The Speech Act of Apology

Fascinated with how speakers can produce an infinite number of sentences when given a finite set of rules for sentences, some scholars (e.g. Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969; Hymes, 1972) have tried to understand how an infinite number of sentences can reflect a finite set of rules. Based on the assumption that the minimal units of human linguistic communication are not linguistic expressions, but rather the performance of certain kinds of acts, such as making statements, asking questions, giving directions, these scholars have offered insight into speech act theory with an attempt to explain how speakers use language to accomplish intended actions and how hearers infer intended meaning from what is said.

Austin (1962), in his famous work How to do things with words, claimed that communication is a series of communicative acts which are used systematically to accomplish particular purposes, and that all utterances perform specific actions by having a specific force assigned to them. According to Austin, the performance of a speech act involves the performance of three types of act:

(1) Locutionary act: the utterance of a sentence with determinate sense and reference, that is, the literal meaning of the utterance

(2) Illocutionary act: “the making of a statement, offer, promise, etc., in uttering a sentence by virtue of the conventional force associated with it or with its explicit performative paraphrase”, that is, the illocutionary act carried out by an utterance enables the saying of something to convey more than what it literally said

(3) Perlocutionary act: the bringing about of effects on the audience by means of uttering the sentence, such effects being special to the circumstances of utterance.

Building on Austin’s work, Searle (1969) claimed that the basic unit of human linguistic communication is illocutionary acts which are rule-governed forms of behavior. He presented

five basic kinds of actions that one can perform in an utterance:

(1) Representatives which commit the speaker to the truth of the expected proposition (i.e., asserting, concluding)

(2) Directives which are attempts by the speaker to get the addressee to do something (i.e., requesting, questioning)

(3) Commissives which commit the speaker to some future course of action (i.e., promising, threatening, offering)

(4) Expressives which express a psychological state (i.e., thanking, apologizing, complimenting, welcoming)

(5) Declarations which affect immediate change in the institutional state of affairs and which tend to rely on elaborate extra-linguistic institutions (i.e., christening, declaring war)

Based on Austin and Searle, Hymes (1972) proposed a distinction between speech situation, speech events, and speech acts. This distinction provides a framework for studying communicative competence. And in this framework, speech situation is placed at the top, speech events comes second, and speech acts are at the bottom. According to this framework, there are many speech situations in a speech community (e.g., meals, parties, auctions, and conferences); however, they are not governed by consistent rules. Speech events are restricted to activities directly governed by rules of speech (e.g., lectures, introductions, advertising).

Speech acts, as at the bottom of this scale, refer to the acts performed by speaking (e.g., giving reports, giving advice, agreeing, complaining, apologizing), and are thus defined in terms of discourse functions.

Scholars, like Austin, Searle, and Hymes, made great contribution to building up the preliminary speech act theory. From their theories, it is realized that when people communicate with others by issuing utterances, they not only make prepositional statements

about objects, contents, and situations, but also fulfill social functions, such as greeting, inviting, refusing, apologizing, complaining, through the use of a string of fabricated words, namely speech acts (Nunan, 1999). Therefore, to summarize, though there are different speech act theories proposed by different scholars, all these theories have the attempt to explain how people use language to accomplish certain communicative goals.

2.4.2 Application of Speech Act Theory

After the pioneering work mentioned in the previous section, studies of speech acts turned into a search for the sequences and responses of each speech act (e.g., Beebe & Takahashi, 1989;

Boxer, 1993; Edmundson, 1992; Eisenstein & Bodman, 1995; García, 1992, 1993; Holmes, 1989, 1990), and the results of these empirical studies have provided pedagogical implications to language teaching.

First, empirical studies of speech acts which have been undertaken to gather information on what appropriate use of linguistic forms in different sociocultural contexts actually comprises have shown that nonnative speakers may fail to communicate effectively in a given context by uttering inappropriate linguistic forms even though their command of grammar and vocabulary is fine (Blum-Kulka, 1982; Eisenstein and Bodman, 1986; Rintell, 1981; Rubin, 1983; Thomas, 1983; Wolfson, 1981). It is thus claimed by Olshtain and Cohen (1983) that the most important realization for language teaching is the fact that effective communication involves the processing of social knowledge as well as linguistic knowledge.

Second, since speech act theory looks beyond the level of the sentence to the question of what sentences do and how they do it, its application to SLA gave birth to the notional functional syllabus in language teaching which focuses on functions as the organizing elements of the language curriculum instead of grammar (e.g., Finnochiaro & Brumfit, 1983;

Paulston, 1981). This brought about a major change in language teaching methodology away

from an emphasis on linguistic form to language use.

2.4.3 The Communicative Act of Apologizing

There have been a variety of studies exploring the formulas, functions and preconditions of the speech act apology (e.g., Blum-Kulka & Olshtain, 1984a, 1984b; Borkin & Reinhart, 1978;

Edmondson & House, 1981; Fraser, 1981; Goffman, 1971; Holmes, 1989; Leech, 1983;

Norrick, 1978; Olshtain & Cohen, 1983; Owen, 1983; Searle, 1969; Trosborg, 1987, 1995).

Firstly, according to Blum-Kulka and Olshtain (1984a), there are three preconditions for the apology act to take place (Blum-Kulka & Olshtain, 1984a: 206):

(1) The apologizer² did a violation or abstained from doing a violation (or is about to do it).

(2) A violation is perceived by the apologizer only, by the hearer only, by both the apologizer and the hearer, or by a third party as a breach of a social norm.

(3) A violation is perceived by at least one of the parties involved as offending, harming, or affecting the hearer in some way.

Simplified by Trosborg (1995), the precondition for the apology act is as follows: “There are two participants: an apologizer and a recipient of the apology. When a person has performed an act (action or utterance), or failed to do so, which has offended another person, and for which he/she can be held responsible, the offender needs to apologize. That is, the act of apologizing requires an action or an utterance which is intended to set things right.”

(Trosborg, 1995: 373).

Secondly, as far as the functions of apology are concerned, apologies, in a general sense, are expressive illocutionary acts, the goal of which coincides with the social goal of

2 The word “apologizer” refers to the person who is supposed to give an apology no matter he/she gives the apology or not, and on the other hand, the word “hearer” refers to the person who is offended in the situation and

maintaining harmony between speaker and hearer (Leech, 1983). On the one hand, apologies can be viewed as a remedial act. For example, Edmondson (1981) highlighted the central function of apologies as to provide a remedy for an offense and store social equilibrium or harmony; in addition, Olshtain and Cohen (1983) claimed that apologies are called for when social norms have been violated because apologies have the effect of paying off a debt. On the other hand, apologies can also be viewed as a face-saving act. As Trosborg (1995) claimed, in apologies, “there is an element of face-saving involved with regard to a protective orientation towards saving the interlocutor’s face and also with regard to a defensive orientation towards saving one’s own face” (Trosborg, 1995: 374). Based on different functions of the apology act, the broad definition of an apology can be summarized as that “an apology is a speech act addressed to the hearer’s face-needs and intended to remedy an offense for which the apologizer takes responsibility, and thus to restore equilibrium between the apologizer and the hearer” (Holmes, 1989: 196).

Finally, as far as the formulas of apology are concerned, one of the studies concerning with this was conducted by Goffman (1971). He distinguished between positive ritual and negative ritual and claimed that positive rituals occur because of a need for mutual support, while negative rituals occur when infractions have been done. In the former case, an expression of gratitude should be provided, while in the latter case, remedial explanations, accounts, repair, or assurances should be offered, and thus a “remedial interchange” occurs. In what he called “remedial interchange”, Goffman observed that speakers attempt to remedy unpleasant social situations by offering an apology and observed that apologies occur in many different formulas according to different situations.

Borkin and Reinhart (1978) further examined two different but often functionally similar phrases “excuse me” and “I’m sorry”. They found that though both of these two formulas can be used as remedies in what Goffman (1971) calls “remedial interchanges”, they actually have

different apologizing effects and their distribution is governed by some social generalizations.

Based on extensive observation, Borkin and Reinhart defined “excuse me” as a formula to

“remedy a past or immediately forthcoming breach of etiquette or other light infraction of a social rule on the part of the speaker”, while “I’m sorry” was defined as “an expression of dismay or regret at an unpleasantness suffered by the speaker and/or the addressee” (Borkin &

Reinhart, 1978: 61).

The accuracy of Borkin and Reinhart’s analysis has been supported by Owen (1983) and Fraser (1981). Owen claimed that the primary remedial formulas in a remedial interchange varies from ritual to substantive and that the most frequent expression of a primary remedial formulas in English is to include the key word sorry in it. Moreover, by analyzing the strategies used in apologizing, Fraser found that in cases where social norms are broken, people tend to give apologies by providing explanation or account for why the infraction happened in the first place. However, in cases where injury or some sort of serious inconvenience is caused, people tend to offer some form of redress instead of simply accounting for their action.