Chapter 12
“He offered an apologetic smile”
The politeness of apologetic gestures
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.
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
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Acknowledgements
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Notes
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Corpora
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References