Evidence for native speaker notions of apologizing and accepting apologies in American English

Under traditional speech act theory, it has been assumed that the elements comprising speech acts such as apologies can be classified into a taxonomy, and that the conventional and non-conventional means (semantic formulae) of accomplishing a speech act may be described in terms of the perceived function that they have in accomplishing the speech act, e.g. justification, and acceptance of responsibility. However, such classification proved unreliable when it was found that native speakers disagree as to the function of a given semantic formula. The purpose of this study was threefold: (1) to look for patterns of interpretation with regard to the function of given semantic formulae as they occur within the discourse of several popular television programs; (2) to examine the cues which subjects use to interpret the sincerity of an apology and whether or not it was accepted by the Receiver; and (3) to propose the types of rules needed to account for the variety of interpretations which subject proposed for a single semantic formula. The data were gathered from 161 native speakers of English. Subjects were asked to view one of two videos containing six apologies and answer several questions concerning each apology on one of the four accompanying script/questionnaires. It was found that some very general patterns of interpretation did occur although there was tremendous variation in the responses. These data suggest that the rules used to interpret and choose apologies must allow for much flexibility in their application to various circumstances. It was found that subjects differed in their ideas of what it means to be sincere, and what it means to accept an apology. Subjects used primarily prosodic cues to judge the sincerity of an apology and they used primarily lexical cues to judge the acceptedness of an apology. It is hypothesized that the nature of the rules subjects use is analogous to a list of priorities and a list of pragmatically subcategorized semantic formulae and a set of conventions used to match these lists in a manner allowing speakers to appropriately interpret and offer apologies.