Apology responses and gender differences in spoken British English: A corpus study

Yi An, Hang Su and Mingyou Xiang
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications | Sichuan International Studies University | University of International Business and Economics

Abstract

This study presents a corpus-based sociopragmatic investigation into apology responses (ARs) and gender differences in ARs in spoken British English. Using data taken from the recently released Spoken BNC2014, the investigation leads to an adjusted taxonomy of ARs which comprises five categories and several sub-categories. The investigation shows that ‘Lack of response’ is the most typical response, followed by ‘Acceptance’, ‘Rejection’, ‘Evasion’, and ‘Acknowledgement’. The results are discussed in relation to the process of attenuation that apologies have undergone (e.g. Jucker 2019 2019 “Speech Act Attenuation in the History of English: The Case of Apologies.” Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 4 (1): 1–25. DOI logoGoogle Scholar), i.e. apologies are becoming more routinised and less meaningful. The proposed taxonomy is subsequently used to examine the extent to which male and female recipients respond to apologies differently. While the investigation suggests no significant differences in ARs across genders, it has been observed that there is some correlation between ARs and the gender of the apologiser. Finally, the implications and applications of the study are briefly discussed.

Keywords:
Publication history
Table of contents

1.Introduction

This study, drawing on insights from previous studies (Holmes 1989Holmes, Janet 1989 “Sex Differences and Apologies: One Aspect of Communicative Competence.” Applied Linguistics 10 (2): 194–212. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 1995 1995Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.Google Scholar; Robinson 2004Robinson, Jeffrey 2004 “The Sequential Organization of ‘Explicit’ Apologies in Naturally Occurring English.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 37: 291–330. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; Murphy 2016Murphy, James 2016 “Apologies Made at the Leveson Inquiry: Triggers and Responses.” Pragmatics and Society 7 (4): 595–617. DOI logoGoogle Scholar), proposes an adjusted taxonomy of apology responses (ARs) and further applies it to explore the extent to which men and women respond to apologies differently in spoken British English. The rationale of doing so is that, as indicated in the reviews recently offered by Jones and Adrefiza (2017)Jones, Jeremy, and Adrefiza 2017 “Comparing Apologies in Australian English and Bahasa Indonesia: Cultural and Gender Perspectives.” Journal of Politeness Research 13 (1): 89–119. DOI logoGoogle Scholar and Jucker (2018)Jucker, Andreas 2018 “Apologies in the History of English: Evidence from the Corpus of Historical American English.” Corpus Pragmatics 2: 375–398. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, only a few studies have explored apology responses (e.g. Holmes 1989Holmes, Janet 1989 “Sex Differences and Apologies: One Aspect of Communicative Competence.” Applied Linguistics 10 (2): 194–212. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 1995 1995Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.Google Scholar; Robinson 2004Robinson, Jeffrey 2004 “The Sequential Organization of ‘Explicit’ Apologies in Naturally Occurring English.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 37: 291–330. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; Murphy 2016Murphy, James 2016 “Apologies Made at the Leveson Inquiry: Triggers and Responses.” Pragmatics and Society 7 (4): 595–617. DOI logoGoogle Scholar) and even fewer have investigated how male and female recipients respond to apologies made to them (see Section 2 for more detail). Therefore, using data taken from the recently released Spoken BNC2014 (Love et al. 2017Love, Robbie, Claire Dembry, Andrew Hardie, Vaclav Brezina, and Tony McEnery 2017 “The Spoken BNC2014: Designing and Building a Spoken Corpus of Everyday Conversations.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 22 (3): 319–344. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; Section 3), the study presents a corpus-based sociopragmatic investigation into apology responses and the differences of ARs across genders. It contributes to the literature of apology studies particularly by providing a more fine-grained taxonomy of ARs and by examining the gender differences in ARs. It will be shown that the proposed taxonomy would facilitate the investigation of ARs across genders (or, more broadly, across contexts). It will also be argued that a systematic account of ARs could be of practical significance, especially in that it would be useful to inform language users, EFL learners in particular, of the ways to interpret and respond to apologies appropriately.

The remainder of this paper is organised into five sections. Section 2 offers a brief overview of previous studies on ARs. Section 3 discusses the data and methodology used in the current investigation. Section 4 presents the analyses and subsequently the refined taxonomy of ARs proposed in this study, followed by Section 5 in which gender differences in ARs are systematically explored. Finally, Section 6 concludes the study, discussing its implications and applications and suggesting directions that are worthy of further investigation.

2.Literature review

Apologies are common in everyday life and play a crucial role in maintaining social relationships. Studies have extensively investigated apologies from the perspectives of, for example, cross-cultural pragmatics (e.g. Blum-Kulka et al. 1989Blum-Kulka, Shoshana, Juliane House, and Gabriele Kasper (eds) 1989Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar; Ogiermann 2009Ogiermann, Eva 2009On Apologising in Negative and Positive Politeness Cultures. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; Bella 2014Bella, Spyridoula 2014 “A Contrastive Study of Apologies Performed by Greek Native Speakers and English Learners of Greek as a Foreign Language.” Pragmatics 24 (4): 679–713. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; Jones and Adrefiza 2017Jones, Jeremy, and Adrefiza 2017 “Comparing Apologies in Australian English and Bahasa Indonesia: Cultural and Gender Perspectives.” Journal of Politeness Research 13 (1): 89–119. DOI logoGoogle Scholar) and interlanguage pragmatics (e.g. Trosborg 1995Trosborg, Anna 1995Interlanguage Pragmatics: Requests, Complaints and Apologies. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; Flores Salgado 2011Flores Salgado, Elizabeth 2011The Pragmatics of Requests and Apologies: Developmental Patterns of Mexican Students. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; Cheng 2017Cheng, Dongmei 2017 “Communication Is a Two-Way Street: Instructors’ Perceptions of Student Apologies.” Pragmatics 27 (1): 1–32. DOI logoGoogle Scholar). However, it appears that few studies have addressed the questions as to how recipients respond to apologies and whether there are any gender differences in ARs, as discussed in more detail below.

One pioneering work on ARs is Owen (1983)Owen, Marion 1983Apologies and Remedial Interchanges: A Study of Language Use in Social Interaction. Berlin: Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar. Using tape recordings of transactions and telephone conversations, the author identified three general categories: ‘formulaic responses’ (acknowledgements, acceptances), ‘extended responses’ (remedial responses like thanks, denials, shifts of blame, and affiliations), and ‘withholding of response’. Another early and representative work is that of Holmes (1989Holmes, Janet 1989 “Sex Differences and Apologies: One Aspect of Communicative Competence.” Applied Linguistics 10 (2): 194–212. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 1995 1995Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.Google Scholar), which explored the ways speakers make and respond to apologies in New Zealand English and proposed a taxonomy of ARs consisting of six types: ‘Accept’, ‘Acknowledge’, ‘Evade’, ‘Reject’, ‘No response’, and ‘Other’ (e.g. another apology). In general, Holmes (1989Holmes, Janet 1989 “Sex Differences and Apologies: One Aspect of Communicative Competence.” Applied Linguistics 10 (2): 194–212. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 1995 1995Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.Google Scholar) showed that the most preferred response is ‘Accept’, while ‘Reject’ and ‘Acknowledge’ are less likely choices, which also appears to be the case in other communities (e.g. Owen 1983Owen, Marion 1983Apologies and Remedial Interchanges: A Study of Language Use in Social Interaction. Berlin: Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; Adrefiza and Jones 2013Adrefiza, and Jeremy Jones 2013 “Investigating Apology Response Strategies in Australian English and Bahasa Indonesia: Gender and Cultural Perspectives.” Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 36 (1): 71–101. DOI logoGoogle Scholar).

Relatively more recently, Robinson (2004)Robinson, Jeffrey 2004 “The Sequential Organization of ‘Explicit’ Apologies in Naturally Occurring English.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 37: 291–330. DOI logoGoogle Scholar examined the sequential organisation of apologies in English and found that apologies can take different sequential positions. Specifically, working within a conversation analytic framework, he focused on apologies as first turns in adjacency pairs and distinguished between preferred and dispreferred responses to such apologies.11.Note that preferred and dispreferred responses are not about the psychological desire of a speaker, but about what is sequentially and/or culturally expected (Heritage 1984Heritage, John 1984Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar). The former includes “absolution” and “disagreeing with the need to have apologized”, and the latter consists of “response delay”, “mere acknowledgment”, and “agreeing with the need to have apologized” (Robinson 2004Robinson, Jeffrey 2004 “The Sequential Organization of ‘Explicit’ Apologies in Naturally Occurring English.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 37: 291–330. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 319). Overall, these categories are to a large extent similar to those proposed by Holmes (1989Holmes, Janet 1989 “Sex Differences and Apologies: One Aspect of Communicative Competence.” Applied Linguistics 10 (2): 194–212. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 1995 1995Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.Google Scholar). One limitation of Robinson’s study, however, might be that it does not provide any quantitative information for each type of response and, consequently, it remains unclear which type of response is more frequently activated in conversations.

Adrefiza and Jones (2013)Adrefiza, and Jeremy Jones 2013 “Investigating Apology Response Strategies in Australian English and Bahasa Indonesia: Gender and Cultural Perspectives.” Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 36 (1): 71–101. DOI logoGoogle Scholar investigated ARs from a sociocultural perspective by comparing responses in Australian English and Bahasa Indonesia. They modified Holmes’ (1995) 1995Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.Google Scholar taxonomy slightly and suggested four response types: ‘Acceptance’, ‘Acknowledgement’, ‘Evasion’, and ‘Rejection’. Additionally, like Chen and Yang (2010)Chen, Rong, and Dafu Yang 2010 “Responding to Compliments in Chinese: Has It Changed?Journal of Pragmatics 42: 1951–1963. DOI logoGoogle Scholar who suggested sub-types of compliment responses, they proposed a number of sub-types of ARs, as shown in Table 1. These sub-types further capture the complexity of ARs, which is evidenced by the fact that most ARs involve two or more sub-strategies. Adrefiza and Jones’ (2013)Adrefiza, and Jeremy Jones 2013 “Investigating Apology Response Strategies in Australian English and Bahasa Indonesia: Gender and Cultural Perspectives.” Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 36 (1): 71–101. DOI logoGoogle Scholar investigation showed that ‘Acceptance’ was the most prevalent response in both communities, which is consistent with the observations drawn in previous research (e.g. Owen 1983Owen, Marion 1983Apologies and Remedial Interchanges: A Study of Language Use in Social Interaction. Berlin: Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; Holmes 1989Holmes, Janet 1989 “Sex Differences and Apologies: One Aspect of Communicative Competence.” Applied Linguistics 10 (2): 194–212. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 1995 1995Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.Google Scholar). They further observed that Indonesians were more direct and face-threatening than their Australian counterparts in that they were more likely to acknowledge apologies than Australians (24.4% vs. 9.4%), whereas Australians were more evasive than Indonesians (33.3% vs. 14.4%). This was somewhat unexpected as it challenges the stereotype that Indonesians, as members of a High Context culture (Hofstede 1980Hofstede, Geert 1980Culture’s Consequences: International Differences in Work-Related Values. Beverly Hills: Sage.Google Scholar), would be more deferential and indirect than their English-speaking counterparts (Adrefiza and Jones 2013Adrefiza, and Jeremy Jones 2013 “Investigating Apology Response Strategies in Australian English and Bahasa Indonesia: Gender and Cultural Perspectives.” Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 36 (1): 71–101. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 95).

Table 1.Types and sub-types of apology responses in Adrefiza and Jones (2013Adrefiza, and Jeremy Jones 2013 “Investigating Apology Response Strategies in Australian English and Bahasa Indonesia: Gender and Cultural Perspectives.” Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 36 (1): 71–101. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 78–79)
Response type Sub-type
Acceptance Absolution, Dismissal, Formal, Thanking, Advice/Suggestion, Requests, Expressing empathy, Expressing emotion, Questioning/Surprise
Acknowledgement Absolution plus, Negation plus, Formal plus, Advice/Suggestion, Warning/Threatening, Evaluating, Expressing emotion
Evasion Deflecting/Explaining, Thanking, Questioning/Surprise, Requests, Advice/Suggestion, Expressing emotion
Rejection Refusal, Advice/Suggestion, Requests, Warning, Blaming, Swearing, Asking for Compensation, Evaluating, Non-apology ‘Sorry’, Expressing emotion, Thanking

In another more recent study, Murphy (2016)Murphy, James 2016 “Apologies Made at the Leveson Inquiry: Triggers and Responses.” Pragmatics and Society 7 (4): 595–617. DOI logoGoogle Scholar explored triggers of and responses to apologies in the political context of the Leveson Inquiry in the United Kingdom. He identified four types of responses, including ‘Rejection of need to apologise’, ‘Minimise the offence’, ‘Apology in kind’, and ‘Lack of response’, which are also similar to those identified in Holmes (1989Holmes, Janet 1989 “Sex Differences and Apologies: One Aspect of Communicative Competence.” Applied Linguistics 10 (2): 194–212. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 1995 1995Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.Google Scholar) and Adrefiza and Jones (2013)Adrefiza, and Jeremy Jones 2013 “Investigating Apology Response Strategies in Australian English and Bahasa Indonesia: Gender and Cultural Perspectives.” Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 36 (1): 71–101. DOI logoGoogle Scholar. However, no equivalent category of ‘Evade’ or ‘Reject’ was found in the Leveson Inquiry. This may be due to the fact that many of the offences in the Inquiry are “interactional” in nature (e.g. speaking too quickly, interrupting), rather than “tangible transgressions” (Murphy 2016Murphy, James 2016 “Apologies Made at the Leveson Inquiry: Triggers and Responses.” Pragmatics and Society 7 (4): 595–617. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 615). In addition, Murphy observed that apology response can be completely absent, which is very common at the Inquiry (85 out of 105).

The aforementioned studies are of great value in that they have offered a good starting point for subsequent investigations into ARs. Nevertheless, they have some limitations. The first is that most previous studies did not draw on large-scale authentic, naturally occurring data. For instance, Holmes (1989Holmes, Janet 1989 “Sex Differences and Apologies: One Aspect of Communicative Competence.” Applied Linguistics 10 (2): 194–212. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 1995 1995Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.Google Scholar) used ethnographic data reported retrospectively; Adrefiza and Jones (2013)Adrefiza, and Jeremy Jones 2013 “Investigating Apology Response Strategies in Australian English and Bahasa Indonesia: Gender and Cultural Perspectives.” Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 36 (1): 71–101. DOI logoGoogle Scholar relied on data collected through discourse completion tasks. This indicates that the taxonomies of ARs proposed in previous studies may need to be further tested with a larger-scale investigation into naturally occurring data. In other words, this points to the necessity to explore the extent to which a taxonomy of ARs based on large corpora can be aligned with those developed in previous studies.

The second limitation is that the broad categories (i.e. Accept, Reject, Evade, Acknowledge) may not be sufficient to capture the subtlety and complexity of ARs, as responding to an apology is context- and politeness-sensitive and each response strategy may comprise different sub-categories (see Section 4 for more discussion). Although Adrefiza and Jones (2013)Adrefiza, and Jeremy Jones 2013 “Investigating Apology Response Strategies in Australian English and Bahasa Indonesia: Gender and Cultural Perspectives.” Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 36 (1): 71–101. DOI logoGoogle Scholar identified a few sub-categories of ARs, it seems that they have not clearly distinguished these sub-categories. For example, ‘thanking’ and ‘request’ are considered to be sub-categories not only of ‘Acceptance’, but also of ‘Evasion’ and ‘Rejection’. This in turn points to the need to identify and distinguish sub-categories of ARs in a more principled manner. The present study attempts to remedy these problems.

Another question to be addressed is whether gender affects the ways speakers respond to apologies. Previous studies have revealed gender differences in language use (e.g. Newman et al. 2008Newman, Matthew L., Carla J. Groom, Lori D. Handelman, and James W. Pennebaker 2008 “Gender Differences in Language Use: An Analysis of 14,000 Text Samples.” Discourse Processes 45: 211–236. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; Locke 2011Locke, John L. 2011Duels and Duets: Why Men and Women Talk So Differently. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; Coates 2013Coates, Jennifer 2013Women, Men and Language: A Sociolinguistic Account of Gender Differences in Language, 3rd edition. London: Routledge.Google Scholar; Katz and Woodbury 2017Katz, Albert N., and Jonathan A. R. Woodbury 2017 “Gender Differences in Being Thanked for Performing a Favor.” Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 46: 481–496. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; Wainwright 2019Wainwright, Angela 2019 “Gender Differences in the Narrative Productions of African American Adults.” American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology 28: 623–638. DOI logoGoogle Scholar), which raises the question as to whether gender differences also exist with respect to ARs. While a number of studies have investigated gender differences in apology behaviour (e.g. Holmes 1995 1995Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.Google Scholar; Bataineh and Bataineh 2006Bataineh, Ruba, and Rula Bataineh 2006“Apology Strategies of Jordanian EFL University Students. Journal of Pragmatics 38 (11): 1901–1927. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; Schumann and Ross 2010Schumann, Karina, and Michael Ross 2010 “Why Women Apologize More than Men: Gender Differences in Thresholds for Perceiving Offensive Behavior.” Psychological Science 21: 1–7. DOI logoGoogle Scholar),22.The stereotype is that women apologise more often than men, and the reasons for the differences have often been associated with women’s relative lower social status and their perception of more offences (Holmes 1995 1995Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.Google Scholar; Schuman and Ross 2010Schumann, Karina, and Michael Ross 2010 “Why Women Apologize More than Men: Gender Differences in Thresholds for Perceiving Offensive Behavior.” Psychological Science 21: 1–7. DOI logoGoogle Scholar). it appears that very few studies have explored how male and female speakers respond to apologies, respectively (e.g. do they use and/or prefer different response strategies?). Holmes (1989Holmes, Janet 1989 “Sex Differences and Apologies: One Aspect of Communicative Competence.” Applied Linguistics 10 (2): 194–212. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 1995 1995Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.Google Scholar) did pioneering work in this field. Her investigation showed that in New Zealand English women are more likely to accept apologies than men, whereas men use the rejection and evasion strategies more often than women. She further argued that, although the differences did not have statistical significance, they provide suggestive trends (Holmes 1989Holmes, Janet 1989 “Sex Differences and Apologies: One Aspect of Communicative Competence.” Applied Linguistics 10 (2): 194–212. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 208). This, however, is not supported by Adrefiza and Jones (2013)Adrefiza, and Jeremy Jones 2013 “Investigating Apology Response Strategies in Australian English and Bahasa Indonesia: Gender and Cultural Perspectives.” Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 36 (1): 71–101. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, who reported no such trends in Australian English and Bahasa Indonesia. While the differences may be attributed to different socio-cultural norms of each language community, the differences might also be a consequence of the data they used: Holmes (1989Holmes, Janet 1989 “Sex Differences and Apologies: One Aspect of Communicative Competence.” Applied Linguistics 10 (2): 194–212. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 1995 1995Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.Google Scholar) was based on ethnographic data reported retrospectively whereas Adrefiza and Jones (2013)Adrefiza, and Jeremy Jones 2013 “Investigating Apology Response Strategies in Australian English and Bahasa Indonesia: Gender and Cultural Perspectives.” Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 36 (1): 71–101. DOI logoGoogle Scholar used oral DCTs to collect data for their study, as discussed above.

To recapitulate, while apologies have been extensively investigated, few studies have explored how speakers respond to apologies using large-scale authentic data and even fewer have looked into the possibility of gender differences with respect to ARs. In the present study we attempt to bridge these gaps. We use corpus methods to explore how language users respond to apologies, aiming to offer an adjusted taxonomy of, and to further investigate gender differences in, ARs, as will be discussed in the following sections.

3.Corpus and methodology

The data used for the current investigation were taken from the newly released Spoken BNC2014 (Love et al. 2017Love, Robbie, Claire Dembry, Andrew Hardie, Vaclav Brezina, and Tony McEnery 2017 “The Spoken BNC2014: Designing and Building a Spoken Corpus of Everyday Conversations.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 22 (3): 319–344. DOI logoGoogle Scholar). As the analyses require the analysts to manually examine all apology-response sequences, we further restricted the data to those collected in 2015 and 2016 (hereafter the Spoken BNC2015-2016), i.e. the most recent data in the Spoken BNC2014. The metainformation of the Spoken BNC2015-2016 is given in Table 2 and the corpus is accessed via the BNCweb CQP-edition (https://​cqpweb​.lancs​.ac​.uk​/bnc2014spoken/; Hoffman et al. 2008Hoffman, Sebastian, Stefan Evert, Nicholas Smith, David Y. W. Lee, and Ylva Berglund 2008Corpus Linguistics with BNCweb: A Practical Guide. Oxford: Peter Lang.Google Scholar).

Table 2.Metainformation of the Spoken BNC2015-2016
Total words No. of texts No. of words by female speakers No. of words by male speakers
6,090,996 700 3,883,524 2,207,472

Following previous studies (e.g. Goffman 1971Goffman, Erving 1971Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar; Holmes 1995 1995Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.Google Scholar; Ogiermann 2009Ogiermann, Eva 2009On Apologising in Negative and Positive Politeness Cultures. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar), apology in this study is defined as an act performed to remedy an offence so as to restore social harmony or equilibrium. The current investigation focuses specifically on explicit apologies whose realisations have been shown to be highly conventionalised, i.e. routinely realised by key items such as sorry, excuse, and forgive (e.g. Aijmer 1996Aijmer, Karin 1996Conversational Routines in English. London/New York: Longman.Google Scholar, 2019 2019 “ ‘Ooh Whoops I’m Sorry! Teenagers’ Use of English Apology Expressions.” Journal of Pragmatics 142: 258–269. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; Deutschmann 2003Deutschmann, Mats 2003Apologising in British English. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Umeå University, Sweden.; Jucker and Taavitsainen 2008Jucker, Andreas, and Irma Taavitsainen 2008 “Apologies in the History of English: Routinized and Lexicalized Expressions of Responsibility and Regret.” In Speech Acts in the History of English, ed. by Andreas Jucker, and Irma Taavitsainen, 229–443. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; Su and Wei 2018Su, Hang, and Naixing Wei 2018‘‘‘I’m Really Sorry about What I Said’: A Local Grammar of Apology.” Pragmatics 28 (3): 439–462. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; Su 2020Su, Hang 2020 “Local Grammars and Diachronic Speech Act Analysis: A Case Study of Apology in the History of American English.” Journal of Historical Pragmatics 21 (1): 109–136. DOI logoGoogle Scholar). This means that this kind of apology is amenable to corpus search. We, therefore, used a set of lexical items, also known as illocutionary force indicating devices (IFIDs), to search and retrieve apology-response sequences (see Table 3).

Table 3.Apology IFIDs and their frequencies in the Spoken BNC2015-2016
Item Frequency
sorry 3,050
pardon  310
excuse  307
afraid  165
apologize/se   61
regret   67
forgive   13
apology/ies   12
Total 3,985

As Jucker and Taavitsainen (2008Jucker, Andreas, and Irma Taavitsainen 2008 “Apologies in the History of English: Routinized and Lexicalized Expressions of Responsibility and Regret.” In Speech Acts in the History of English, ed. by Andreas Jucker, and Irma Taavitsainen, 229–443. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 233) noted, even if searching these items can only retrieve a subset of apology expressions, “it is likely to be a fairly substantial subset, and we believe that it is a very important subset”. This would justify our choice of using a predetermined set of items to search and identify explicit apologies in the Spoken BNC2015-2016. We further manually examined all the apology expressions retrieved to make sure that all the remaining instances have the illocutionary force of apologising. The examination allows us to identify 660 apology-response sequences.

Types of offences may influence the strategy one chooses to apologise and subsequently how the recipient responds to that apology; therefore, it is necessary to discuss offence types. We found Deutschmann’s (2003)Deutschmann, Mats 2003Apologising in British English. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Umeå University, Sweden. taxonomy, which is presented in Table 4, to be the most comprehensive one (cf. Holmes 1989Holmes, Janet 1989 “Sex Differences and Apologies: One Aspect of Communicative Competence.” Applied Linguistics 10 (2): 194–212. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; Aijmer 1996Aijmer, Karin 1996Conversational Routines in English. London/New York: Longman.Google Scholar).

Table 4.Types of offences (adapted from Deutschmann 2003Deutschmann, Mats 2003Apologising in British English. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Umeå University, Sweden., 64)
Offence type Explanation Example
Breach of expectation Not living up to the addressee’s expectations, by not keeping promises or by rejecting invitations or requests, for example.

S0509: >> sorry for my failure of a birthday present then

S0510: no it wasn’t at all I mean I still enjoyed it

Lack of consideration Transgressions where the positive face wants of the hearer are threatened in some way, such as interruptions, overlooking a person, causing inconvenience, and taboo offences.

S0679: sorry I interrupt

S0680: in this in this thing I was gon na say we went up to London in this thing

Mistake and misunderstanding Misunderstanding someone, or making mistakes

S0607: hotel where?

S0644: >> oh it’s a bank sorry it’s a bank

Talk offence Slips of the tongue, digressions, hesitations, corrections, being unclear, forgetting to mention something

S0679: you know the spiky plants at your house that no sorry not at your house at – ANONnameM ’s house

S0680: yes

Accident Damage to property, bumping into a person, hurting someone unintentionally

S0655: sorry it fell off (.) this – UNCLEARWORD is taking ages (…) see if I can get – UNCLEARWORD yay

S0653: >> well I hope you’re going to be cleaning that up

Social gaffe Accidental socially unacceptable behaviour such as coughing, burping or hiccupping.

S0618: yeah sorry sorry for yawning

S0619: yeah

To facilitate the subsequent investigation, we grouped the 660 apology-response sequences according to the type of offence that triggered each apology (as listed in Table 4). The quantitative information for each category is given in Table 5. We will return to this when we discuss the gender differences in ARs.

Table 5.Apology types and their frequencies in the Spoken BNC2015-2016
Apology type Frequency
Apology for lack of consideration 253
Apology for talk offence 193
Apology for mistake & misunderstanding 102
Apology for breach of expectation  88
Apology for social gaffe  12
Apology for accident  12
Total 660

4.Towards a refined taxonomy of ARs

We carefully examined all the apology-response sequences identified, which led to a slightly adjusted taxonomy of ARs consisting of five main categories and a few sub-categories (Table 6).

Table 6.An adjusted taxonomy of ARs
Response type Sub-type Explanation
Acceptance

  1. Absolution

  2. Disagreeing with the need to have apologised

  3. Comforting the apologiser

The recipient simultaneously acknowledges the claimed offence yet indicates that no offence is actually taken (Robinson 2004Robinson, Jeffrey 2004 “The Sequential Organization of ‘Explicit’ Apologies in Naturally Occurring English.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 37: 291–330. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 303).

The recipient expresses disagreement with the need to have apologised, or simply denies the claimed offence.

The recipient comforts the apologiser by expressing empathy or giving a positive evaluation of the offence.

Rejection

  1. Complaint

  2. Doubting sincerity

The recipient complains about the offence or blames the apologiser, indicating that s/he is not satisfied.

The recipient doubts the apologiser’s sincerity in making an apology.

Evasion The recipient avoids directly responding to an apology.
Acknowledgement The recipient acknowledges the receipt of an apology without indicating whether s/he is satisfied or not.
Lack of response The recipient makes no response to an apology, which seems to be dismissed as the offence is minimal and thus not worth mentioning.

The major response strategies identified in the present study are: ‘Acceptance’, ‘Rejection’, ‘Evasion’, ‘Acknowledgement’, and ‘Lack of response’, which are similar to those identified in previous studies (e.g. Holmes 1989Holmes, Janet 1989 “Sex Differences and Apologies: One Aspect of Communicative Competence.” Applied Linguistics 10 (2): 194–212. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 1995 1995Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.Google Scholar; Robinson 2004Robinson, Jeffrey 2004 “The Sequential Organization of ‘Explicit’ Apologies in Naturally Occurring English.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 37: 291–330. DOI logoGoogle Scholar). However, the corpus investigation suggests some sub-categories. Among the five sub-categories, three (i.e. ‘Comforting the apologiser’, ‘Complaint’, and ‘Doubting sincerity’) are newly proposed, whereas the other two (‘Absolution’ and ‘Disagreeing with the need to have apologised’) are borrowed from Robinson (2004)Robinson, Jeffrey 2004 “The Sequential Organization of ‘Explicit’ Apologies in Naturally Occurring English.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 37: 291–330. DOI logoGoogle Scholar. The proposed (sub)categories are discussed in more detail below.

‘Acceptance’ refers to ARs in which the recipient appreciates the apologiser’s effort in remedying the claimed offence and attempts to restore interpersonal harmony by minimising the offence. It has three sub-categories: ‘Absolution’, ‘Disagreeing with the need to have apologised’, and ‘Comforting the apologiser’. Following Robinson (2004Robinson, Jeffrey 2004 “The Sequential Organization of ‘Explicit’ Apologies in Naturally Occurring English.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 37: 291–330. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 302–307), “Absolution” refers to a response strategy which acknowledges a possible offence yet claims that no offence is actually taken, and “Disagreeing with the need to have apologised” refers to cases in which the recipient asserts the lack of relevance for an apology, as illustrated in Examples (1) and (2), respectively. The sub-category ‘Comforting the apologiser’ was proposed on the observation that, in some cases, the addressee comforts the apologiser by showing empathy to him/her or by giving a positive evaluation of the event/action being apologised for, as shown in Example (3). These three response strategies were grouped into ‘Acceptance’ because they generally indicate acceptance of an apology.

(1)
S0618:

–UNCLEARWORD a wipe there (…) shall we turn that off and have a bit of

S0619:

>> yeah

S0618:

peace?

S0619:

sorry – UNCLEARWORD

S0618:

>> that’s alright 33.Speakers’ responses to apologies are marked in bold italics in all examples.

(2)
S0509:

>> sorry for my failure of a birthday present then

S0510:

no it wasn’t at all I mean I still enjoyed it

(3)
S0618:

bye (.) sorry love to stay and wave but have to go now (.) yeah

S0619:

oh it’s just the greatest

S0618:

yeah

‘Rejection’ means that the recipient negatively comments on the offence or on the speaker’s apologising behaviour, indicating his/her unwillingness to absolve the offender from the responsibility. It comprises two sub-categories: ‘Complaint’ and ‘Doubting sincerity’. ‘Complaint’ refers to cases in which the recipient complains about the offence or blames the offender, displaying his/her displeasure, as illustrated in Example (4). ‘Doubting sincerity’ refers to cases in which the recipient doubts the apologiser’s sincerity in making an apology, as shown in Example (5).

(4)
S0589:

then like when you do that you just talk to it and not to me

S0588:

yeah sorry darling

S0589:

it’s like your great big monologue about the library

(5)
S0689:

I’m sorry – ANONnameM

S0690:

no you’re not you just want pizza

Following Holmes (1995) 1995Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.Google Scholar and Adrefiza and Jones (2013)Adrefiza, and Jeremy Jones 2013 “Investigating Apology Response Strategies in Australian English and Bahasa Indonesia: Gender and Cultural Perspectives.” Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 36 (1): 71–101. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, ‘Evasion’ accounts for responses in which the speaker avoids directly responding to an apology, as illustrated in Example (6). To some extent, a rejection threatens the apologiser’s face as it shows disregard for his/her efforts in remedying the transgression and restoring social harmony (Goffman 1971Goffman, Erving 1971Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar). On the other hand, an acceptance may be perceived as a threat to the speaker’s negative face, since “the acceptance implicitly confirms that the offender has imposed on the speaker” (Holmes 1995 1995Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.Google Scholar, 183). Evasion may be used as a strategy to avoid the dilemma (as is the case with compliment response, see Pomerantz 1978Pomerantz, Anita 1978 “Compliment Responses: Notes on the Cooperation of Multiple Constraints.” In Studies in the Organization of Conversational Interaction, ed. by Jim Schenkein, 79–112. New York: Academic Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar) and gives the recipient a way out.

(6)
S0589:

and B this is well outside his normal roaming territory

S0588:

it is if he lived here he ’d quite enjoy it and he would enjoy looking at the ducks (…) careful (.) wha- er what is wrong with using your fucking bell? sorry darling

S0589:

I think you ’re a bit tipsy

S0588:

yes

S0588:

sorry darling half a pint and I ’m fucking shouting at cyclists…

In addition, the category of ‘Acknowledgement’ refers to ARs in which the respondent merely acknowledges the receipt of an apology without indicating his or her attitude. This is illustrated in Example (7).

(7)
S0605:

>> sorry are you speaking English now?

S0603:

no I am yes sorry

S0605:

>> okay

Finally, ‘Lack of response’ means that no response was made to an apology. It seems to be dismissed by the recipient as the offence is minimal and thus not worth mentioning. The recipient, therefore, may either reply with comments irrelevant to an apology, or simply say nothing, as in Example (8).

(8)
S0642:

and we ’ve got a new cinema

S0486:

oh gosh yes

S0642:

>> yes

S0486:

I ’ve just noticed that wow

S0642:

well sorry not a new cinema

S0486:

>> right

S0642:

we ’ve got a new

S0486:

>> screen

S0642:

huge screen

S0486:

a huge screen?

S0642:

yes

S0486:

oh wow

Note, however, that the distinction between ‘Evasion’ and ‘Lack of response’ is not always clear-cut as the above discussion suggests. In some cases, for example, it is difficult to decide whether the recipient’s lack of response to an apology is intended as an evasion or as a genuine ‘no response’. This makes the categorisation of apology responses very challenging. In the present study, the suggested solution is that, when the offence triggering an apology is relatively severe (e.g. hurting someone’s feelings, failing to keep an appointment), cases in which no response is presented to that apology were considered ‘Evasion’. This is because, an apology produced after a relatively severe offence can be regarded as taking responsibility for the transgression and showing regret, which makes a response relevant. No response to such apologies is a manifestation of the respondent’s displeasure and thus should be perceived as an evasion. For example, in Example (9), the speaker apologises for going to a friend’s house without telling his/her mother last time (i.e. I am really sorry about that). This makes his/her mother worried and annoyed, and is thus a relatively serious offence. Seen in this light, it is reasonable to regard the mother’s no response to the apology as an evasion.

(9)
S0416:

am I allowed to go over to – ANONnameM’s house?

S0417:

erm

S0416:

I know what it is

S0417:

that’s in town can’t you just start with the people round here? because last time you went to – ANONnameM’s house you didn’t phone you didn’t contact me didn’t know where you were – UNCLEARWORD

S0416:

I am really sorry about that

S0417:

I know but start why don’t you start with the people round here? you could actually walk to other than all the fact that like I can’t pick you up  – UNCLEARWORD picking you back up and all that kind of stuff okay? (.) start with – ANONnameM and – ANONnameM or – ANONnameM (.) – UNCLEARWORD see what they want to do

On the other hand, when the offence triggering an apology is minimal (e.g. coughing, slip of the tongue) and poses no threat to the recipient’s face, cases in which no response is presented were considered ‘Lack of response’. This is illustrated in Example (10), where the transgression leading to the apology is merely a slip of the tongue, which does not constitute a face threat. In such cases, apology is largely a matter of routine or self-repair (Deutschmann 2003Deutschmann, Mats 2003Apologising in British English. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Umeå University, Sweden., 46), and thus does not warrant a relevant response. As a result, the addressee’s change of topic is classified as ‘Lack of response’. This would hopefully be useful to distinguish ‘Evasion’ from ‘Lack of response’.

(10)
S0671:

yeah (.) I am not getting the hang of this at all (.) come on fella come on erm (.) oh – ANONnameF had her last exam today oh no not sorry her first exam

S0678:

oh (.) when does she finish?

S0671:

erm June or something

Since the proposed (sub-)categories are based on analyses of a relatively large set of authentic data, it is arguable that this adjusted taxonomy would to a large extent be reliable and robust to account for ARs in naturally occurring discourse. Based on the adjusted taxonomy of ARs, we further calculated the frequency of each response type in the Spoken BNC2015-2016, as shown in Table 7 and Figure 1.

Table 7.Types and distribution of ARs in the Spoken BNC2015-2016
Response type No. %
Lack of response 445    67.4
Acceptance  82    12.4

  1. Absolution

  2. Disagreeing with the need to have apologised

  3. Comforting the apologiser

 38

 34

 10

    5.8

    5.2

    1.5

Rejection  61     9.2

  1. Complaint

  2. Doubting sincerity

 55

  6

    8.3

    0.9

Evasion  39     5.9
Acknowledgement  33     5.0
Total 660 100
Figure 1.Proportion of ARs in the Spoken BNC2015-2016
Figure 1.

Table 7 and Figure 1 show that ‘Lack of response’ is the most frequent form of ARs (67.4%). The other four response types, ranked in a descending order, are: ‘Acceptance’ (12.4%), ‘Rejection’ (9.2%), ‘Evasion’ (5.9%), and ‘Acknowledgment’ (5.0%). This suggests that the absence of a response to an apology is unmarked in spoken British English and, when a response is produced, ‘Acceptance’ is a more likely choice, whereas ‘Acknowledgment’ is disfavoured by most interlocutors.

The results seem to contrast with the observations drawn in previous studies. Most notably, ‘Lack of response’ occupies the largest proportion of ARs in the present study, while previous research has reported that the most frequent response was ‘Acceptance’ (e.g. Holmes 1989Holmes, Janet 1989 “Sex Differences and Apologies: One Aspect of Communicative Competence.” Applied Linguistics 10 (2): 194–212. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 1995 1995Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.Google Scholar; Adrefiza and Jones 2013Adrefiza, and Jeremy Jones 2013 “Investigating Apology Response Strategies in Australian English and Bahasa Indonesia: Gender and Cultural Perspectives.” Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 36 (1): 71–101. DOI logoGoogle Scholar) but ‘Lack of response’ occupies only a small proportion. This contrast may be attributed to differences in data used: the current study used authentic data, whereas Holmes (1989Holmes, Janet 1989 “Sex Differences and Apologies: One Aspect of Communicative Competence.” Applied Linguistics 10 (2): 194–212. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 1995 1995Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.Google Scholar) and Adrefiza and Jones (2013)Adrefiza, and Jeremy Jones 2013 “Investigating Apology Response Strategies in Australian English and Bahasa Indonesia: Gender and Cultural Perspectives.” Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 36 (1): 71–101. DOI logoGoogle Scholar relied on second-hand reports and DCTs, respectively. Deutschmann (2003Deutschmann, Mats 2003Apologising in British English. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Umeå University, Sweden., 52) similarly cautioned that Holmes’ study may have overlooked many apologies for minor offences as it was not based on authentic data, which may also be true for Adrefiza and Jones (2013)Adrefiza, and Jeremy Jones 2013 “Investigating Apology Response Strategies in Australian English and Bahasa Indonesia: Gender and Cultural Perspectives.” Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 36 (1): 71–101. DOI logoGoogle Scholar. This is supported by the low frequencies of apologies for talk offences and social gaffes in Holmes (1989Holmes, Janet 1989 “Sex Differences and Apologies: One Aspect of Communicative Competence.” Applied Linguistics 10 (2): 194–212. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 1995 1995Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.Google Scholar). We would thus concur with Deutschmann’s (2003Deutschmann, Mats 2003Apologising in British English. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Umeå University, Sweden., 85) argument that “[s]tudies based on elicited data or second-hand reports probably give a false picture of general apologetic behaviour since they ignore trivial offences”. This could also be true for AR studies not using authentic data, in which responses to apologies triggered by minor offences may be underrepresented.

Nevertheless, the results of the present study are largely consistent with those of Murphy (2016)Murphy, James 2016 “Apologies Made at the Leveson Inquiry: Triggers and Responses.” Pragmatics and Society 7 (4): 595–617. DOI logoGoogle Scholar who noted that ‘Lack of response’ occurred very frequently in the Leveson Inquiry. Murphy argued that this might be due to the fact that many of the offences in the Inquiry were interactional in nature (e.g. misspeak, talking too fast) rather than tangible transgressions, as noted earlier; in such cases, the action of apologising did not warrant a relevant response. Similarly, Aijmer (1996)Aijmer, Karin 1996Conversational Routines in English. London/New York: Longman.Google Scholar observed 45.4%, and Deutschmann (2003)Deutschmann, Mats 2003Apologising in British English. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Umeå University, Sweden. reported 41.3%, of the apologies were triggered by minor offences such as talk offence and slip of the tongue.

This further aligns with the general observation that apology tokens may have become more routinised, losing their apologetic force (e.g. Deutschmann 2003Deutschmann, Mats 2003Apologising in British English. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Umeå University, Sweden.; Murphy 2016Murphy, James 2016 “Apologies Made at the Leveson Inquiry: Triggers and Responses.” Pragmatics and Society 7 (4): 595–617. DOI logoGoogle Scholar). Particularly noteworthy is that of Jucker (2019) 2019 “Speech Act Attenuation in the History of English: The Case of Apologies.” Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 4 (1): 1–25. DOI logoGoogle Scholar who, investigating the diachronic development of apologies from Old English up to present-day English, notes that,

[A]pologies have undergone, and are still in the process of undergoing, a process of attenuation. What used to be a weighty and sincere act of admitting guilt and expressing remorse in a religious context has, via a series of steps, been weakened into a token acknowledgement of a minor mishap, such as, for instance, accidentally bumping into somebody on a crowded platform of a railway station. The older type of apologies still exists but the new types of fleeting and sometimes non-serious uses of apologies have been added, and they significantly increase the overall frequency of apologies.(Jucker 2019 2019 “Speech Act Attenuation in the History of English: The Case of Apologies.” Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 4 (1): 1–25. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 2)

It has thus been argued that the pragmaticalisation of apologies in English has contributed to their change from an appeal for forgiveness to a token acknowledgement of minor infractions. Although apologies serving as requests for forgiveness still exist, attenuated apologies merely acknowledging some trivial offences have increased considerably in present-day English (Deutschmann 2003Deutschmann, Mats 2003Apologising in British English. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Umeå University, Sweden.; Murphy 2016Murphy, James 2016 “Apologies Made at the Leveson Inquiry: Triggers and Responses.” Pragmatics and Society 7 (4): 595–617. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; Jucker 2019 2019 “Speech Act Attenuation in the History of English: The Case of Apologies.” Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 4 (1): 1–25. DOI logoGoogle Scholar). In a similar vein, Williams (2018)Williams, Graham 2018Sincerity in Medieval English language and literature. London: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar argues that:

Present-day English-speaking culture is extensively apologetic, and we use apologies for the most minor of everyday social infractions (e.g. if one accidentally bumps into a stranger on the train) as well as for more serious wrongs committed against those closest to us (e.g. forgetting a spouse’s birthday).(Williams 2018Williams, Graham 2018Sincerity in Medieval English language and literature. London: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 121–122)

These observations may provide an explanation as to why ‘Lack of response’ occupies a relatively larger proportion of ARs in the current study. That is, this is because, in present-day English, many apologies are used and perceived as mere token acknowledgements of minor infractions, which are extremely formulaic and the display of regret is minimal; and, in consequence, they may not require any specific response. To illustrate this point, Example (11) is given below.

(11)
S0426:

what about your internal sorry your external examiner for for the programme

S0427:

er well that would have been an obvious choice I don’t know whether that’s allowed or not I don’t know erm anyway that’s passed that’s passed out of my hands now to the likes of – ANONnameF and and – ANONnameM who who know more about the field

S0426:

right

In Example (11), the speaker S0426 made a slip of the tongue, which was only a trivial transgression and nobody’s face was threatened. The apology might result more from an attempt to maintain sociability than from the need to redress face threats. The recipient’s no response to the apology indicates that s/he simply interprets it as a token acknowledgement of the minor infraction. On the other hand, “to provide an explicit response would be to make the offence into too much of an issue: the strategy seems to be that the offence is best ignored” (Owen 1983Owen, Marion 1983Apologies and Remedial Interchanges: A Study of Language Use in Social Interaction. Berlin: Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 102).

To further investigate the association between offences and apology responses, the proportional distribution of response choices across offence types are presented in Table 8.

Table 8.Proportional distribution of ARs across offence types in the Spoken BNC2015-2016
Offence type Response
Acceptance Rejection Evasion Acknowledgement None Total
% % % % %
Accident 33.3  8.3  8.3  0.0 50.0 N = 12
Breach of expectation 20.5 11.4 14.8  8.0 45.5 N = 88
Lack of consideration 21.3 18.2  7.1  4.7 48.6 N = 253
Mistake & Misunderstanding  2.9  2.0  4.9 10.8 79.4 N = 102
Social gaffe 16.7  8.3 16.7  0.0 58.3 N = 12
Talk offence  0.5  0.5  0.0  1.6 97.4 N = 193

When the most frequently chosen strategy (see Table 8), ‘Lack of response’, is examined, we observe higher rates in apologies made because of talk offence (97.4%), mistake and misunderstanding (79.4%), and social gaffe (58.3%). This indicates that these apologies are most formulaic and most likely to be dismissed. ‘Lack of response’ rates are lower for apologies made because of lack of consideration (48.6%) and breach of expectation (45.5%). In addition, ‘Rejection’ rates are much higher for apologies made because of lack of consideration (18.2%) and breach of expectation (11.4%) than for those made because of mistake & misunderstanding (2.0%) and talk offence (0.5%). This observation in turn suggests that lack of consideration and breach of expectation are more face-threatening than mistake, misunderstanding, and talk offence.

In response to apologies triggered by talk offence, ‘‘Evasion’’ strategy was rarely activated, only one apology for talk offence was rejected, one accepted, and three acknowledged. This further suggests that interlocutors usually do not respond to such apologies. Similarly, apologies triggered by mistake & misunderstanding produced significantly higher rates of ‘Lack of response’ (79.4%) than others: ‘Acceptance’ (2.9%), ‘Rejection’ (2.0%), ‘Evasion’ (4.9%), and ‘Acknowledge’ (10.8%). This is also true for social gaffe. The high rates of no response to apologies made because of talk offence, mistake & misunderstanding, and social gaffe may suggest that they are highly conventionalised and not recognised as genuine apologies. Finally, of all ‘Lack of response’, 62.4% were triggered by apologies for minor offences (e.g. talk offence, social gaffe, mistake & misunderstanding). This lends further support to our argument that the large proportion of ‘Lack of response’ in all the ARs in the corpus can be attributed to the frequent use of attenuated apologies.

Bringing together all the observations and arguments made above, it can be argued that the ongoing pragmaticalisation of apology in English has affected the way people respond to apology. In earlier periods when apologies were primarily used to redress real offences and/or seek for absolution, face and/or politeness was a central concern when the recipient was responding to an apology. For example, the strategy of acceptance is used to preserve the face of the apologiser, the strategy rejection is employed to maintain the recipient’s own face, and evasion is chosen to minimise threats to both interlocutors’ face. However, in present-day English, as speakers frequently apologise for minor social infractions, which seems to have become a routine, face is not highly relevant, especially when recipients respond to apologies triggered by trivial offences. This may explain why ‘Lack of response’ is the most frequently activated apology response in the present study.

Moreover, previous research has suggested that there are gender differences in apology behaviour (e.g. Holmes 1989Holmes, Janet 1989 “Sex Differences and Apologies: One Aspect of Communicative Competence.” Applied Linguistics 10 (2): 194–212. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 1995 1995Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.Google Scholar; Schumann and Ross 2010Schumann, Karina, and Michael Ross 2010 “Why Women Apologize More than Men: Gender Differences in Thresholds for Perceiving Offensive Behavior.” Psychological Science 21: 1–7. DOI logoGoogle Scholar), which in turn raises the question as to whether gender differences in ARs exist. In the following section we aim to seek answers to this question.

5.Gender differences in apology responses

The Spoken BNC2014 provides metainformation about speakers such as gender, age, and social status, which enables us to identify the gender of the recipient and to further compare how male and female speakers respond to apologies. We manually examined the gender of the speakers who receive and respond to the apologies identified in the corpus and divided all instances of ARs into two groups, i.e. responses by females and responses by males. The quantitative information on ARs across genders in the Spoken BNC2015-2016 is provided in Table 9 and Figure 2.

Table 9.Distribution of ARs across genders in the Spoken BNC2015-2016 (normalised per million words)
Response type Female Male
Raw Normed Raw Normed
Lack of response 287  73.90 158  71.58
Acceptance  58  14.93  24  10.87

  1. Absolution

  2. Disagreeing with the need to have apologised

  3. Comforting the apologiser

 25

 27

  6

  6.44

  6.95

  1.54

 13

  7

  4

  5.89

  3.17

  1.81

Rejection  45  11.59  16   7.25

  1. Complaint

  2. Doubting sincerity

 44

  1

 11.33

  0.26

 11

  5

  4.98

  2.27

Evasion  23   5.92  16   7.25
Acknowledgement  22   5.66  11   4.98
Total 435 112.01 225 101.93
Figure 2.Distribution of ARs across genders in the Spoken BNC2015-2016 (normalised per million words)
Figure 2.

The analyses of the five major response strategies, i.e. ‘Lack of response’, ‘Acceptance’, ‘Rejection’, ‘Evasion’, and ‘Acknowledgment’, do not suggest much significant gender difference. The results are generally compatible with Adrefiza and Jones (2013)Adrefiza, and Jeremy Jones 2013 “Investigating Apology Response Strategies in Australian English and Bahasa Indonesia: Gender and Cultural Perspectives.” Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 36 (1): 71–101. DOI logoGoogle Scholar which shows that women do not respond to apologies differently from men. However, this study differs from Adrefiza and Jones (2013)Adrefiza, and Jeremy Jones 2013 “Investigating Apology Response Strategies in Australian English and Bahasa Indonesia: Gender and Cultural Perspectives.” Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 36 (1): 71–101. DOI logoGoogle Scholar in that the most favoured AR strategy of both genders is ‘Lack of response’. It is not surprising that ‘Lack of response’ is the most common response employed by both genders, because both women’s and men’s use of, and response to, apologies may have equally contributed to the ongoing pragmaticalisation of apology behaviours. An additional observation is drawn with regard to ‘Acknowledgement’. As shown in Figure 2, ‘Acknowledgement’ seems to be the least favoured response strategy by both genders, as the frequency of which is even lower than that of ‘Rejection’ (5.0% vs. 9.2%). This might be attributed to the face-threatening nature of a mere acknowledgment of an apology. An acknowledgment is typically realised by items such as mm, yeah and okay,44.Mere acknowledgements may also be signalled by intonation or nonverbal behaviour such as shrugging (Robinson 2004Robinson, Jeffrey 2004 “The Sequential Organization of ‘Explicit’ Apologies in Naturally Occurring English.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 37: 291–330. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 319). We, however, are unable to consider such non-linguistic realisations of acknowledgements because they were not recorded in the Spoken BNC2014. which are also referred to as ‘minimal responses’ (Coates 2013Coates, Jennifer 2013Women, Men and Language: A Sociolinguistic Account of Gender Differences in Language, 3rd edition. London: Routledge.Google Scholar, 87). Studies on minimal responses in conversation suggest that they normally indicate the listener’s positive attention to and/or support for the speaker (see Coates (2013)Coates, Jennifer 2013Women, Men and Language: A Sociolinguistic Account of Gender Differences in Language, 3rd edition. London: Routledge.Google Scholar for more discussion). However, when used as a response to an apology, minimal responses do not express support or solidarity. As noted in Robinson (2004Robinson, Jeffrey 2004 “The Sequential Organization of ‘Explicit’ Apologies in Naturally Occurring English.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 37: 291–330. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 303), a mere acknowledgment of an apology confirms “the commission of a possible offense (which is claimed by the apology)”. That is, it admits that the recipient has been impeded on by the apologiser, which constitutes a threat to the recipient’s negative face. Adrefiza and Jones (2013Adrefiza, and Jeremy Jones 2013 “Investigating Apology Response Strategies in Australian English and Bahasa Indonesia: Gender and Cultural Perspectives.” Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 36 (1): 71–101. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 83) similarly argue that an acknowledgement signals “a feeling of reluctance to let the offender completely off the hook”. In other words, ‘Acknowledgement’ may indicate the receiver’s displeasure, thus threatening the apologiser’s face. Seen in this light, ‘Acknowledgment’ threatens both the recipient’s and the apologiser’s face, which may explain why this strategy is rarely used by both genders.

In addition to examining the normalised frequency, we further explored gender differences in ARs by looking at the proportional distribution of each response type across genders, which generally confirms the observations discussed above (see Figure 3). However, it reveals some subtle yet interesting differences that are less obvious in the frequency analysis. While the second most frequent response from both genders is ‘Acceptance’, women show a stronger preference for this strategy than men. This is largely consistent with the findings of Holmes (1995) 1995Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.Google Scholar. One possible explanation is that women and men have different orientations in response to apologies. Since an apology admits that the apologiser is at fault and responsible for a transgression (Deutschmann 2003Deutschmann, Mats 2003Apologising in British English. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Umeå University, Sweden.), it damages the apologiser’s positive face (Brown and Levinson 1987Brown, Penelope, and Stephen Levinson 1987Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar). An acceptance reduces the asymmetry introduced by the apology, thus preserving the apologiser’s face (but may simultaneously threaten the victim’s face); in contrast, a rejection preserves the asymmetry and thus threatens the apologiser’s face. Seen in this light, women’s more frequent use of ‘Acceptance’ suggests that they tend to be other-oriented (i.e. attentive to others’ face needs) in restoring social harmony, while men’s less frequent use of this strategy indicates they are more self-oriented (Holmes 1995 1995Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.Google Scholar, 183).

Furthermore, Figure 3 shows that women’s ‘Rejection’ rate is slightly higher than that of men, which is again somewhat unexpected and challenges the established stereotype that women are more polite than men (e.g. Brown 1980Brown, Penelope 1980 “How and Why Are Women More Polite: Some Evidence from a Mayan Community.” In Women and Language in Literature and Society, ed. by Sally McConnell-Ginet, Ruth Borker, and Nelly Furman, 111–136. New York: Praeger.Google Scholar; Holmes 1989Holmes, Janet 1989 “Sex Differences and Apologies: One Aspect of Communicative Competence.” Applied Linguistics 10 (2): 194–212. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 1995 1995Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.Google Scholar; Coates 2013Coates, Jennifer 2013Women, Men and Language: A Sociolinguistic Account of Gender Differences in Language, 3rd edition. London: Routledge.Google Scholar). Nevertheless, a caveat should be mentioned, i.e. neither the gender differences found in this study nor those reported in Holmes (1995) 1995Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.Google Scholar are statistically significant. Consequently, the results about gender differences in the ways in which male and female speakers respond to apologies are not conclusive and may not be generalised to involve the whole English-speaking population. Alternatively, there is a possibility that the lack of significant differences may suggest that males and females’ linguistic behaviours are becoming more similar to each other (see also Bing and Bergvall 1996Bing, Janet, and Victoria Bergvall 1996 “The Question of Questions: Beyond Binary Thinking.” In Rethinking Language and Gender Research: Theory and Practice, ed. by Victoria Bergvall, Janet Bing, and Alice Freed, 1–30. London: Longman.Google Scholar; Johnson and Meinhof 1997Johnson, Sally, and Ulrike Hanna Meinhof 1997Language and Masculinity. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar; Fuchs 2017Fuchs, Robert 2017 “Do Women (Still) Use More Intensifiers than Men? Recent Change in the Sociolinguistics of Intensifiers in British English.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 22 (3): 345–374. DOI logoGoogle Scholar).

Figure 3.Proportional distribution of ARs across genders in the Spoken BNC2015-2016
Figure 3.

Additionally, we also observed some differences when the sub-categories of ARs are examined. For example, there is no overall gender difference in the ‘Rejection’ category, but looking closely at the sub-categories reveals a different distribution: 4.9% of men’s but 10.1% of women’s responses fall under ‘Complaint’, which suggests that women are more likely to express rejection by means of complaining. Similarly, while ‘Acceptance’ shows no overall differences, 6.2% of women’s but only 3.1% of men’s responses fall under the sub-category ‘Disagreeing with the need to have apologised’. This suggests that women are more likely to absolve completely the apologisers of offences, as ‘Disagreeing with the need to have apologised’ denies the claimed offence while the other two accepting sub-categories (i.e. Absolution and Comforting the apologiser) acknowledge it.

When investigating the response patterns in a dualistic framework (men–​women, women–women, men–men, women–men), some interesting observations concerning men’s and women’s choices of ARs can be further drawn. As shown in Table 10, ‘Acceptance’ was a more likely choice when the apology was made by women (11% and 19.1%) than by men (10.3% and 6.5%), and its rate was the highest in women–women apologies (19.1%). However, ‘Rejection’ was more likely when the apology was made by men (9.3% and 18.1%) compared to that by women (5.1% and 3.8%). In addition, ‘Evasion’ was more likely in inter-gender apologies (8.5% men–women; 8% women–men; compared to 3.0% women–women and 5.6% men–men). Similarly, ‘Acknowledgement’ rates were notably lower in inter-gender apologies (4.2% women–women; 0 men–men) than in inter-gender apologies (9.3% men–women; 6% women–men).

Table 10.ARs in a dualistic gender pattern
Response type Male–Female Female–Female Male–Male Female–Male
% % % %
Lack of response    66.1    69.9    74.8    61.3
Acceptance    11.0    19.1    10.3     6.5
Rejection     5.1     3.8     9.3    18.1
Evasion     8.5     3.0     5.6     8.0
Acknowledgement     9.3     4.2     0.0     6.0
Total 100 100 100 100

Overall, the observations discussed above suggest that gender does have an impact on ARs and that the gender of the apologiser has a greater impact on response choices than the gender of the receiver of an apology in spoken British English. Specifically, speakers are more attentive to the face needs of females in that apologies made by women are more likely to be accepted than those by men, and that apologies made by men are more likely to be rejected than those by women. Moreover, speakers tend to minimise face threats to both interlocutors in mixed-gender interactions, which is supported by the relatively higher rates of ‘Evasion’ and lower rates of ‘Acknowledgement’ in inter-gender apologies.

6.Conclusion

This study has reported on a relatively large-scale corpus-based sociopragmatic investigation into apology responses and gender differences in spoken British English. The investigation allows us to propose a slightly adjusted taxonomy of ARs, comprising five major categories (i.e. ‘Acceptance’, ‘Rejection’, ‘Evasion’, ‘Acknowledgement’, and ‘Lack of response’) and several sub-categories (e.g. complaint, doubting sincerity). Since this adjusted taxonomy of ARs is proposed based on an investigation into naturally occurring discourse, we argue that it is valid and would be robust and useful to account adequately for ARs across contexts, as demonstrated in the subsequent investigation into gender differences in ARs.

The investigation shows that the most common AR in present-day spoken British English is ‘Lack of response’ rather than ‘Acceptance’ (cf. Holmes 1989Holmes, Janet 1989 “Sex Differences and Apologies: One Aspect of Communicative Competence.” Applied Linguistics 10 (2): 194–212. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 1995 1995Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.Google Scholar). We suggest that this may be due to the pragmaticalisation of apologies over time. Studies on the devolvement of apologies in the history of the English language have shown that they have undergone a process of attenuation (Jucker 2018Jucker, Andreas 2018 “Apologies in the History of English: Evidence from the Corpus of Historical American English.” Corpus Pragmatics 2: 375–398. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 2019 2019 “Speech Act Attenuation in the History of English: The Case of Apologies.” Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 4 (1): 1–25. DOI logoGoogle Scholar), which has led to a significant growth in the number of attenuated apologies in present-day English (Murphy 2016Murphy, James 2016 “Apologies Made at the Leveson Inquiry: Triggers and Responses.” Pragmatics and Society 7 (4): 595–617. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; Jucker 2019 2019 “Speech Act Attenuation in the History of English: The Case of Apologies.” Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 4 (1): 1–25. DOI logoGoogle Scholar). The frequent use of ‘Lack of response’ can be considered one consequence of the ubiquity of attenuated apologies.

The study has also investigated the relationship between gender and apology response. Overall, there appears to be no significant gender difference with respect to ARs. ‘Lack of response’ is the most common response strategy used by both men and women, and ‘Acknowledgement’ is the least favoured one by both genders. However, a more thorough investigation into the sub-categories of ARs revealed some subtle yet interesting differences. For instance, women prefer the strategy ‘Complaint’ when rejecting an apology and ‘Disagreeing with the need to have apologised’ when accepting it. Moreover, it is further observed that, although the recipient’s gender does not have a significant impact on ARs, the apologiser’s gender seems to do. When an apology is made by a woman, it is more likely to be accepted, whereas when an apology is made by a man, rejection is a more likely choice. Additionally, ‘Evasion’ and ‘Acknowledgement’ are used more frequently in mixed-gender interactions.

Overall, the study investigated apology responses and their gender differences, thereby contributing to pragmatic studies of apologies. The study could also have some pedagogical applications. The pragmatic competence to produce and respond to apologies requires both appropriate pragmalinguistic knowledge and sociocultural sensitivity, which is a challenge that language learners often face, EFL learners in particular (Limberg 2015Limberg, Holger 2015 “Principles for Pragmatics Teaching: Apologies in the EFL Classroom.” ELT Journal 69 (3): 275–285. DOI logoGoogle Scholar). There is evidence that learners’ transfer of pragmatic resources from their mother tongue to the target language might result in communication problems, as discussed by Golato (2002)Golato, Andrea 2002 “German Compliment Responses.” Journal of Pragmatics 34 (5): 547–571. DOI logoGoogle Scholar. The wide range of (sub-)categories of ARs identified in this study would usefully enrich the repertoire of strategies that can be employed by (EFL) learners to respond to apologies. Furthermore, the quantitative information obtained via corpus investigation can be used to inform EFL learners of the typicality of each response strategy. This would at least to some extent contribute to improving EFL learners’ pragmatic competence of using and responding to apologies appropriately. It is in these respects that we argue that the present study could have potentially valuable pedagogical applications.

Finally, there are some directions worthy of future investigation. For example, since language use in general varies according to contexts, the perceived gender differences may as well be a consequence of, for example, differences in power and social status between interactants (Aries 1996Aries, Elizabeth 1996Men and Women in Interaction: Reconsidering the Differences. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar; Weatherall 2002Weatherall, Ann 2002Gender, Language and Discourse. London: Routledge.Google Scholar). This suggests that studies on ARs which take into account social and situational factors, such as class, power and social distance, would be desirable and valuable. It would also be useful to further explore the correlation between types of offences and apology responses. In addition, since this study has focused specifically on apology behaviour in spoken British English, another direction worthy of further investigation is whether ARs differ across different varieties of English, or even more broadly, across different languages. Such investigations would offer important insights into cross-cultural communication, variational pragmatics, and the association between the pragmatics of language in use and society.

Funding

The present study is funded by the China National Social Science Foundation (Grant No.: 19CYY044) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No.: 2021RC63).

Acknowledgements

We sincerely thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors for their constructive comments on earlier versions of the article. Any remaining errors are ours.

Notes

1.Note that preferred and dispreferred responses are not about the psychological desire of a speaker, but about what is sequentially and/or culturally expected (Heritage 1984Heritage, John 1984Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar).
2.The stereotype is that women apologise more often than men, and the reasons for the differences have often been associated with women’s relative lower social status and their perception of more offences (Holmes 1995 1995Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.Google Scholar; Schuman and Ross 2010Schumann, Karina, and Michael Ross 2010 “Why Women Apologize More than Men: Gender Differences in Thresholds for Perceiving Offensive Behavior.” Psychological Science 21: 1–7. DOI logoGoogle Scholar).
3.Speakers’ responses to apologies are marked in bold italics in all examples.
4.Mere acknowledgements may also be signalled by intonation or nonverbal behaviour such as shrugging (Robinson 2004Robinson, Jeffrey 2004 “The Sequential Organization of ‘Explicit’ Apologies in Naturally Occurring English.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 37: 291–330. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 319). We, however, are unable to consider such non-linguistic realisations of acknowledgements because they were not recorded in the Spoken BNC2014.

References

Adrefiza, and Jeremy Jones
2013 “Investigating Apology Response Strategies in Australian English and Bahasa Indonesia: Gender and Cultural Perspectives.” Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 36 (1): 71–101. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Aijmer, Karin
1996Conversational Routines in English. London/New York: Longman.Google Scholar
2019 “ ‘Ooh Whoops I’m Sorry! Teenagers’ Use of English Apology Expressions.” Journal of Pragmatics 142: 258–269. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Aries, Elizabeth
1996Men and Women in Interaction: Reconsidering the Differences. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bataineh, Ruba, and Rula Bataineh
2006“Apology Strategies of Jordanian EFL University Students. Journal of Pragmatics 38 (11): 1901–1927. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bella, Spyridoula
2014 “A Contrastive Study of Apologies Performed by Greek Native Speakers and English Learners of Greek as a Foreign Language.” Pragmatics 24 (4): 679–713. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bing, Janet, and Victoria Bergvall
1996 “The Question of Questions: Beyond Binary Thinking.” In Rethinking Language and Gender Research: Theory and Practice, ed. by Victoria Bergvall, Janet Bing, and Alice Freed, 1–30. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana, Juliane House, and Gabriele Kasper
(eds) 1989Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Brown, Penelope
1980 “How and Why Are Women More Polite: Some Evidence from a Mayan Community.” In Women and Language in Literature and Society, ed. by Sally McConnell-Ginet, Ruth Borker, and Nelly Furman, 111–136. New York: Praeger.Google Scholar
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen Levinson
1987Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chen, Rong, and Dafu Yang
2010 “Responding to Compliments in Chinese: Has It Changed?Journal of Pragmatics 42: 1951–1963. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cheng, Dongmei
2017 “Communication Is a Two-Way Street: Instructors’ Perceptions of Student Apologies.” Pragmatics 27 (1): 1–32. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Coates, Jennifer
2013Women, Men and Language: A Sociolinguistic Account of Gender Differences in Language, 3rd edition. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Deutschmann, Mats
2003Apologising in British English. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Umeå University, Sweden.
Flores Salgado, Elizabeth
2011The Pragmatics of Requests and Apologies: Developmental Patterns of Mexican Students. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fuchs, Robert
2017 “Do Women (Still) Use More Intensifiers than Men? Recent Change in the Sociolinguistics of Intensifiers in British English.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 22 (3): 345–374. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goffman, Erving
1971Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Golato, Andrea
2002 “German Compliment Responses.” Journal of Pragmatics 34 (5): 547–571. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Heritage, John
1984Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Hoffman, Sebastian, Stefan Evert, Nicholas Smith, David Y. W. Lee, and Ylva Berglund
2008Corpus Linguistics with BNCweb: A Practical Guide. Oxford: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Hofstede, Geert
1980Culture’s Consequences: International Differences in Work-Related Values. Beverly Hills: Sage.Google Scholar
Holmes, Janet
1989 “Sex Differences and Apologies: One Aspect of Communicative Competence.” Applied Linguistics 10 (2): 194–212. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1995Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Johnson, Sally, and Ulrike Hanna Meinhof
1997Language and Masculinity. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Jones, Jeremy, and Adrefiza
2017 “Comparing Apologies in Australian English and Bahasa Indonesia: Cultural and Gender Perspectives.” Journal of Politeness Research 13 (1): 89–119. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jucker, Andreas
2018 “Apologies in the History of English: Evidence from the Corpus of Historical American English.” Corpus Pragmatics 2: 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): 1–25. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jucker, Andreas, and Irma Taavitsainen
2008 “Apologies in the History of English: Routinized and Lexicalized Expressions of Responsibility and Regret.” In Speech Acts in the History of English, ed. by Andreas Jucker, and Irma Taavitsainen, 229–443. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Katz, Albert N., and Jonathan A. R. Woodbury
2017 “Gender Differences in Being Thanked for Performing a Favor.” Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 46: 481–496. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Limberg, Holger
2015 “Principles for Pragmatics Teaching: Apologies in the EFL Classroom.” ELT Journal 69 (3): 275–285. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Locke, John L.
2011Duels and Duets: Why Men and Women Talk So Differently. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Love, Robbie, Claire Dembry, Andrew Hardie, Vaclav Brezina, and Tony McEnery
2017 “The Spoken BNC2014: Designing and Building a Spoken Corpus of Everyday Conversations.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 22 (3): 319–344. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Murphy, James
2016 “Apologies Made at the Leveson Inquiry: Triggers and Responses.” Pragmatics and Society 7 (4): 595–617. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Newman, Matthew L., Carla J. Groom, Lori D. Handelman, and James W. Pennebaker
2008 “Gender Differences in Language Use: An Analysis of 14,000 Text Samples.” Discourse Processes 45: 211–236. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ogiermann, Eva
2009On Apologising in Negative and Positive Politeness Cultures. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Owen, Marion
1983Apologies and Remedial Interchanges: A Study of Language Use in Social Interaction. Berlin: Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pomerantz, Anita
1978 “Compliment Responses: Notes on the Cooperation of Multiple Constraints.” In Studies in the Organization of Conversational Interaction, ed. by Jim Schenkein, 79–112. New York: Academic Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Robinson, Jeffrey
2004 “The Sequential Organization of ‘Explicit’ Apologies in Naturally Occurring English.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 37: 291–330. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schumann, Karina, and Michael Ross
2010 “Why Women Apologize More than Men: Gender Differences in Thresholds for Perceiving Offensive Behavior.” Psychological Science 21: 1–7. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Su, Hang
2020 “Local Grammars and Diachronic Speech Act Analysis: A Case Study of Apology in the History of American English.” Journal of Historical Pragmatics 21 (1): 109–136. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Su, Hang, and Naixing Wei
2018‘‘‘I’m Really Sorry about What I Said’: A Local Grammar of Apology.” Pragmatics 28 (3): 439–462. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Trosborg, Anna
1995Interlanguage Pragmatics: Requests, Complaints and Apologies. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wainwright, Angela
2019 “Gender Differences in the Narrative Productions of African American Adults.” American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology 28: 623–638. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Weatherall, Ann
2002Gender, Language and Discourse. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Williams, Graham
2018Sincerity in Medieval English language and literature. London: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar

Address for correspondence

Hang Su

Centre for Foreign Languages and Literature

Sichuan International Studies University

33 Zhuangzhi Road

400031 Chongqing

China

[email protected]

Biographical notes

Yi An is a lecturer at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China. His research interests include pragmatics, corpus linguistics, and discourse analysis.

Hang Su is a Professor of English Language and Applied Linguistics at Sichuan International Studies University, Chongqing, China. His research interests include corpus linguistics, (corpus) pragmatics, and discourse analysis, etc. His recent publications have appeared in Applied Linguistics, Journal of Pragmatics, Pragmatics, Journal of Historical Pragmatics, among many others.

Mingyou Xiang is a Professor of English Language and Applied Linguistics at University of International Business and Economics, Beijing, China. His research focuses on pragmatics and functional linguistics.