On The Speech Act Of Apology In Chinese

Apology, as one of the speech acts, its realization patterns have been the subject of extensive research in the fields of pragmatics and socio-linguistics. A review of the related literature shows that though apologies by native speakers of English and other languages have been widely studied, the language of Chinese, however, has been seldom researched in a systematical way in terms of both the realization of and responses to apologies. This paper, therefore, focuses on investigating and analyzing the speech act of apology in Chinese as well as Chinese responses to apology. The analysis of apology strategies follows the CCSARP (Cross Cultural Speech Act Realization Patterns) project; a general structure of Chinese apology is therefore produced which leads to the enrichment of the CCSARP. As apology response has been rarely touched upon to date, this paper thus aims to give a preliminary, yet rather persuasive analysis among Chinese speakers in this regard, the finding of which indicates that Chinese subjects respond to apology usually with a set of routinized expressions and strategies. Also discussed in this paper is a brand-new area--the "request" strategies used in apology. The analysis shows that speakers tend to make request when they apologize, that the realization pattern of one speech act is also a way of performing another speech act, and that different speech acts are inter-related. On the whole, there are two major contributions in this paper that will be of great help to the later researches in this field, namely, the apology responses and the "request" strategies used in the speech act of apology.In this paper, the theoretical background, especially the linguistic politeness, is first explored, because the speech act of apology is closely associated with face which is also at the core of Brown and Levinson's politeness theory. Some previous studies on apologies are also taken into consideration, such as the definitions and the strategies of apology.The first section of this research, namely, the realization of the apology strategies, to a large extent, follows that of the CCSARP (the Cross Cultural Speech Act Realization Project) by Blum-Kulka/Olshtain (1984), which has been regarded as the landmark in the studies of two speech acts: requests and apologies. All in all, 84 subjects participate in the survey, whose responses constitute all the needed data. In this section, the questionnaire comprises of nine situations, each of which stands for aspecific situation that may elicit an apology. CCSARP originally had seven situations; most of them are rearranged and two situations, which are more characterized by Chinese people, are added.With regard to the realization patterns, the five strategies (IFIDs (Illocutionary Force Indicating Devices), an expression of responsibility, an account, an offer of repair and a promise of forbearance) defined by Olshtain and Cohen (1983) are likewise applicable among the Chinese speakers, although the use of them vary from person to person and from situation to situation. And the interrelationship between apology and social parameters shows no obvious rules.In the section of the responses to apology, the strategies of AR (apology response) are initiated and categorized into five (IFIDs, cautions, concern for the hearer, explaining things away, conditional forgiveness). Although all the ARs in Chinese cannot be generalized, those strategies classified, however, help us extract an elementary but clear picture about how Chinese speakers respond to an apology. Due to the universality of language, they are, to some extent, also applicable to other languages.And the end of this paper is the conclusion of this research and some difficulties and limitations encountered in the process of studies.