Dct Collections Of Apology

Dct Collections Of Apology

ling 10002-2011-sm2 |
Assignment 2 |
DCT Collection of Apologies |
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Shuting Dong |
                                Student No.521077 |

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Apology is a communicative act and a politeness strategy, which works as a social lubricant to repair a damaged relationship, in order to restore or maintain social harmony (Olshtain, 1989). When an act (typically of the speaker) has caused harm or discomforts, an apology is necessary for the speaker to admit the offense, express remorse and to request forgiveness from the hearer. Although different cultures share some similarities in apology strategies, the application and interpretation of apology is to some extent cultural-specific. The selection of apology strategies to perform a successful apology involves different cultural perceptions of social distance, power relations and degree of imposition (Hong 2008). Apology realization patterns of non-western cultures has received considerable attention lately of applied linguistics, this study has thus been conducted to examine the apology strategies of native Chinese-speaking university students by comparing to their native Austalian English speaking counterparts.

The research aim of this paper is to examine how the perception of relative power affects the apology strategies of Australian and Chinese speakers. This paper will proceed as follows: The first section reviews some theoretical background of apology strategies, politeness. Then research methods and research questions are introduced in second section. The latter section will present research results and the data collected will be analysed and discussed in detail in the final section.

  1. Theoretical background

      1.1 Apology strategies

According to the analytical framework propose by Fraser (1981), apologies can be carried out with the following six major strategies in any combination or sequence:

a. Illocutionary Force Indicating Device (IFID), i.e. announcing that one is...