A Study On Apology In Chinese Daily Talk From The Perspective Of Rapport Management Theory

As one of the most common social behaviors,the apology has been studied by many scholars at home and abroad for many years,but in China,most scholars conduct local conversation research from the perspective of pragmatics,cross-culture and second language acquisition.On the other hand,the domestic research on apology starts later and mainly focuses on the English apologies and the contrastive study between English and Chinese apologies.However,there is little research which analyzes the overall sequence structure of Chinese apologies,so there is a lot of research space in this aspect.This study analyzes the overall sequence structure of apologies in Chinese daily conversation from the perspective of the rapport management,which provides a new research route for apologies.This study is based on Helen Spencer-Oatey's(2007)Rapport Management Theory and qualitative and quantitative methods are used to analyze the apology conversation in the television series.Three questions will be asked:(1)What is the sequence structure of Chinese apologies?(2)How are Chinese apologies initiated and developed?(3)How do we interpret Chinese apologies from the perspective of Rapport Management Theory? Through analysis,the present study finds the overall sequence structure of apologies,which includes the five stages.The five stages are trigger,initiation,core part,development,and closing.Trigger composes two subtypes,past offence as trigger or present/future offence as trigger.Initiation which means the start of apologies is divided into three subtypes,the initiation of apologies by the offender,the requirement of apologies by the offended and the initiation of apologies by the third party.The core part has two subtypes.The first is acceptance of apologies and the second is refusal of apologies.Development has three subtypes.Closure is the last stage of the apologies which can be divided into three subtypes:acceptance of apologies,refusal of apologies and changing the topic.Finally,through the Rapport Management Theory,the present study further explores the apology conversation and interpersonal harmony orientation.Rapportmanagement theory is the latest theory of the pragmatics,which is based on the theory of face and politeness.It focuses on the relationship management function of language,with interpersonal harmony as the orientation.The Rapport Management Theory mainly consists of two parts: face management,social rights management.Among them,face management includes quality face management and identity face management;sociality rights management includes equity rights management and association rights management.Through the Rapport Management Theory,the present study finds that the use of apologies has the function of remedying and balancing each other's quality face,identity face,equity rights and sociality rights,which is of great significance for better guiding the use of apologies.On the other hand,the present study also finds that not all the apologies which are made by the offender are accepted by the offended or the third party.In response to apologies of the offender,the offended or the third party may threaten the offender's face and sociality rights management.In addition,the research in this paper has certain limitations.For example,if the corpus is taken from real life,it will be more convincing,and the corpus of this paper is not enough.Therefore,it is hoped that the subsequent research can be more comprehensive based on the collection of sufficient corpus.