The results also reveal the use of nominal address terms, codeswitching and some indigenized patterns of French to modify the illocutionary force of apologies. Overall, the linguistic and pragmatic choices made by the respondents varied according to degree of familiarity and power distance between the interlocutors.<p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0949/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>
Highlights
This paper presents the results of a case study of linguistic and pragmatic strategies used by speakers of French in Cameroon to apologize in two situations – (a) apologizing for having broken a vase belonging to a friend; (b) apologizing to for arriving late for an appoint with a professor
The findings reveal that the participants used a wide range of strategies to accomplish remedial work and that factors such as the nature of the offence committed, the level of familiarity between the speaker and the hearer, and the power distance between the interaction partners played an important role in the choices and combinations of apology strategies
With respect to the complexity of remedial work performed, the analysis reveals that the informants mostly used complex apology utterances
Summary
This paper presents the results of a case study of linguistic and pragmatic strategies used by speakers of French in Cameroon to apologize in two situations – (a) apologizing for having broken a vase belonging to a friend; (b) apologizing to for arriving late for an appoint with a professor. The aim of the study is to add to a growing body of research on Cameroon French pragmatics. The structure of the paper is as follows. After this introduction, the section presents the theoretical framework of the study while section 3 focuses on aspects of the methodology used. The findings of the study are presented and discussed, and it will be followed by a discussion and summary of the main results of the study.
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