A Study Of Apology Speech Acts In Desperate Housewives

Speech act theory is an important theory in the area of pragmatics. Now it’s the hotspot of recent research to make a general and multi-angle study of pragmatics by combining speech act theory and specific usage of language. Apology has been attracting the attention of scholars both at home and abroad for a long time as a kind of speech act. It’s a social act in nature, aiming to maintain harmonious social relations among people. To apologize is a kind of polite act, is the need to value the hearer’s face. It’s a measure of remedy, and is a necessary composition of remedial conversation. The basic function of apology is to provide compensation for offensive act and to regain social balance and harmony.In the previous study of apology speech acts, most scholars are inclined to study its linguistic theory. And the corpus is test or questionnaire which is mostly designed. This kind of study is usually lack of applicability. In this thesis, the author studies not only the theory of apology speech act, but also its application of analyzing literature work. The corpus is chosen from American TV series Desperate Housewives and the author studies their apology strategies and pragmatic functions. The TV series Desperate Housewives tells about a story of four housewives and the languages in it is close to life. In this way, the author hopes to show the readers a more comprehensive application of apology speech act.Research methods in this thesis are as follows: the author summarizes 380 items of apology strategies from the eighth season of American TV series Desperate Housewives artificially, and analyzes its apology strategies one by one. In the process of analyzing, the author finds out the previous classifications of apology strategies are not enough to cover the whole corpus. So the author adds four new strategies to Trosborg’s classification. They are ignoring the complainer’s feeling; transferring topics; reminding the hearer’s attention and the fake apology. Through these analyzing, the author hopes the readers could have a better understanding of the characters in the TV play and could use apology speech act more accurately. This is the innovation point and practical applicability of the thesis.From the analysis, we can see the most frequently used strategy is illocutionary force indicating devices(IFIDs). Most people would like to choose this kind of strategy to show his or her sorry for the hearer at the first time of offending. The second frequently used strategy is acknowledgement of responsibility. A lot of people choose this kind of strategy to placate the sufferer’s feelings and to show regret for having hurting the sufferer before. Among it the strategy of explicit acknowledgement takes up the most percent. The third frequently used strategy is explanation for the offence. And the forth frequently used strategy is refusing to apologize. Through the analysis, the author finds that the apology language of American English has its own characteristics. English culture is low context. People advocating personality and pay attention to individual culture. Their communication style is full of conflictions, and it’s praised when people have different opinions with each other. So a certain degree of conflict is considered to be positive, is a sign of democracy. When the speakers consider they are reasonable, they will not apologize. Some may choose the explicit denial of apology and the others choose a relative lighter degree of denial. The other strategies like fake apology, offer of repair, minimizing the degree of offence, reminding the hearer’s attention, expressing concern for the hearer and promise of forbearance take up a little frequency in total. Then the author lists the three functions of apology strategies: serving as phatic communication; maintaining face; and showing sympathy to hearers.Through these detailed analysis, the author hopes that the readers could have a better understanding of the personal characters in the TV series, and then apply the apology speech acts more accurately and exactly in daily life. In this way, people could have a better and more harmonious relationship with each other.