“Sorry it took me a long time to reply”: Sorry as a discourse-pragmatic feature in African Englishes

Abstract

This article examines the use of sorry as a discourse-pragmatic feature in three African varieties of English: Ghanaian English, Nigerian English and Ugandan English, in terms of its frequencies, forms, positioning, collocational patterns, pragmatic functions and use with different clause types and text types. The data for the study, which are extracted from the Ghanaian, Nigerian and Ugandan components of the International Corpus of English, are examined from a variational pragmatic framework, with insights from rapport management theory. The results show similarities and differences in the use of sorry in the three varieties. In all three varieties, sorry appears more often as a single lexical item than in other forms, occurs more frequently with declaratives, and appears more often in the clause-initial position. Moreover, sorry occurs more frequently in Nigerian English than in the other two varieties; it collocates more often with intensifiers and interjections in Ghanaian English, with honorifics and politeness markers in Nigerian English, and with interjections in Ugandan English. In addition, sorry is used to mark self-repair, regret, empathy, polite redirection, correction, mitigation and interruption at varying degrees in all three varieties. Possible first language influence may have led to some of the differences between the three varieties.