Previous Studies on Apology

Over the last two to three decades, pragmatic researches have been growing rapidly and different researches focus on different languages or cultures and discuss different variables affecting the speech act. Rojo (2005) has summarized the following major categories:

politeness strategies employed (e.g. Brown and Levinson, 1978; García, 1989), cultural values reflected in the apology realization (e.g. Suszczyńska, 1999), gender, factors affecting the choice/use of a particular strategy (e.g. Cohen & Olshtain, 1981; Fraser, 1981; Olshtain &

Cohen, 1983, etc.), strategies used by native and non-native speakers (García, 1989; Trosborg 1987) and others. Sub-categories such as social distance, social power/status and age may also serve as the focus of individual research.

Languages and socio-cultural groups, as well as the sub-categories under, may also be of concern. Some studies may discuss only one language, either paritcipants’ L1 or L2 while other studies may focus on comparing two or more languages or participants with same or different backgrounds. In speech act researches, L1 data usually serve as the baseline for intercultural or cross-cultural comparison and are usually not the main concern in doing

“second language acquisition” researches. Thus, most of the designs may include learners’ L1 and L2 performances for transfer studies, learners’ L2 and native speakers’ performances for miscommunication studies and L1s of different socio-cultural groups for cultural studies. Some of the major studies are introduced below under the categorizations of participants’ L1 or L2.

2.3.3.1 Studies on First Languages

In addition to Austin’s (1962) and Goffman’s study (1971), perhaps the most famous recent L1 study is Janet Holmes’ (1989, 1990, 1998) studies on New Zealanders. She collected natural occurring data and analyzed the strategy distributions by offense types and by the relationships between the participants, such as gender (Holmes, 1989), status and distance (Holmes, 1990).

She employed Brown & Levinson’s (1978) politeness notions and Wolfson’s bulge model (1989) of social relations applicable to the strategy selections and distributions in apologizing.

She found that women apologize more than men and the sex of both speaker and recipient of an apology has an impact on the apology realization (Holmes, 1989, 1990, 1998).

Vollmer & Olshtian (1989) investigated apologies of German with a DCT and also found that social status, social distance and the severity of the offense are the main factors determining the apology strategies. Obeng (1999) investigated Akan apologies also in natural interactions. The data was analyzed according to the formality of the situations, speakers’

status relations and social group differences. He suggested that Akan apologies may be more complex than as described in other studies. Notions and combinations of explicit and implicit apology strategies were the main discussion in the paper (Obeng, 1999).

Deutschmann (2003) investigated explicit apologies in the spoken data of the British National Corpus in his PhD thesis. There were three main focuses: shape and function of the apologies, distribution of the total frequency and the different types of apologies among speakers of different social groupings in the BNC, and the effect of the conversational setting on the apology frequency and the types of apologies produced. Deutschman (2003) concluded that apology is so complex and can be discussed from many aspects.

Even though there are many apology speech act researches of different L1s, very few of them study Chinese apology. In 1989, Blum-Kulka, House & Kasper said “clearly, there is a definite need for studies examining speech act realization in a wider spectrum of target

languages and cultures, if interlanguage pragmatics is to contribute to solving one of the central problems of second language acquisition research, viz., which aspects of nonnative language development are universal and which are language-specific” (Blum-Kulka, House& Kasper, 1989: 10). Eight languages were studied and great findings are still contributive to many people.

Over the last twenty years, not many Chinese researchers have studied and reported on EFL apology and other speech acts systematically. Most of them are more like “experience sharing” essays. However, compared to the rapid growth done in other languages, there is a need to carry out more research on Chinese .

2.3.3.2 Cross-cultural and Interlanguage Studies

There are many more cross-cultural and interlanguage studies than L1 studies on apology. The rapid growth of the need to learn the pragmatic aspects of a language for cross-cultural communication and the differences in languages and cultures are realized as critical issues to L2 speakers and cross-cultural communications (Cohen, Olshtain & Rosenstein, 1986; Barron, 2003).

For cross-cultural and interlanguage apology studies, most previous methods encompassed several data gathering methods and thus discussed different aspects in their studies. Bergman & Kasper (1993) pointed out that studies of interlanguage apologizing have essentially addressed one research question - the accessibility of apology strategies to non-native speakers. Yet, they have examined this issue by means of different data-gathering procedures. Thus, different researches results should be treated with caution in inferencing speech acts. Therefore, to gain a comprehensive and objective view in determining results in studies of rare themes like this study, cross-cultural and interlanguage studies on apology in the literature are described chronologically below.

Cohen & Olshtain (1981) investigated the communicative act of apologizing as realized in the speech of Danish learners of English compared with Hebrew native speakers’ performance.

This paper also provided an outline of apology strategies and an analysis of native/non-native communicative behavior for later studies. For example, Olshtain (1983) examined apology with role-plays by native speakers of American English (NS AE), Russian (NS Rus), and Hebrew (NS Heb) and by American and Russian learners of Hebrew (IL E-HEB, IL Rus-Heb) and find not only L1 transfer but also stereotypes exist in learners choice in performing speech act of apology in L2.

Cohen, Olshtain & Rosenstein (1986) found that even advanced learners of English overgeneralized specific strategies and do not always provide the appropriate “social lubricant”

in apologizing. Trosborg (1987) examined NS of British English (NS BE), NS of Danish (NS Dan) and three groups of Danish learners of English at different levels of proficiency with role-plays. Trosborg is more famous for her apology strategies categorization and often adopted as the model or pre-model in other speech act of apology researches.

Mir (1992) examined apology strategies used by Spanish learners of English with variables such as severity, age and distance of the interlocutors. The results revealed cultural dissimilarities, strategies transfer and intensification differences. Kasper (1993) examined the perception of contextual factors by Thai and American informants. She also discussed the question of how the selection of apology strategies is determined by contextual factors.

Rintell & Mitchell (1989) used both written DCT and oral DCT data-collecting methods and did not find significant differences. Sbisà (1999) compared Italian with other languages’

apology. She also discussed the disagreements among the findings and pointed out that apology strategies may be universal and cross-cultural but they may mean different things and have different degrees in force.

Not many similar apology research to the above are conducted in Chinese. Thus, to discuss the speech act of apology in Chinese, there is a need broaden the field in reviewing the

literature. Observed from cultural studies, the most famous cross-cultural apology lately should be the Hainan Island incident. This seemingly simple incident was so complicated and brought popular discussions at the time. It was as the following said in Gries & Peng that “ China insisted on an American apology, ‘because they think it’s very appropriate to apologize because people died. To Americans, an ‘apology’ is a legal issue where you admit you did something wrong.’ China’s standard was moral … Chinese diplomats tended to look at the incident holistically, searching for greater causes, while Americans found that discussion irrelevant to the event at hand” (Gries & Peng, 2002: 1).

The UCLA study is more similar to ILP studies. The UCLA Studies discussed a little on three Chinese learners’ performance. The Chinese deviated their language from the native speakers’ by saying too much or too little. They also used many more intensifications in apology than any other ethnic groups did in the same study.