Publications

Publication details [#35012]

Holmes, Janet. 1990. Apologies in New Zealand English. Language in Society 19 (2) : 155–199.

Publication type

Article in journal

Publication language

English

Keywords

affect | apologizing | meaning | sociolinguistics

Language as a subject

English, New Zealand

Place, Publisher

Cambridge University Press

ISBN

0047-4045

Journal WWW

journals.cambridge.org/

Annotation

This paper examines the syntactic, semantic and sociolinguistic characteristics of apologies in informal remedial interactions, based on a New Zealand corpus of 183 apologies. The findings are tested against Brown and Levinson's politeness theory and Wolfon's 'bulge' theory.