Speech Acts Bibliography:
Apologies

Bataineh, R. F. & Bataineh, R. F. (2008). A cross-cultural comparison of apologies by native speakers of American English and Jordanian Arabic. Journal of Pragmatics, 40(4), 792-821.

This study compared the realization patterns of the apology strategies used by native speakers of American English and Jordanian Arabic. The participants consisted of 50 American undergraduate students at an American university and 50 Jordanian undergraduate students at a Jordanian university. The respondents ranged between 17 and 24 years of age. Gender was examined as a variable. Results in this study showed that participants were found to differ in their use of apology strategies. Differences involved using various manifestations of explicit, less explicit, and non-apology strategies. Thus, although both groups used explicit apology, Jordanian respondents tended to use more manifestations of expressions of apology and higher frequencies of combinations of expressions of apology with various intensifiers than their American counterparts. This showed that the Jordanian respondents had a tendency to exaggerate their expression of apology, probably as an attempt to win the victim’s sympathy. Furthermore, results revealed that although the two groups opted for the same primary apology strategies, the frequency and order of some of these strategies varied. Thus, unlike Americans, Jordanian participants opted for using proverbs and sayings widely in order to ease their responsibility and pacify the victim. Jordanian respondents also used non-apologies strategies more than their American counterparts. Also, the evident difference in frequency between negative and positive assessment of responsibility in Jordanians’ apologies revealed that whenever they attempted to assign blame, they used negative and positive assessment assigning the blame to themselves and others in close frequencies. By contrast, Americans used only negative assessment of responsibility in order to assign the blame to others. In addition, the differences in the use of apology strategies were found not only in the two cultures but also between the males and females of the same culture. The authors suggested that apologies could be problematic for ESL/EFL learners since strategy use in one’s culture may differ from that in the target culture.

Blum-Kulka, S. & Olshtain, E. (1984). Requests and apologies: A cross-cultural study of speech-act realization patterns (CCSARP). Applied Linguistics, 5(3), 196-213.

This study reported on a project concerned with a cross-cultural investigation of speech act realization patterns. The goals of the project were to compare across languages the realization patterns of two speech acts – requests and apologies – and to establish the similarities and differences between native and non-native speakers’ realization patterns in these two acts in each of the languages studied within the project. The theoretical and methodological framework for this investigation developed as a result of close collaboration among the participants of the project. They all followed the same approach in data collection and data analysis. The paper outlined the theoretical framework for the project, presented the methodology developed, and illustrated the procedures for analysis by giving examples from the data in some of the languages studied.

Cenoz, J. & Valencia, J. (1994). Interlanguage pragmatics: The role of linguistic and social psychological elements in the production of English requests and apologies. Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain: Dept. of English and German Philology, University of the Basque Country.

Investigates whether NSs (34) and NNSs (62 Basque) of English used the same linguistic expressions to make requests and apologies, whether these varied according to situation, sex, and social status. They used the DCT — four requests and four apologies. They found similar overall patterns, but NSs used more alerts and locution derivable strategies than learners, and learners used more syntactic downgraders in requests. NSs used more intensifiers in apologies. No significant differences were found between males and females.

Cohen, A. D. & Olshtain, E. (1993). The production of speech acts by EFL learners. TESOL Quarterly, 27(1), 33-56.

Reports on a study describing ways in which nonnative speakers assessed, planned, and then delivered speech acts. The subjects, fifteen advanced English foreign language learners, were given six speech act situations (two apologies, two complaints, and two requests) in which they were to role-play along with a native speaker. The interactions were videotaped and after each set of two situations of the same type, the videotape was played back and then the respondents were asked both fixed and probing questions regarding the factors contributing to the production of their responses in those situations. The retrospective verbal report protocols were analyzed with regard to processing strategies in speech act formulation. The study found that in delivering the speech acts, half of the time respondents conducted only a general assessment of the utterances called for in the situation without planning specific vocabulary and grammatical structures, often thought in two languages and sometimes in three languages (if trilingual), utilized a series of different strategies in searching for language forms, and did not attend much to grammar nor to pronunciation. Finally, there were respondents whose speech production styles characterized them as "metacognizers," "avoiders," and "pragmatists" respectively.

Enochs, K. & Yoshitake, S. (1996). Self-assessment and role plays for evaluating appropriateness in speech act realizations. ICU (International Christian University) Language Research Bulletin, 2, 57-76.

This study reports on the reliability, validity, and practicality of the same three measures of cross-cultural pragmatic competence that were developed by Hudson et al. (1992, 1995) and used in the Japanese FL study by Yamashita (1996). The current study administered these tests to 25 first-year Japanese EFL learners. There was a self-assessment test with 24 situations, 8 requests, 8 refusals, and 8 apologies, with varying degrees of power, social distance, and imposition. Respondents rated themselves on a 5-point scale as to how appropriately they would respond. A role-play self assessment test -- performing 8 scenarios for the speech acts, described in English and Japanese. After performing the role plays, they had to rate themselves on a 5-point scale. Role-play test -- with native speakers of English (as in previous), videotaped and rated by three native speakers on a 5-point scale. All three tests proved to be both reliable and valid in assessing pragmatic competence. In addition, the TOEFL subtest scores did not correlate with the pragmatic measures. A limitation was that this was a homogeneous group of students.

Enochs, K. & Yoshitake, S. (1999). Evaluating six measures of EFL learners' pragmatic competence. JALT Journal, 21 (1), 29-50.

This study reports on the reliability, validity, and practicality of the same six measures of cross-cultural pragmatic competence that were developed by Hudson et al. (1992, 1995) and used in the Japanese FL study by Yamashita (1996). The current study administered these tests to 25 first-year Japanese EFL learners. Four of the tests were highly reliable and two less so, and the tests distinguished those with substantial overseas experience from those without any -- a distinction which the TOEFL did not show. The two less reliable tests were the Open Discourse Completion Test (24 descriptions of speech act situations to provide written response and rated on 5-point scale) and Multiple-Choice Discourse Completion Test (same as OPDCT but MC responses from among 3). Both were take-home tests.

Edmundson, R. J. (1992). Evidence for native speaker notions of apologizing and accepting apologies in American English. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN.

Attempts to determine (1) how semantic formulae are interpreted by native speakers [so there is the intention and the interpretation], (2) the cues subjects use to interpret the sincerity of an apology and whether it was accepted, and (3) the rules needed to account for variety in interpretations of semantic formulae. Points out that studies looking at strategies in realizing a speech act are problematic in that often one element can be classified in more than one category. 161 native speakers of English (from 8 Intro to Language classes at Indiana U.) were asked to view one of two videos containing six apologies within the discourse of several popular TV programs and to answer several questions concerning each apology. There were some general patterns of interpretation but much variation in the responses. Subjects used mostly prosodic cues to judge sincerity of an apology. Females relied on lexical cues to judge the acceptability of the apology, while the males (1/3 the sample) relied on lexical, paralinguistic, and prosodic cues equally. The researcher found two interpretations of what accepting an apology meant. Some thought it meant acknowledging the offense and forgiving the offender. Others thought it meant that the social balance was fine (either because the social balance was restored or there was never anything wrong in the first place). Edmundson concluded that classification by semantic formula was completely unreliable as subjects might classify a single semantic formula into two or three different categories — i.e., "the choice to justify, explain, or excuse oneself while apologizing is a risky one which may have serious consequences for the social repair at hand" (98). Appropriateness of an apology was rated according to sincerity.

García, C. (1989). Apologizing in English: Politeness strategies used by native and non-native speakers. Multilingua, 8(1), 3-20.

This article compares the stylistic devices used by ten native English-speaking Americans and ten female Venezuelans who had lived in the United States anywhere from 3 months to 3 years. They each participated in two different English language role play situations: disagreeing and requesting.  L1 speakers preferred non-confrontational stylistic devices when they disagreed with an L1 interlocutor and impersonal stylistic devices when they requested a service.  L2 speakers used more confrontational devices when disagreeing and more personal devices when requesting a service.

Glinert, L. (2010). Apologizing to China: Elastic apologies and the meta-discourse of American diplomats. Intercultural Pragmatics, 7(1), 47-74.

The study examined the pragmatic negotiation of state-to-state apologies in two Sino-American crises: the Belgrade embassy bombing and the Hainan airplane collision represented in interviews by US officials involved in these negotiations. The interviews were not recorded but they revealed the officials’ metapragmatic thinking about diplomatic apologies in general, and apologizing to China in particular. The study emphasized the importance of negotiation and discursive struggle in the diplomatic apology and possibly in apologies in general. Data consisted of off-the-record interviews conducted in late 2001 with four State Department and ex-State Department officials with a close knowledge of Sino-American relations. The subjects were students of Eastern cultures. The interviews centered on apologies by US to China followed two major incidents: the bombing by US aircraft of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999 and the collision of an American and a Chinese airplane off the coast of China in 2001, followed by the emergency landing of the American airplane on Hainan Island. The subjects reported that the apologies involved extended negotiation, strategic illocutionary and semantic ambiguities, and a struggle to achieve each nation’s real-political goals that at the same time presented a dialectical struggle over the pragmatic meaning of the wording used and over what an apology actually was and did. Furthermore, subjects stated that American diplomatic apologies had a loose quality, responding in an ad hoc manner to the specific situation. The officials that were interviewed agreed that in this type of apologies a strategic use was made of ambiguity, cross-linguistic gaps, and pragmatic perception of them. The author asserted that it was found that the whole process and outcome presented a strategic pragmatic elasticity that satisfied the parties on both occasions but which was not guaranteed to do so in other different contexts. Also, it was contended that this elasticity seemed to have a broader significance for understanding apologies, both between states and in everyday interactions.

 

Gonzales, M. H., Pederson, J. H., Manning, D. J. & Wetter, D. W. (1990). Pardon my gaffe: Effects of sex, status, and consequence severity on accounts. Journal of Personality and Psychology, 58(4), 610-621.

This study examined the effects of offender sex, offender status, and consequence severity on accounts following an embarrassing predicament. Data were collected from 80 undergraduate introductory psychology students who volunteered to participate in exchange for extra course credit at the University of Minnesota. Subjects were induced to believe they had committed a gaffe with either relatively mild or severe consequences for a confederate/victim of either higher or lower status than they, and their verbal and nonverbal behaviors captured on videotape served as the source of dependent variable measures. Verbal accounts were coded using Schonbach’s (1980) account taxonomy. Nonverbal behaviors were also coded, as were measures of subjects’ verbal and behavioral helping. Results showed a main effect for gender on account length (p<.001), number of concessionary elements (p<.001), and verbal helping scores (p = .001). Mitigating accounts were preferred more than aggravating accounts. Thus, subjects frequently demonstrated concern for the victim’s face at the apparent expense of their own face needs. Two-way interactions by gender and status of the participants, as well as by account type (strategies such as concessions, excuses, justification, and refusals) and severity of the offense also were obtained. The authors reported longer accounts and more excuses, justifications and concessions on the part of female apologizers. Results of the study point to the potential usefulness of this more complex conceptualization of accounts as remedial strategies serving the needs of all encounter participants, and predictions of politeness theory were partially supported.

Hayashi, A. (1999). Kaiwa tenkainotameno sutorategi: "Kotowari" to "wabi" no syutsugen jokyoto kaiwa tenkaijono kinou (‘Strategies for conversation: Analysis and functions of "refusals" and "apologies"’). Bulletin of Tokyo Gakugei University Section II Humanities, 50, 175-188.

The author compares German and Japanese refusals (cancellation of an appointment) and apologies but reports only her analyses of Japanese in this study. Fifty-seven native Japanese-speaking university students completed a written questionnaire (but only 48 were analyzed) creating an imaginary dialogue between themselves and an unacquainted professor. Their task was to request the professor for a change of an appointment on the telephone and the participants were free to come up with their own reasons. The paper examines reasons for the cancellation (and the request for the change), and the ways in which the reasons were presented in the discourse. It was found that private reasons were often presented only once if ever. The speaker tended to convey the idea of the refusals first, then provide the reasons gradually as the information was requested by the hearer. Also, the speaker often prepared the hearer for the upcoming special reasons by the use of jitsuwa ‘actually.’ With regard to apologies, the semantic strategies, their frequencies, reasons for their use, and the ways in which the apologies were presented in the discourse were examined. Apologies often signaled an upcoming request and were used to close the conversation.

Holmes, J. (1989). Sex differences and apologies: One aspect of communicative competence. Applied Linguistics, 10(2), 194-221.

This study discussed how apologies are illuminating sources of information on the socio-cultural values of a speech community, including differences between male and female values in the distribution of apologies. It also explained the complexity of the language learners’ task in acquiring communicative competence. The researcher contended that apologies express negative politeness and that they signal the speaker’s awareness of having impinged on the hearer’s negative face and restricted her/his freedom of action in some way. A corpus of apologies was collected to conduct an analysis of the range of strategies used by New Zealanders for expressing this aspect of negative politeness as well as the distributional patterns for women and men. The offenses – which elicited apologies – and the strategies selected to realize them provided clues to the kind of speech acts the community regarded as FTAs (face-threatening acts) and the relative seriousness of different FTAs. Findings showed that there were significant differences between female and male apologizers. It was found that women gave and received more apologies and remarked that this speech act could function differently for males and females. The author concluded that learning how to produce, interpret, and respond to them appropriately requires a thorough familiarity with those values.

Holmes, J. (1990). Apologies in New Zealand English. Language in Society, 19 (2), 155-99.

Examines the syntactic, semantic, and sociolinguistic features of a corpus of 183 apologies in New Zealand English, within the context of an interaction model with 2 intersecting dimensions, affective and referential meaning, attempting to relate the relative "weightiness" of the offense to features of the apology. (53 references) (Author/CB)

Ide, R. (1998). 'Sorry for your kindness': Japanese interactional ritual in public discourse. Journal of Pragmatics, 29(5), 509-529.

The study examines the social and metapragmatic functions of sumimasen (lit., 'there is no end' or 'it is not enough'), a conventional expression of apology in Japanese that is also used to express the feeling of thanks. Using Goffman’s (1971) notion of ‘remedial’ and ‘supportive’ interchanges as the conceptual framework, the paper first describes seven pragmatic functions of sumimasen based on 51 instances of sumimasen recorded through ethnographic participant/non-participant observations of discourse in an ophthalmology clinic in Tokyo. The professionals were two female doctors, a female nurse, and a female receptionist. 58 patients participated, males and females of many ages. The seven functions: 1) sincere apology; 2) quasi-thanks and apology; 3) request marker; 4) attention-getter; 5) leave-taking devise; 6) affirmative and confirmational response; 7) reciprocal exchange of acknowledgment (as a ritualized formula. These seven functions are presented not as mutual exclusive but rather overlapping concepts, ranging from remedial, remedial and supportive, to supportive in discourse. The author also cites Kumagai, Kumatoridani, Coulmas, and others to account for the concept of indebtedness that emerges from the shift of point of view from the speaker (the benefactor) to the listener (the provider of the benefit) (‘debt-sensitive’ society). The paper also demonstrates the exchange of sumimasen as a metapragmatic ritual activity, an anticipated and habitual behavior in public discourse in Japanese society. The author also reframes the multiple functions of sumimasen in accordance with the folk notion of aisatsu, which constitutes the ground rules of appropriate and smooth Japanese public interaction. The author notes that historically arigato 'thank you' was a form of excuse, derived from ari 'exist, have' plus gatashi 'difficult,' literally meaning, 'it is hard to accept/have.' Shitsurei shimasu 'I intrude' is a similar expression when leaving or entering one's space in public.

The aim of this study was both to examine how South Korean apology speech act expression differed conceptually from Australian English expressions and to analyze how South Koreans performed the speech act of apologies. For the first part, the author provided a semantic and pragmatic analysis of the main Korean apology speech act expression mianhada and compared it with the use of the Australian English word sorry. In the process, she illustrated some distinguishable features of South Korean culture. The findings revealed that the attitudinal meanings of mianhada and sorry, as well as the range of illocutionary acts associated with the two expressions were different. Decomposing mianhada and sorry into their illocutionary components provided a fine-grained description of what the author assumed to be the attitudes and states of mind of South Koreans and Australians, respectively, when performing the apologetic speech act. In the second part of the paper, she investigated South Korean apology speech act strategies among 30 South Korean University students in seven situations, rating them according to social distances, social power, and severity. The investigation was modeled on the work of Blum-Kulka and her collaborators (1989). Findings indicated that South Korean speakers preferred not to express responsibility. Instead, they followed up their illocutionary force indicating devices (such as those indicating (being) sorry, apologizing, regretting, excusing, etc.) with a compensation strategy. The author also noted that when the speaker could not compensate for a serious offense, the strategy of expressing the speaker’s responsibility was used as intensification but the explanation strategy was not preferred in South Korean. In addition, her study suggested that conceptualizing speech act expressions, using semantically simple words, could help second language learners acquire the proper ways of carrying out speech acts (including non-verbal expressions) in the target language and culture.

Kumagai, T. (1993). Remedial interactions as face-management: The case of Japanese and Americans. In S. Y. T. Matsuda, M. Sakurai, A. Baba (Eds.), In honor of Tokuichiro Matsuda: Papers contributed on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday (pp. 278-300). Tokyo: Iwasaki Linguistic Circle.

Compares general patterns of the remedial interaction of Japanese and Americans, focusing on the cultural meaning of the act of apology and the dynamics underlying the realized behaviors. She found that similar strategies had different implications and effects in Japanese and American interactions. Japanese emphasized restoring the relationship while Americans focused on solving the problem. The Japanese used penitent utterances, humble in nature, while Americans used explanatory utterances; the former were empathetic, the latter rational; the former self-threatening (reciprocity expected), the latter self-supporting. The examples of remedial interactions were collected from scripts of 40 Japanese TV dramas, 4 Japanese dramas and 90 American films. The corpus contained 154 Japanese and the same number of American English remedial interactions, from a larger corpus of 400 each.

Kumatoridani, T. (1993). Hatsuwa koui taisyo kenkyuuno tameno tougouteki apurouchi: Nichieigono "wabi" wo reini (‘An integrative approach to contrastive speech-act analysis: A case of apologies in Japanese and English’). Nihongo Kyouiku (Journal of Japanese Language Teaching), 79, 26-40.

The author poses 4 questions to be answered in pragmatics research: 1) for what purpose a speech act is performed; 2) in what situations the speech act is performed; 3) how the repertoire of strategies and linguistic forms are related; 4) what discourse functions the speech act serves. Taking English and Japanese apologies as an interpersonal repair strategy, the author argues that there are differences in speech act realization between the two languages in terms of the situations that require an apology, linguistic forms/strategies used, and responses to apologies. No mention of the data source is given.

Kumatoridani, T. (1999). Alternation and co-occurrence in Japanese thanks. Journal of Pragmatics, 31(5), 623-642.

This article deals with how thanks and apologies are not as distinctly different as might be though. Thanks in Japanese can be conveyed by apologizing: Shooyu o toote moraemasen ka. 'Please pass me the soy sauce.' Hai dozoo. 'Here you go.' Doomo sumimasen. '(lit.) I'm very sorry.' The apology form is in empathy to the hearer (such as when this person is of higher status). Sumimasen can be used for local management of an event and then arigato for closing the gratitude exchange. The paper compares usages and functions of two Japanese apologizing and thanking expressions, sumimasen and arigatou, based on: 1) 140 collected interchanges including naturally occurring gratitude and apology exchanges; 2) findings from the questionnaire give to 189 native speakers of Japanese; and 3) his own native speaker intuition. Although sumimasen can replace the gratitude expression arigatou, the two are not completely interchangeable. The author first accounts for the applicability of alternation, and discusses the more formal and thus polite nature of sumimasen as an expression of gratitude. The use of sumimasen as a gratitude expression occurs as a result of a shift in the focus (‘empathy operation’) from the speaker’s to the hearer’s perspective. This shift is considered a conventionalized strategic device to repair the politeness imbalance between the interlocutors. However, the use of sumimasen tends to be appropriate only in expressing acceptance of the offer combined with gratitude and not refusal, whereas arigatou can be used for both acceptance and refusal of the offer. Use of sumimasen is also inappropriate in response to ‘affective’ speech acts such as congratulations, condolences, compliments, and encouragement. Finally, the author explains the sequential preference in using the two expressions in a single event (sumimasen first, and then arigatou). While sumimasen functions to repair imbalance locally, arigatou has dual functions both to repair imbalance and to close a conversation.

Linnell, J., Porter, F. L., Stone, H., & Chen Wan-Lai. (1992). Can you apologize me? An investigation of speech act performance among non-native speakers of English. Working Papers in Educational Linguistics, 8 (2), 33-53.

Examines the performance of apologies among 20 NNSs of English and 20 NSs. The eight verbal discourse completion tests designed by Cohen and Olshtain were administered on a one-to-one basis. No significant differences were found between NNSs and NSs in six of the eight situations. Explicit apologies, acknowledgments of responsibility and intensifiers were significantly undersupplied by NNSs in two of the situations. NNSs undersupplied an explicit apology and an intensifier in an unintentional insult situation and acknowledging responsibility for forgetting a meeting with a boss. Performance did not correlate with TOEFL scores.

Maeshiba, N., Yoshinaga, N., Kasper, G., & and Ross, S. (1996). Transfer and proficiency in interlanguage apologizing. In S. M. Gass & J. Neu (Eds.), Speech acts across cultures: Challenges to communication in a second language (pp. 155-187). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Begins with a review of current research and theories about pragmatic transfer from the L1 to the L2. They noted that several non-structural factors interact with pragmatic transfer, including the learning context and length of residence in the target community (learner-external factors), and attitude towards the native and target community and second language proficiency (learner-internal factors). They then reviewed recent studies about native and non-native apology, noting that in most studies it appears that apology performance is affected by context-external factors such as social power and social distance. The perpetrator is more likely to employ an explicit apologetic formula the lower his/her status is vis-a-vis the offended person. The authors then described their own study to examine the relationship between contextual factors and strategy use in apologies. The subjects participating came from 4 groups: 30 Japanese learners of English (Intermediate) students from the JEI program at Hawai'i Pacific University; 30 Japanese learners of English (Advanced) from the University of Hawai'i at Manoa; 30 native speakers of English who were undergraduates at Hawai'i Pacific University; and 30 native speakers of Japanese who were also undergraduate and graduate students at Hawai'i Pacific University. The participants were given an Assessment Questionnaire and a Dialogue Construction Questionnaire (in English and/or Japanese) in which they were asked to rate each of 20 contexts on a five-point scale for: severity of offense, offender's obligation to apologize, likelihood for the apology to be accepted, offender's face loss, and offended party's face loss (context-internal factors) and social distance and dominance (context-external factors). The results showed that there was strong agreement between the native speakers of English and Japanese in perception of status, obligation to apologize, and likelihood of apology acceptance. The effects of positive transfer seemed to be much more pervasive than negative transfer in the learners' apology performance and perception. An important finding did occur: native speakers of Japanese who were advanced learners of English only transferred their Japanese apology behavior in 2 instances, whereas the intermediate group transferred their native apologetic behavior 6 times, which indicates that advanced learners were better able to emulate American apology behavior. The intermediate learners tended to use a less elaborated approach based on apology behavior used in their L1. The authors then compared the results to previous studies cited earlier regarding positive and negative pragmatic transfer.

Márquez Reiter, R. (2000). Linguistic politeness in Britain and Uruguay: A contrastive analysis of requests and apologies. Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins Publishing.

The request and apology behavior of British English (BE) and Uruguayan Spanish (US) speakers are analyzed in depth. The author first reviews the literature surrounding notions of politeness and speech act theory within the domain of linguistic pragmatics. She then describes the basic linguistic forms and general functions of requests and apologies in both English and Spanish. Data was collected using open-ended role plays containing social variables such as distance and power. Participants [BE: N=61 (m-29, f-32); US: N=64 (m-33, f-31)] participated in 12 combined situations resulting in 12 requests and 12 apologies. Analysis of the request results indicates a marked preference for conventional indirectness (CI) in both language varieties. However, variation did occur in the types of strategies used. For example, the US subjects were less concerned about naming the addressee as the actor. Cross-cultural differences were also found in the use of impositives (US used this type of strategy more and in a wider variety of situations) and non-conventional indirectness (only BE used this type of strategy). In general, US speakers tended to be more direct than BE speakers when requesting. The analysis of apologies also offers insight into cross-cultural differences. BE opted for intensification of one formulae (“Sorry”) when apologizing. In addition, more apologies and explanations were given by BE speakers as compared to US speakers. The US showed a clear preference for non-intensification and used several formulae to apologize. In both groups, there was agreement as to the severity of the situation, which served as the main motivator for strategy selection. Possible reasons for these differences are discussed and implications for language teaching are also given.

Matsuura, H. (1998). Japanese EFL learners' perception of politeness in low imposition requests. JALT Journal, 20 (1), 33-48.

Study of perception of politeness in requests with 77 Japanese English majors and 48 American students in two U.S. universities. Perceptions were similar except that Japanese saw interrogatives with a present tense modal ("May I borrow a pen?") as less polite than those with a past tense modal ("Could I borrow a pen?").

Meier, A. J. (1998). Apologies: What do we know? International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 8 (2), 215-231.

Based on a review of the apology literature, Meier (1998) comes to the conclusion that there exists a less than unified picture of "facts" about apology behavior. She notes that there are conflicting claims regarding the distribution of strategies, the degree of mitigation effected by account types, the co-occurrence of strategy types, the effect of the severity of the offense, the effect of gender, and the effect of the interlocutor relationship. She thus concludes that attempts to provide a summary description of apology behavior in English based on such lack of consensus could only be arbitrary, vague, or disjointed. There is the argument as to how much knowledge about a certain language behavior is necessary in order to assess it. The burden is now on the SLA researchers to fine-tune our descriptions of speech acts.

Miyake, K. (1994). "Wabi" igaide tsukawareru wabi hyogen: Sono tayoukatno jittaito uchi, soto, yosono kankei (‘Formulaic apologies in non-apologetic situations: A data analysis and its relation with the concept of uchi-soto-yoso’). Nihongo Kyouiku (Journal of Japanese Language Teaching), 82, 134-146.

This is a questionnaire study reporting the occasions on which apologies like sumimasen are likely to be used (as well as non-apologetic occasions on which apologies are used) and the effects of social variables on such occasions. English and Japanese questionnaires were given to 101 British and 122 Japanese participants respectively. The questionnaire presented 36 situations that elicited expressions of gratitude and/or apologies. Closeness and status of the interlocutors, and severity of the offense/indebtedness (benefits and losses) were manipulated in those situations. The participants first wrote down the responses they were likely to give (perhaps orally---not specified in the article) and indicated on a 5-point scale what their feelings would be (strong gratitude/slight gratitude/neutral feeling neither gratitude nor apology/slight apology/strong apology/others). The paper reports only the idiomatic expressions found in the data, excluding additional expressions. Major findings: 1) the language forms for apology expressions (e.g., sumimasen) in Japanese are used not just to express apology but also gratitude; the Japanese form for apology can co-occur with the form for thanking (arigato) where both are intended as part of an apology (thanking apologetically), and as a way of phatic communication (like greetings); 2) Japanese speakers tend to feel apologetic in more situations than British English speakers; 3) Japanese speakers tend to feel the more apologetic when their feeling of indebtedness is the greater. However, apologies are often employed when the hearer is relatively older in age and in a soto ‘outside’ relationship (e.g., an academic advisor), as opposed to uchi ‘inside’ and yoso ‘somewhere else.’

Moriyama, T. (1999). Oreito owabi: Kankei syufukuno sisutemu toshite (‘Gratitude and apologies: A system of repair’). Kokubungaku: Kaishakuto kyouzaino kenkyu (Japanese Literature: Interpretation and Material development), 44(6), 78-82.

This article is an essay on gratitude and apology expressions in Japanese as a repair strategy in interpersonal communication. The motive for both gratitude and apologies is a psychological imbalance (or a sense of indebtedness) between the speaker and the hearer. Expressions of gratitude and apologies both attempt to adjust that imbalance. An expression of gratitude repairs the sense of imbalance accompanied by a certain benefit on the part of the speaker offered by the hearer. Apologies also repair the offense caused by the speaker. Section 1: conceptual understanding of gratitude and apologies. Section 2: analysis of various expressions of gratitude and apologies. Section 3: sumimasen as an expression of gratitude. Section 4: responses to expressions of gratitude and apologies. Section 5: phatic greeting expressions including gokuro sama, otsukare sama, omedetou.

Nakai, H. (1999). Universal and cross-cultural features of apologies. Tenri University Journal for Linguistics, Literature, the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Natural Sciences, 192, 119-139.

The first part of this literature review discusses the semantic strategies in an apology speech act set. The author asserts that in Japanese apologies, the apology realization is centered around the expression of apology and the explanation or excuse, and why Westerners have difficulty understanding this focus by Japanese on apologetic expressions in situations perceived as inappropriate by the Westerners. The last part of the article is on what to teach about apologies and how to teach it. He gives the results of a questionnaire filled out by 43 female Japanese HS students (ages 17-18) with speech act situations and tasks to perform. He demonstrates that although the students were familiar with three expressions in English, "I'm sorry," "excuse me," and "thank you," they were not in agreement over when to use them in the situations provided. He suggests starting by heightening the awareness of the learners such as by administering a questionnaire to elicit data and to get the learners to think about different realization patterns in the L1 and L2. Then he would explain the universal and language-specific aspects of apologies. Then he would stage role plays among learners and then with native speakers providing the model -- going from less severe to more severe apology situations. Finally he would have learners take a look at the pragmalinguistic side -- the language options such as "I'm sorry" and "excuse me."

Nakamura, H. (1997). Kinki Daigaku Kyouyou Gakubu Kiyou, 29 (1), 23-30.

General article on apologizing in Japanese. It notes that sumimasen is used for both apology and gratitude. The author notes that Japanese prefer intuition and harmony, enjoy emotional dependency and group solidarity, while avoiding direct confrontation for the sake of the group. Ambiguous, indirect, suggestive, euphemistic, and understated discourse is preferred. Brevity is a virtue; silence is preferred to eloquence. Exactness and directed logical exposition is considered impertinent and arrogant.

Nakata, T. (1989). Hatsuwa kouitoshiteno chinshato kansha: Nichiei hikaku (‘Apology and Thanks in Japanese and English’). Nihongo Kyouiku (Journal of Japanese Language Teaching), 68, 191-203.

This study compares English and Japanese apologies and thanks collected in movie and TV drama scenarios (400 apologies and 400 thanks in English and Japanese each). Major differences between the two languages: 1) Japanese were more likely to thank for voluntary assistance offered by the hearer; 2) Japanese more often apologized for someone close to themselves than English speakers; 3) Japanese thanking expressions included versatile expressions like sumimasen that can be used both for apologies and thanks.

Nishimura, F. (1998). Cyukyu nihongo gakushushaga kaku wabino tegamini okeru goyou bunseki: Bunno tekisetsuseino kanten kara (‘An error analysis of letters of apology written by intermediate-level students: From the viewpoint of appropriateness’). Nihongo Kyouiku (Journal of Japanese Language Teaching), 99, 72-83.

This study examines written apologies produced by 31 intermediate American learners of Japanese in comparison with 20 Japanese apologies by native speakers of Japanese and 15 English apologies by native speakers of American English. Major findings with learners’ apologies: 1) inaccurate modest verb forms; 2) inappropriate use of ...kara in presenting excuses; 3) lack of regret expressions (...te shimau) ; 4) choice of face-threatening excuses without mitigating strategies.

Nonaka, K. (2000). Apology is not necessary: An in-depth analysis of my own intercultural and intracultural miscommunication. Journal of Hokkaido University of Education at Kushiro, 32, 155-186.

In the paper, the author focuses on some cases of Japanese and American cross-cultural differences based on Hall's Beyond culture (high vs. low-context situations: especially the explicit vs. the implicit, overt vs. covert in the culture ). She does a context analysis of some of the typical and atypical interactional situations in both cultures, connecting them with her own experience. She gives an example of how she as a high-context person expected low-context Americans to sense what was bothering her without having to spell it out -- without having to be specific. She points out that Americans rank logic high and feelings low and Japanese vice versa which can explain why Japanese say "I'm sorry" as a way of showing consideration to the interlocutor's feelings even if the speaker is not logically at fault for the problematic situation. Americans, she maintains, do not tend to apologize merely to show consideration for others if the problem is not their fault. In fact, Americans will say, "Don't be so apologetic," "Why did you say 'sorry'? It's not your fault."

Nonoyama, F. (1993). Apologies: Toward communicative competence. The Bulletin of Nihon Fukushi Daigaku. Nihon Fukushi University, 88 (2), 195-217.

Politeness rules in Japanese. Be polite to persons of a higher social position, persons with power, older persons, to men if a woman, in formal settings, and to someone with whom you do not have a close relationship. The author generalizes that older Japanese and those who have not lived in the U.S. tend to transfer their own sociocultural rules when they apologize in English. A study was conducted with 70 native English speakers in the US and 234 Japanese speakers, 70 responding in Japanese and 164 in English. Age, gender, position of power, and social distance were varied in four versions of a questionnaire. The research appears to find that his Japanese respondents do not make excuses to a person with higher status, yet the findings here ran counter to that. On bumping into a female, the E1 group expressed an apology, while both the J1 and E2 groups did not, but rather confirmed damage ("Are you OK?" "Are you hurt?") Not a gender difference here -- females likely to express an apology (89%) tan males (52%). So E2 was more like J1 than E1. An exception: a difficult job to do, J1 utilized expression of apology, while E2 hedged as did E1.

This study attempted to outline the type and extent of use of apology strategies in Sudanese Arabic. The study also aimed to shed light on the sociocultural attitudes and values of this community. The corpus examined consisted of 1,082 responses to a discourse completion test that presented ten different social situations of varying severity of offense, strength of social relationship, and power between hypothetical speakers and hearers. The participants consisted of 110 college educated adults in Khartoum, Sudan. The author asserted that the results supported earlier findings suggesting the universality of apology strategies, but nevertheless the selection of apology strategies in this study reinforced the culture-specific aspect of language use. The results revealed an orientation toward positive politeness. This was indicated by the respondents’ attempts not to damage their own positive face. They tried to preserve their positive face by avoiding the use of apology strategies that were considered the most damaging to the speaker’s face such as taking responsibility, intensification, and promise of forbearance. Instead informants preferred to rely on ‘less dangerous’ strategies such as the illocutionary force indicating device that were used to present an excuse and avoidance of self-blame, probably because participants preferred not to apologize explicitly in less serious offenses. Likewise, as an attempt to reduce the threat of a strong apology, respondents preferred to use non-threatening strategies such as humor, minimization, denial, and opting out at a higher frequency. On the other hand, the study also illustrated the use of religious words and phrases in everyday communication with varied illocutionary forces, possibly as fillers, hedges, or devices to soften the threat of an act.

The study examined the influence of gender and culture on the speech act of apologies by comparing gender-specific language use both in Britain, where the gender roles have considerably changed over the past decades, and in Russian, where linguistic gender differences had never been perceived as significant or problematic. The study analyzed responses to offensive situations under the same contextual conditions by English and Russian women and men. Data were collected by means of discourse completion tests (DCTs) that consisted of ten scenarios, eight of which described offensive situations and the other two served as distracters. The scenarios included variables of social distance, power, and gender. The subjects were all students from three British universities and two Russian ones. A corpus of 100 English and 100 Russian DCTs with equal distribution between genders was comprised. The data consisted of a total of 1600 responses elicited under identical contextual conditions. Findings revealed that in both languages women were more verbose; they used more illocutionary force indicating devices; and opted for the form with a strong illocutionary force more often than men. In addition, although English and Russian women used more intensifiers and exclamations than men, the discrepancies were less marked in Russian. English and Russian women used higher frequency of positive politeness apology strategies confirming the author’s hypothesis that women put more effort into maintaining relationships than men. Furthermore, English and British women employed more upgrading and fewer downgrading accounts than men. In addition, the study illustrated the importance of culture as a factor that determined not only the differences between female and male conversational styles in this study but also for attitudes towards these differences.

Okamoto, S., & Tamon, Y. (2000). "Shitsurei" no syoyouhou: Youhouno sougo kanrenseini cyakumokushite (‘Use of shitsurei: How are they related?’). Nihongo Kyouiku (Journal of Japanese Language Teaching), 104, 30-39.

Use of the variants of shitsurei (e.g., Shitrurei shimasu, shitsurei shimashita, shitrurei desuga) was analyzed based on the data from scenarios, novels, conversations and narration on the radio and television, and observations of naturally occurring discourse. Section 1: brief overview of the past research and dictionary definitions of shitsurei. Section 2: 3 forms of shitsurei- 1) shitsurei shimasu type in reference to a future event; 2) shitsurei shimashita type in reference to a past event; 3) shitsurei desuga type acting as a note/disclaimer for an accompanying action. Section 3: semantic categories and use of shitsurei — shitsurei used for recognition of: the speaker’s invasion, discrepancy of action between the speaker and the hearer, an inappropriate communication style, an inappropriate content of conversation, an inappropriate action. Section 4: interrelationships among these categories. Section 5: differential degree of rudeness among the 3 forms of shitsurei.

Olshtain, E. & Cohen, A. D. (1989). Speech act behavior across languages. In H. W. Dechert et al. (Eds.), Transfer in production (pp. 53-67). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

One of the major concerns of discourse studies across languages is that of setting up comparable units of analysis within the various languages being studied. Speech acts represent a highly complex mapping of meaning onto form. Hence, comparative studies are faced with a number of theoretical and methodological problems. Some of these problems are discussed in this chapter, with the aid of empirical data drawn from the act of apologizing in different languages.

Overfield, D. (1994). Cross-cultural competence and apologies among learners of Spanish as a foreign language. Osamayor, 8, 45-61.

Apologies tend to be more situation-dependent and occur less frequently than other speech acts. This study aims to examine their use among native speakers (NS) of Latin American Spanish and American English as well as learners of Spanish. Data was collected utilizing a discourse completion task from seven NS of Latin American Spanish and eleven learners (of English as well as Spanish). An analysis of the DCT data demonstrates some differences in the apologies produced by each group. The NS of Latin American Spanish tended to use disculpar, perdón/perdonar, and lo siento all followed with an explanation or acknowledgement of responsibility. More than one strategy often occurred in the same apology. Furthermore, an apology was not given in only one case. In contrast, the types of apologies produced by NS of American English demonstrate the use of explicit expressions with explanations or accounts. In addition, it was deemed more acceptable to say nothing in certain situations. A comparison of the learner data shows that their apologies approximated English strategies rather than Spanish, indicating that linguistic competence and sociolinguistic competence are two separate areas. The author asserts that pragmatic instruction is essential and intrinsically linked to culture in the foreign language classroom. The concluding portion of the article offers insights and suggestions as to how to make pragmatic instruction an important component in classroom learning.

Rojo, L. (2005). "Te quería comentar un problemilla..." The speech act of apologies in Peninsular Spanish: A pilot study. Hipertexto, 1, 63-80.

This preliminary, pilot study surveys the use of apology speech acts in Peninsular Spanish. Five native speakers of Peninsular Spanish (n=2 female and 2 male, plus 1 male constant) participated in an open role play in which they had to apologize to a friend or acquaintance for having borrowed his laptop. The role plays were analyzed and coded according to the head acts used, as well as upgraders and downgraders. The results show a marked preference for acknowledgement of responsibility (Es culpa mía), followed by intensified offers of repair (Yo te lo voy a llevar a arreglar Carlos, de verdad). A wide-variety of upgraders and downgraders were used, with downgraders being the most common. Interestingly, this study shows very infrequent use of IFIDs (illocutionary force indicating devices), a highly formulaic strategy. The author speculates that the lack of use of this strategy is likely due to the insincerity often attached to formulaic expressions in Peninsular Spanish. Thus, it is more important to be sincere than use 'polite' routine formulae (IFIDs).

Rose, K. R. (2000). An exploratory cross-sectional study of interlanguage pragmatic development. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 22 (1), 27-67.

Reports the results of an exploratory cross-sectional study of pragmatic development among three groups of primary school students in Hong Kong who completed a cartoon oral production task designed to elicit requests, apologies, and compliment responses in EFL or in Cantonese -- the first two speech acts being in their curriculum but not the third. They found little evidence of pragmatic transfer from Cantonese. The subjects were approximately 40 children at levels P-2, P-4, and P-6 respectively, half receiving the prompts in English, half in Cantonese. They were to tape record what they thought the character in the cartoon would say. In requests, there is at best only weak evidence of any situational variation. It would seem that the children had not yet developed the pragmatic competence in English to exhibit such situational variation. It could also be that the instrument did not adequately capture the relevant contextual features. In apologies, all three levels had similar responses regarding the strategy of expressing an apology. However, P-6 demonstrated more control over intensifiers. They also acknowledged responsibility more and offered repair -- a pattern that was not found in the Cantonese data. There was little evidence of situational variation however. Compliments were not in the curriculum. The most frequent strategy was acceptance of the apology -- in Cantonese as well, so the patterns were similar. There was a marked increase in both frequency and range of strategies used with the P-6 group. No background questions were asked so there is no way of knowing about exposure to English-speaking domestic helpers, parents' English proficiency, and attitudes towards English.

Ruzickova, E. (1998). Apologies in Cuban Spanish. Paper presented at the Perspectives on Spanish Linguistics Conference.

Apologies and notions of offense and obligation are analyzed and classified in terms of politeness. The data consists of naturally occurring apologies made by 42 native speakers (NS) of Cuban Spanish (n=24 females and 18 men) in 11 different contextual situations. Results indicate that Cuban Spanish-speakers opted for positive politeness strategies 5:1. An overwhelming majority of the strategies utilized were IFIDs utilizing some form of disculpar, perdonar, dejar, and sentir. The author concludes that ‘politeness’ is not universally constructed and depends highly on the cultural values of the individual society.

Sachiko, N. (1994). Apologies in English by Japanese learners. JALT Journal, 16 (1), 75-89.

Examines apologies in English produced by undergraduate Japanese. The 12 students tended to apologize twice as much in their L1 as Americans did in English. And in their L2 the Japanese students also offered more apologies than did 12 Americans (grad and UG).

Sameshima, S. (1998). Communication task ni okeru nihongo gakusyusha no tenkei hyougen/bunmatsu hyougen no syuutokukatei: Chuugokugo washa no "ira" "kotowari" "shazai" no baai (‘The acquisition of fixed expressions and sentence-ending expressions by learners of Japanese’). Nihongo Kyouiku (Journal of Japanese Language Teaching), 98, 73-84.

This paper examines speech act performance of request, refusal, and apology by Chinese speakers of Japanese in Taiwan. Three levels of learners, high-beginners, low-intermediate, and high-intermediate, took a discourse completion test that included 3 situations eliciting the three speech act performance. The results were analyzed in terms of the linguistic form of each core speech act and the language use in the opening and closing of the dialogue. The author also compares the learners’ performance with the expressions included in their textbooks. Generally learners’ linguistic performance approximates that of native speakers as their levels became more advanced, although all level learners tended to oversimplify opening and closing statements.

The Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (Blum-Kulka, House, & Kasper, 1989a) identified five components of an "apology speech act set": five strategies that speakers use to apologize. This study examined the effects of four of those strategies (illocutionary force indicating device, expression of responsibility, promise of forbearance, and offer of repair) on the judgments made by hearers about the speaker and about the apology. The presence or absence of the four apology strategies was manipulated in a split-plot design. Thirty-two American female university students volunteered to serve as subjects. They read about a character who failed to fulfill an important promise for a friend. Each subject responded to eight possible combinations of the apology elements. To control for order effects, the eight apologies for each subject were counterbalanced with a Latin square. To examine the effect of each of the apology components, regression analyses were conducted. In order to examine the possibility that specific strategies might interact with one another, a multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was conducted, followed by univariate analyses for those effect which were significant in the analysis. The study showed that the strategies participants used to realize the speech act of apologizing had a clear and independent effect on the judgments that they made about the transgressor. Each strategy showed an additive effect on judgments of how appropriate the utterance of the transgressor was. Further, the magnitude of these effects appeared to have been roughly similar for each of the strategies. This study showed that the things people say to apologize seemed to be effective in accomplishing the self-presentational goals of apologizers in their attempts to remedy the social relationships that had been threatened by their transgressions

Sumita, I. (1992). Nihongno wabino aisatsukotoba:Jyoshi gakuseino gengo seikatsuniokeru danwa shiryouwo motonishite (‘Apologies in Japanese: Data analysis of discourse by female university students’). Nihon Bungaku Kenkyu (Studies in Japanese Literature), 28, 235-243.

This paper discusses different functions of apology expressions by drawing examples from naturally occurring discourse between female university students. Multiple functions of apology expressions (e.g., sumimasen, gomen(nasai), moushiwake arimasen, shitsurei shimasu) includes: signaling an inquiry, signaling a refusal, thanking, getting attention, apologizing, signaling a request, recognizing the hearer’s favor/the speaker’s troubling the hearer (disclaimer?), opening, closing conversation, and interrupting.

The author pointed out that much of the cross-cultural research into the speech act of apologizing had focused on the phenomenon of non-native communicative competence and less on cross-cultural data. This study attempted to provide 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 of 14 American, 20 Hungarian, and 76 Polish students. The goals in this study were as follows: first to highlight the differences in the realizations of apologetic responses that could be found not only in the choice and sequential arrangement of strategies but also in the content and in the choice of linguistic form. Second, this paper sought to understand the nature of different communicative styles. The researcher viewed undertaking such a detailed analysis as essential in order to grasp important differences in cultural communicative styles and in helping to understand different cultural values and assumptions concerning interpersonal conduct in West and Central Europe. The author felt that politeness theory did not explain the linguistic differences, since they stemmed less from universal norms of politeness but more from culture-specific values and attitudes.

Tanaka, N. (1999). Would you apologize when you are not responsible? Unpublished paper presented at the AILA Congress, Tokyo.

Reports on a research study that was conducted with 131 Japanese university students. They were given a discourse completion task with eight situations, and were asked what they would say to the other person who was annoyed with a time-related matter. Among other things, she compared apologizing for a situation in which the complaining person was mainly responsible for the problem and one in which external circumstances were mainly responsible. In the latter cases they were far more likely to use a form that marked their utterance as an apology in Japanese.

Tateyama, Y. (2001). Explicit and implicit teaching of pragmatic routines. In K. R. Rose & G. Kasper (Eds.), Pragmatics in language teaching (pp. 200-222). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Studies the effects of explicit and implicit instruction in the use of attention getters, expressions of gratitude, and apologies to beginning students of Japanese as a foreign language. The groups received treatments four times over an 8-week period, with the treatment for the explicit group (N=13) including explicit metapragmatic information, whereas that for the implicit group (N=14) withheld it. Participants engaged in role-play and multiple-choice tasks as well as two different forms of self-report (retrospective verbal report from the students and the raters' comments as well). There were no differences between the two groups in the multiple-choice and role-play tasks. However, close examination of the errors in the multiple-choice tasks indicated that the participants in the explicit group were more successful in choosing the correct answers in items that required higher formality of the linguistic expressions. It seems that these participants benefited from explicit teaching on how the degree of indebtedness in thanking situations, the severity of offense in the apology contexts, and such factors as age social status, and in-group/out-group distinction intricately influence the choice of routine formulas. This suggests that some aspects of interlanguage pragmatics are teachable to beginners before they develop analyzed second language knowledge.

The researcher noted that learners of a foreign language could be proficient in grammar and vocabulary, but still fail to communicate effectively because they lacked social-appropriateness rules as well as linguistic realization rules for conveying their intended communicative acts. This study of the speech act of apology analyzed the sociopragmatic competence in terms of the selection of appropriate apology strategies in a given social context among Danish learners at three levels of English compared to native speaker performance. The paper was divided into two parts: (1) an outline of apology strategies, and (2) an analysis of native/non-native communicative behavior in terms of these strategies. The findings showed that sociopragmatic strategies were indeed transferred from one language to another but the frequency with which the seven main strategies (minimizing the degree of offence, acknowledgment of responsibility, explanation or account, expression of apology, offer of repair, promise of forbearance, and expressing concern for hearer) were selected revealed a deviation from the English native speakers’ norms for a number of strategies. When the performance of native speakers of English was compared to the performance of native speaker of Danish, no significant differences were found on the main strategies since the researcher contended that the two countries shared similar cultures. Hence, negative transfer from the L1 would not be likely to cause major deviations from the norm in the choice of strategies when apologizing in the L2, but nevertheless had some impact all the same. In sum, the author’s extensive analysis of apologies found no substantial differences among the three participating proficiency groups (intermediate, low advanced, and high advanced). The biggest difference she observed was that most proficient learners used more modality markers. Trosborg also noticed that lack of linguistic proficiency prevented learners from providing substantial explanations comparable with the native speakers’.

Uehara, E. (1993). The role of uptake in speech acts. The Journal of the Tokyo International University, 47, 73-83.

Austin (1962) defined uptake as the understanding of the meaning and the force of the locution. So while perlocutionary force is whether or not the speech act achieved its purpose, uptake is not just understanding the meaning but also understanding the intent of the speaker. The hearer may understand the message (uptake) but reject it, misunderstand the message (unsuccessful uptake), or not understand it at all (no uptake).

This paper analyzed the speech act of apologizing in Indonesia in the island of Lombok. The study used data from a discourse completion task that consisted of six situations including factors such as social distance and social status. One hundred and five respondents completed the test: 60 males, 44 females, and one unspecified. The average age range of the participants was between 17 and 25 years old. This test focused on the type of apology term used and the types of upgrading employed in different situation. Comparisons were made with published results of choice of apology term and use of upgrading in other cultures (Americans, Austrians, and Germans). Findings revealed that Indonesian showed somewhat less variety in apology terms than most other societies that have been studied and lacked a lexical item with the meaning of apology. Lombok Indonesians tended to prefer requests for forgiveness around a single lexical item ‘maaf’ and did not use other apology terms. In this strong preference for a single type of apology term, Indonesians were found to be most similar to English speakers. In their preference for impersonal forms, Lombok Indonesians were unique among societies investigated to date. In addition, expressions of regret were not used. Impersonal forms were most frequently chosen. The types of upgrading used varied with the situation. Variation in the use of emotive particles seemed to relate to the nature of the offense, occurring mainly when some element of surprise or suddenness was present. Variation in the use of intensification seemed to relate both to the nature of the offences and to the nature of the relationship, in ways that reflected particular conventions of the Indonesian society. There was some little gender difference in the use of upgrading, with males in some situations. They were somewhat more likely than females to use solidarity-oriented upgrading. As the author predicted, deference strategies were used with higher status addressees, while solidarity strategies were used with social intimates.

Yanagiya, K. (1992). Investigating communication competence: Contrasting speech acts across cultures -- the case of "apologies." Bulletin of the English Literature Department (pp. 105-128), Teikyo University, Tokyo.

The author raises the question of whether routine (not "heartfelt") apologies really express regret. When might they be considered insincere, infelicitous? Or are they not apologies at all but simply share the forms? This is considered exacerbated with Japanese where apologies are not so much an expression of regret as an expression of sumanasa, mooshiwakenasa and oime -- the feelings of inexcusableness and indebtedness. His point is that speech acts are not clear-cut entities but rather overlap or fade into each other. The features of the core, prototypical cases may be said to be universal. Even though it may seem like dominance, social distance, and severity of offense are universal in defining the character of a situation, the formality of the occasion in Japanese may change the forms of the utterances even when other factors are kept constant (119). The author also points out that in Japanese apologies are frequently nonverbal -- just hanging down one's head without saying a word, possibly with tears in the eyes. The author reminds us of the Hymes grid and would apply it to analyzing the speech act (setting, participants, goals, act sequence (form of the message), tone, language variety, norms of interaction, and genre. She then makes the case that Japanese society which is group oriented, genuinely values apologizing to show that one is indeed indebted, "By showing that one subscribes to the same conventional norms which presupposes role and rank relationship, and thereby proving that one shares the same sense of values and is content with it, one can alleviate the threat towards the other's (weighted) face" (p. 123). Hence, in Japan apologizing generally isn't done so as a strategy for recovering balance among status-equals. She points out that "apologies" and "thanks" overlap in a continuum: yorokobi 'pleasure,' arigatasa 'gratitude,' oime 'indebtedness,' kyooshuku 'embarrassment,' mooshiwakenasa 'inexusableness,' jiseki 'guilt,' and ikan 'regret.' Kinodokuna koto-o shita and variants can be used for both "apology" and "sympathy" (the hearer's misfortune) or consideration (omoiyari). She notes that not everyone can say sumimasen. It is not used towards a child nor from a child to others. To a child we say arigatoo and gomenne. With elders, araigatoo gozaimashita and moodhowake gozaimasendeshita are appropriate. So with children, persons of higher status, and intimate friends, expressions of gratitude and regret are used. With non-intimate persons of same rank, expressions of indebtedness are used. So the paper is essentially non-empirical, and rather based on native speaker intuitions.