Apology Strategies Research Articles

A cross cultural apology episode of a diplomatic repair

Against the political backdrop of what was arguably the lowest point in the China-Japan relationship in modern times, China had called for Japan to take “concrete actions to face up with … its history of invasion”. In response, Japan’s then Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi, issued a public apology at the Asian-African Summit on 22nd April 2005. His choice of words, “deep remorse” and “heartfelt apology”, did little to assuage the Chinese. What did these words really mean in the context of speech acts of apology? Was the apology considered to be an apology? How does this episode of apology fall into the current discussion of apology strategies? Was there lexical avoidance? Was there any discourse difference compared to previous apologies? This paper will attempt to answer these questions.

Cross-Cultural Comparison of Verbal and Nonverbal Strategies of Apologizing

Two studies examined cultural differences in verbal and nonverbal apology strategies. Self-administered structured survey was employed with a convenience sample composed of undergraduates. U.S. American and Chinese participants were asked to answer questions regarding their choice of verbal and nonverbal apology strategies in a potentially apologetic situation. Study 1, using open-ended questions, and Study 2, using close-ended questions, yielded some different findings. For example, both the U.S. American and Chinese participants did not show significant differences in their apology strategies toward in-group and out-group members in Study 1, but the Chinese showed significant differences in their apology strategies toward in-group and out-group members in Study 2. Overall, the most common apology strategy in the given situation for both cultural groups was a simple apologetic statement. Other findings, implications, and limitations of these studies are discussed.

Development of Spanish requests and apologies during study abroad

The present study analyzed the requests and apologies of 67 U.S. American study abroad students before and after spending one semester in a Spanish-speaking country. Ratings of students' pragmatic appropriateness by Spanish native speakers indicated that, overall, students improved their request and apology performance over the course of the semester. An analysis of students' request and apology strategy use, both pre- and post-study abroad, found that in certain ways students shifted their behavior to more closely resemble that of Spanish native-speaker baseline data, but that in some cases, they also remained or moved away from native-speaker norms. Another objective of the study was to examine the possible associations between students' background characteristics, contact with Spanish, and gains in intercultural sensitivity with gains over time in rated request and apology performance. Of these variables, only two of the language contact variables yielded statistically significant results. This study contributes to our understanding of second language pragmatic development and the influence of individual characteristics and environmental factors.
 Recibido: 14-12-2007 / Aceptado: 07-08-2008
 How to reference this article:
 Shively, R. L. & Cohen, A. D. (2008). Development of Spanish requests and apologies during study abroad. Íkala. 13(2), pp.57-118.

On the culture-specificity of linguistic gender differences: The case of English and Russian apologies

Abstract The present paper analyzes the influence of gender and culture on speech act performance. Although culture as a factor shaping gender roles can be regarded as being implicitly addressed by the growing number of speech act studies analyzing gender differences in various languages, results from such studies are difficult to compare. This study examines responses to offensive situations produced under identical contextual conditions by English and Russian women and men, thus ensuring comparability across groups and allowing for statements on the culture-specificity of linguistic gender differences. The first part of the paper offers a contrastive analysis of English and Russian responses to offensive situations, sketching some culture-specific differences in dealing with them. The second part is devoted to an investigation of gender-based differences in English and Russian, their comparison and interpretation. Apart from apology strategies and intensifying devices, the study also examines the use of downgrading strategies and the effect of strategy combinations on the illocutionary force of the responses.

A cross-cultural comparison of apologies by native speakers of American English and Jordanian Arabic

This study investigates the apology strategies used by the speakers of American English and Jordanian Arabic. The various strategies used by the two groups, in addition to the causes of any potential differences, constitute the crux of the analysis. American and Jordanian respondents have been found to differ in their use of apology strategies. Differences involve using several manifestations of explicit apology among other less explicit apology strategies. The authors further examined the differences between male and female respondents in both groups and found that there were more differences between Jordanian male and female respondents than between American male and female respondents, which may be attributed to the fact that there is a greater similarity between how boys and girls are raised in the U.S. than between how they are raised in Jordan.

Cross cultural pragmatics: Apology strategies in Sudanese Arabic

In the last two decades, many studies have been conducted to investigate speech act performance in general, and apology speech act in particular. This genus of research has focused on western languages. However, more recently a number of studies have been carried out in eastern languages, with only a few in Arabic language varieties. The underlying motivation of speech act studies is to outline the pragmatic rules that govern the use of language in different cultures and to show how findings can be used to facilitate communication between people from different socio-cultural backgrounds. This study is an attempt to outline the type and extent of use of apology strategies in Sudanese Arabic and hence shed light on the socio-cultural attitudes and values of this community. The corpus examined was 1082 responses to a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) that consisted of 10 different social situations of varying severity of offense, strength of social relationship and power between hypothetical speakers and hearers. The informants were 110 college educated adults in Khartoum, Sudan. The survey was written in Sudanese dialect to elicit responses that approximate verbal apologies that might be given in these situations. The corpus was analyzed to determine the strategies used and the frequencies of their use. Although this is a pioneering study in its societal context, results support earlier findings suggesting the universality of apology strategies; however, the selection of apology strategies in this study reinforces the culture-specific aspect of language use. Despite the fact that a more restricted classification of apology strategies was used as a model for analyzing the data, the results are expected to be conducive to cross-cultural comparisons.

Effects of cultural background of college students on apology strategies

This article presents the research findings from a cross-cultural comparison of apology strategies written in English by two groups of college students. The study analyzed the e-mail correspondences for class absences from students to professors in two undergraduate classes, a technology class and a Chinese language class. It was found that the cultural background of the students and the course attendance policies were two major factors that caused different apology strategies. The differences are attributed to the different perceptions of social distance, politeness, severity of offense, and obligation for apology. It may be concluded that, although expressed in English and in the same given situation, the data present a great difference in the choice of apology strategies due to sociopragmatic and cultural interventions.

Do children apologize to each other? Apology events in young Israeli peer discourse

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.

“I can now apologize to you twice from the bottom of my heart”: Apologies in Greek reality TV

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.

Institutional apologies in UK higher education: Getting back into the black before going into the red

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.

Apology strategies of Jordanian EFL university students

This study is an investigation of Jordanian EFL university students’ apologies, using a 10-item questionnaire based on Sugimoto's (1997). The findings revealed that male and female respondents used the primary strategies of statement of remorse, accounts, compensation, promise not to repeat offense, and reparation. They also resorted to the use of non-apology strategies such as blaming victim and brushing off the incident as unimportant to exonerate themselves from blame. The findings further revealed that male and female respondents differed in the order of the primary strategies they used. In addition, female respondents opted for non-apology strategies that veered towards avoiding the discussion of offense while male respondents used those which veered towards blaming the victim. This research is hoped to have implications for ESL/EFL pedagogy as well as the study of intercultural communication. The researchers put forth a number of relevant recommendations for further research.

American University Students’ Apology Strategies: An Intercultural Analysis of the Effect of Gender

This study aims at investigating potential gender effects in American university students’ use of apologies within the framework of the two-culture theory which claims that men and women are so different that they comprise strikingly different cultures. The researchers used a 10-item questionnaire based on Sugimoto’s (1997). The findings revealed that male and female respondents used the primary apology strategies of statement of remorse, accounts, compensation, and reparation. They also resorted to the use of non-apology strategies such as blaming victim and brushing off the incident as not important to exonerate themselves from blame. The findings further revealed that male and female respondents used the same primary strategies but in different frequencies. In addition, female respondents used fewer non-apology strategies than their male counterparts and more manifestations of the statement of remorse. Both similarities to and differences from Sugimoto’s findings were detected.

An Investigation of the Use of Apology Strategies in English by the Taiwanese EFL College Students

The paper investigates Taiwanese college students' sociolinguistic competence in making apologies in English. The study includes six types of offence: social gaffe, space, talk, time, inconvenience, and possession. Apologies for twelve offence situations were elicited from fifty-two freshmen at an intermediate level of English. The results indicate that the majority of the elicited apologies were acceptable, with simple apologies dealing with the lighter offences and multiple apologies dealing with the heavier offences. However, there are still differences between the native and the nonnative apologies. For social gaffe, space, talk, time, and inconvenience, the native apologies relied heavily on Strategy A and combinations with All, whereas the nonnative apologies involved not only Strategy A and combinations with AB but also combinations with strategies other than A and 13. For possession, native apologies showed a heavy reliance on Strategy A, combinations of All, and combinations with A: whereas the normative apologies were mainly combinations containing AC. In relation to the severity of the offence, for light offences, the native apologies showed a heavy use of Strategy A and combinations of AB, whereas the nonnative apologies showed a heavy use of Strategy A and combinations with All or AC. For heavy offences, the native apologies made a heavy use of Strategy A and combinations with A and other types of combinations, whereas the nonnative apologies made a heavy use of Strategy A and combinations with AB or AC. The paper ends with a number of pedagogical implications.

Face-keeping strategies in reaction to complaints

This paper discusses a number of differences between English and Persian in the area of speech acts and links them with different cultural values and norms. The Persian speakers’ use of face-keeping strategies in reaction to complaints was compared with American English speakers’ performance. The most frequent face- saving strategy used by both groups in reaction to complaints was the apology speech act. Therefore, a cross-cultural comparison in the realization patterns of the apology speech acts between the two languages was performed. A detailed analysis of the use of the illocutionary force indicating device (IFID) strategies and supportive strategies revealed important differences in communicative styles of the two groups which can give us insights into understanding different cultural values, norms, and assumptions concerning interpersonal use of language in a Western and a non-Western language. It is shown that Persian speakers are more sensitive to contextual factors and vary their face-keeping strategies accordingly whereas English speakers mostly use one apology strategy and intensify it based on contextual factors.

The speech act of apology in IsiXhosa educational contexts

This article examines some of the characteristics of apologies in informal remedial interchanges in isiXhosa. The analysis presented covers the functions of apologies and the range of strategies used to apologize. The research is conducted within the broad context of Brown and Levinson's (1987) theory of politeness. Brown and Levinson's model provides a means of taking into account of a range of social factors which are likely to affect the way a speaker apologizes for an offense, and it is therefore possible to analyze the effect that different factors have on the apology strategies which speakers use in different contexts.

The concept of self and apology strategies in two cultures

The speech act of apologising aims at maintaining, restoring and enhancing interpersonal relationships. Most of the existing studies of apology in different languages and cultures follow the Brown and Levinson (1987) approach and describe apology as a ‘negative politeness’ strategy. In this paper, we study the use of apology by two groups of women from Japanese and British cultural backgrounds, in conjunction with an examination of the cultural conception of ‘self’. Using both standard test (Twenty Statements Test, TST) and questionnaire data, we demonstrate that important differences exist in the self concept of the two groups, and these differences are reflected in and impact on the women’s use of apologies in social interaction.

A Japan-U.S. Comparison of Apology Styles

This article compares U.S. and Japanese styles of apology. 200 U.S. and 181 Japanese college students were asked to construct messages indicating what the offender would say in response to potentially offending situations. The messages were deconstructed into minimal meaningful segments and were coded to indicate the apology strategies used. Members of both cultures reported that the offender would be more likely to respond than not. Beyond these basic norms of apology shared by the two cultures, cultural differences emerged in the use of various apology strategies. More U.S. than Japanese participants included accounts in their messages, whereas Japanese participants were more likely than U.S. participants to employ strategies such as statements of remorse, reparation, compensation, promise not to repeat the same offense, and requests for forgiveness. Given these findings, this study questions some of the presuppositions previously held regarding U.S. and Japanese communicative patterns.

Apologies in New Zealand English

ABSTRACTThe function of apologies is discussed within the context of a model of interaction with two intersecting dimensions – affective and referential meaning. Apologies are defined as primarily social acts conveying affective meaning. The syntactic, semantic, and sociolinguistic features of apologies are described, based on a corpus of 183 apologies. While apology exchanges divided equally between those which used a combination of strategies and those where a single strategy sufficed, almost all apology exchanges involved an explicit apology. An account is provided of the kinds of social relationships and the range of offenses which elicited apologies in this New Zealand corpus.Apologies are politeness strategies, and an attempt is made to relate the relative “weightiness” of the offense (assessed using the factors identified as significant in Brown and Levinson's model of politeness) to features of the apology strategies used to remedy it. Though some support is provided for Brown and Levinson's model, it is suggested that Wolf-son's “bulge” theory more adequately accounts for a number of patterns in the data. In particular, the functions of apologies between friends may be more complex than a simple linear model suggests. (Apologies, politeness, speech functions, New Zealand English, sociolinguistics, pragmatics)

Apologizing in Chilean Spanish and Australian English

Several studies across languages (Cohen and Olshtain, 1981; Olshtain, 1983; Trosborg, 1987; Holmes, 1989) investigated the different social and contextual factors that influence native speakers to select one or a group of “semantic formula(s)” (Fraser, 1981) in the act of apologizing. Nevertheless the literature is still in its infancy (Fraser, 1981 and Holmes, 1989) in respect to the gender differences between speaker (apologizer) and hearer (recipient), and in the comparison between Spanish and English. This paper aims to investigate the strategies and the semantic formulas that Chilean Spanish and Australian English native speakers use in the act of apologizing. A role play eliciting an apology was carried out in the participants’ mother tongue. Twenty two Chileans (twelve females and ten males) who had lived for not more than three years in Australia and twenty Australians (ten males and ten females) who, like the Chileans, varied in age from 17 to 30 were the informants in this study. Results show that Chilean and Australian cultural values were reflected in the act of apologizing. Chileans in comparison to Australians make less use of the apology strategy “explicit expression of apology”. Nevertheless they appear to give more explanations than Australians in the act of apologizing. Differences were also found in both languages in the use of “speaker and hearer oriented apologies” and in the use of some strategies and intensifiers, in which the addressee’s gender played an important role in both languages.

Insiders/Outsiders: Basque nationalism

This study investigated apology strategies in formal and informal situations of American university students learning Arabic as a foreign language (AFL) in the United States. Data were collected from spoken discourse completion tasks for 15 Arabic native speakers and 45 university students from three different proficiency levels. The findings show that there is a positive relationship between an increase in proficiency level and the production of apology strategies as well as between level of proficiency and approximation of native speakers' (NSs) apology strategy production norms. Learners in general used more statements of regret than the NS group did. Unlike what previous studies posit, the findings show that lower proficiency learners have the tendency to produce more explicit apologies than those at a higher proficiency. Results also demonstrate that verbosity was salient in oral production, which is at odds with previous claims that it tends to occur only in learners’ written responses. In addition, findings show that the NS group tends to provide vague explanations when offering apologies, whereas the learners prefer to provide specific reasons for their offense. The study also discusses pedagogical implications for teaching apologies in L2 Arabic.