Using Wierzbicka's (1987) natural semantic metalanguage theory, this semantic and pragmatic analysis explores how the expressions of South Korean and Australian English apologetic speech acts -such as mianhada and sorry- differ conceptually from each other. It also examines South Korean apology speech act strategies in seven situations. this investigation is modeled on the work of Blum-Kulka and her collaborators (1989). The findings of my study are that the attitudinal meanings of mianhada and sorry, as well as the range of illocutionary acts associated with the two expressions are different. Decomposing mianhada and sorry into their illocutionary components provides a fine-grained description of what I assume to be the attitudes and states of mind of South Koreans and Australians, respectively, when performing the apologetic speech act. My study further suggests that conceptualizing speech act expressions, using semantically simple words, may help second language learners acquire the proper ways of carrying out speech acts (including non-verbal expressions) in the target language and culture.