Cover not available
Part of
Multimodal Im/politeness: Signed, spoken, written
Edited by Andreas H. Jucker, Iris Hübscher and Lucien Brown
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 333] 2023
► pp. 327–351

Chapter 12
“He offered an apologetic smile”

The politeness of apologetic gestures

ORCID logo | University of Zurich
This contribution focuses on the multimodal aspects of apologies. In terms of politeness and face management, apologies are ambivalent. They are redressive and indicate a concern for the hearer, but they also include a certain amount of self-blame and thus threaten the speaker’s own positive face. Narrative descriptions of apologetic gestures were retrieved from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) through the collocation profiles of apology expressions. Such gestures may occur in isolation without a spoken apology, or they may occur together with a more or less explicit apology. In many cases, the apologetic gesture helps to discursively negotiate the severity of an event that may have been perceived as an offence and the speaker’s responsibility for it.
Keywords: speech acts, apologies, gestures, facial expressions, Corpus of Contemporary English (COCA), face work
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous literature
  • 3.Data and method
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Register profiles of apologies
    • 4.2Collocational patterns of apologies and gestures
    • 4.3The politeness of apology gestures
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Corpora
  • References
Published online: 21 February 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.333.12juc
References (51)
Corpora
Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): [URL]
Corpus of Historical American English (COHA): [URL]
British National Corpus (BNC): [URL]
References
Aijmer, Karin. 2019. “‘Ooh whoops I’m sorry!’ Teenagers’ Use of English Apology Expressions.” Journal of Pragmatics 142: 258–269. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Arizavi, Saleh, and Yazdan Choubsaz. 2019. “To Use or not to Use the Shorter Forms: A Corpus-based Analysis of Apologetic Expressions Sorry and I’m sorry in American Spoken English Discourse.” Corpus Pragmatics 3: 21–47. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Austin, J. L. 1962. How to Do Things With Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Barron, Anne. 2019. “Using Corpus-linguistic Methods to Track Longitudinal Development: Routine Apologies in the Study Abroad Context.” Journal of Pragmatics 146: 87–105. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana, Juliane House, and Gabriele Kasper (eds.). 1989. Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Brown, Lucien, and Pilar Prieto. 2017. “(Im)politeness: Prosody and Gesture.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic (Im)politeness, ed. by Jonathan Culpeper, Michael Haugh and Dániel Z. Kádár, 357–379. London: Palgrave. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2021. “Gesture and Prosody in Multimodal Communication.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics, ed. by Michael Haugh, Dániel Z. Kádár and Marina Terkourafi, 430–453. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness. Some Universals in Language Usage. Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics 4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clark, Billy. 2013. Relevance Theory. Cambridge Textbook in Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Deutschmann, Mats. 2003. Apologising in British English. Skrifter från moderna språk 10. Umeå: Institutionen för moderna språk, Umeå University.Google Scholar
Domaneschi, Filippo, Marcello Passarelli, and Carlo Chiorri. 2017. “Facial Expressions and Speech Acts: Experimental Evidences on the Role of the Upper Face as an Illocutionary Force Indicating Device in Language Comprehension.” Cognitive Process 18: 285–306. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Efe, Ibrahim, and Bernhard Forchtner. 2015. “‘Saying sorry’ in Turkey: The Dersim Massacre of the 1930s in 2011.” Journal of Language and Politics 14 (2): 233–257. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Haugh, Michael. 2018. “Corpus-based Metapragmatics.” In Methods in Pragmatics. Handbooks of Pragmatics 10, ed. by Andreas H. Jucker, Klaus P. Schneider and Wolfram Bublitz, 619–643. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Haugh, Michael, and Wei-Lin Melody Chang. 2019. “‘The apology seemed (in)sincere’: Variability in Perceptions of (Im)politeness.” Journal of Pragmatics 142: 207–222. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Heritage, John, Chase Wesley Raymond, and Paul Drew. 2019. “Constructing Apologies: Reflexive Relationships Between Apologies and Offenses.” Journal of Pragmatics 142: 185–200. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Holmes, Janet. 1990. “Apologies in New Zealand English.” Language in Society 19 (2): 155–199. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hübler, Axel. 2007. “On the Metapragmatics of Gestures.” In Metapragmatics in Use. Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 165, ed. by Wolfram Bublitz and Axel Hübler, 107–128. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2011. “Metapragmatics.” In Foundations of Pragmatics. Handbooks of Pragmatics 1, ed. by Wolfram Bublitz and Neal R. Norrick, 107–136. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jucker, Andreas H. 2018. “Apologies in the History of English: Evidence from the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA).” Corpus Pragmatics 2 (4): 375–398. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2019. “Speech Act Attenuation in the History of English: The Case of Apologies.” Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 4 (1): 45. 1–25. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jucker, Andreas H., and Irma Taavitsainen. 2013. English Historical Pragmatics. Edinburgh Textbooks on the English Language. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2014. “Complimenting in the History of American English: A Metacommunicative Expression Analysis.” In Diachronic Corpus Pragmatics. Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 243, ed. by Irma Taavitsainen, Andreas H. Jucker and Jukka Tuominen, 257–276. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jucker, Andreas H., Gerold Schneider, Irma Taavitsainen, and Barb Breustedt. 2008. “Fishing for Compliments: Precision and Recall in Corpus-linguistic Compliment Research.” In Speech Acts in the History of English. Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 176, ed. by Andreas H. Jucker, and Irma Taavitsainen, 273–294. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kampf, Zohar. 2009. “Public (Non-)apologies: The Discourse of Minimizing Responsibility.” Journal of Pragmatics 41: 2257–2270. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kendon, Adam. 1995. “Gestures as Illocutionary and Discourse Structure Markers in Southern Italian Conversation.” Journal of Pragmatics 23: 247–279. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2004. Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lopez-Ozieblo, Renia. 2020. Proposing a Revised Functional Classification of Pragmatic Gestures. Lingua 247: 102870. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lutzky, Ursula, and Andrew Kehoe. 2017a. “‘Oops, I didn’t mean to be so flippant’: A Corpus Pragmatic Analysis of Apologies in Blog Data.” Journal of Pragmatics 116: 27–36. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2017b. “‘I apologise for my poor blogging’: Searching for Apologies in the Birmingham Blog Corpus.” Corpus Pragmatics 1: 37–56. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Manes, Joan, and Nessa Wolfson. 1981. “The Compliment Formula.” In Conversational Routine: Explorations in Standardized Communication Situations and Prepatterned Speech, ed. by Florian Coulmas, 115–132. The Hague: Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McNeill, David. 1992. Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Meier, A. J. 1998. “Apologies: What Do We Know?” International Journal of Applied Linguistics 8 (2): 215–231. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mok, Jeffrey, and Mitsuhiro Tokunaga. 2009. “A Cross Cultural Apology Episode of a Diplomatic Repair: A Study into Japan’s Former Prime Minister Koizumi’s Official Apology in April 2005.” Journal of Language and Politics 8 (1): 72–96. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Müller, Cornelia. 1998. Redebegleitende Gesten: Kulturgeschichte, Theorie, Sprachvergleich. Berlin: Berlin-Verlag Spitz.Google Scholar
Murphy, James. 2019. “‘I’m sorry you are such an arsehole’: (Non-)canonical Apologies and their Implications for (Im)politeness. Journal of Pragmatics 142: 223–232. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Okano, Emi, and Lucien Brown. 2018. “‘Did Becky really need to apologise?’ Intercultural Evaluations of Politeness.” East Asian Pragmatics 3 (2): 151–178. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Olshtain, Elite. 1989. “Apologies Across Languages.” In Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies, ed. by Shoshana Blum-Kulka, Juliane House, and Gabriele Kasper, 155–173. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Owen, Marion. 1983. Apologies and Remedial Interchanges: A Study of Language Use in Social Interaction. Berlin: Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Page, Ruth. 2014. “Saying ‘Sorry’: Corporate Apologies Posted on Twitter.” Journal of Pragmatics 62: 30–45. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Payrató, Lluís, and Sedinha Teßendorf. 2014. “Pragmatic Gestures.” In Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft / Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science. HSK 38/2, ed. by Cornelia Müller, Alan Cienki, Ellen Fricke, Silva Ladewig, David McNeill, and Jana Bressem, 1531–1539. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pereira, Gerardine M. 2018. “The Interface between Pragmatics and Gesture Studies.” In Pragmatics and its Interfaces. Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 294, ed. by Cornelia Ilie and Neal R. Norrick, 163–184. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rieger, Caroline L. 2017. “‘I want a real apology’: A Discursive Pragmatic Perspective on Apologies.” Pragmatics 27 (4): 553–590.Google Scholar
Robinson, Jeffrey D. 2004. “The Sequential Organization of ‘Explicit’ Apologies in Naturally Occurring English.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 37 (3): 291–330. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Searle, John R. 1969. Speech Act:. An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson. 1995. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Second edition. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Trosborg, Anna. 1995. Interlanguage Pragmatics: Requests, Complaints and Apologies. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wharton, Tim. 2009. Pragmatics and Non-Verbal Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar