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. , 1995Holmes, Janet 1995 Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.; Robinson 2004Robinson, Jeffrey 2004 “The Sequential Organization of ‘Explicit’ Apologies in Naturally Occurring English.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 37: 291–330. ; Murphy 2016Murphy, James 2016 “Apologies Made at the Leveson Inquiry: Triggers and Responses.” Pragmatics and Society 7 (4): 595–617. ), 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. 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. , 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. , 1995Holmes, Janet 1995 Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.; Robinson 2004Robinson, Jeffrey 2004 “The Sequential Organization of ‘Explicit’ Apologies in Naturally Occurring English.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 37: 291–330. ; Murphy 2016Murphy, James 2016 “Apologies Made at the Leveson Inquiry: Triggers and Responses.” Pragmatics and Society 7 (4): 595–617. ) 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. ; 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) 1989 Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.; Ogiermann 2009Ogiermann, Eva 2009 On Apologising in Negative and Positive Politeness Cultures. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. ; 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. ; 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. ) and interlanguage pragmatics (e.g. Trosborg 1995Trosborg, Anna 1995 Interlanguage Pragmatics: Requests, Complaints and Apologies. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ; Flores Salgado 2011Flores Salgado, Elizabeth 2011 The Pragmatics of Requests and Apologies: Developmental Patterns of Mexican Students. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. ; Cheng 2017Cheng, Dongmei 2017 “Communication Is a Two-Way Street: Instructors’ Perceptions of Student Apologies.” Pragmatics 27 (1): 1–32. ). 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 1983 Apologies and Remedial Interchanges: A Study of Language Use in Social Interaction. Berlin: Mouton. . 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. , 1995Holmes, Janet 1995 Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.), 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. , 1995Holmes, Janet 1995 Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.) 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 1983 Apologies and Remedial Interchanges: A Study of Language Use in Social Interaction. Berlin: Mouton. ; 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. ).

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. 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 1984 Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press.). 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. , 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. , 1995Holmes, Janet 1995 Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.). 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. investigated ARs from a sociocultural perspective by comparing responses in Australian English and Bahasa Indonesia. They modified Holmes’ (1995)Holmes, Janet 1995 Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman. 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. 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. 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 1983 Apologies and Remedial Interchanges: A Study of Language Use in Social Interaction. Berlin: Mouton. ; Holmes 1989Holmes, Janet 1989 “Sex Differences and Apologies: One Aspect of Communicative Competence.” Applied Linguistics 10 (2): 194–212. , 1995Holmes, Janet 1995 Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.). 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 1980 Culture’s Consequences: International Differences in Work-Related Values. Beverly Hills: Sage.), 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. , 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. , 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. 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. , 1995Holmes, Janet 1995 Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.) 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. . 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. , 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. , 1995Holmes, Janet 1995 Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.) 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. 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. 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. ; Locke 2011Locke, John L. 2011 Duels and Duets: Why Men and Women Talk So Differently. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ; Coates 2013Coates, Jennifer 2013 Women, Men and Language: A Sociolinguistic Account of Gender Differences in Language, 3rd edition. London: Routledge.; 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. ; Wainwright 2019Wainwright, Angela 2019 “Gender Differences in the Narrative Productions of African American Adults.” American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology 28: 623–638. ), 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 1995Holmes, Janet 1995 Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.; Bataineh and Bataineh 2006Bataineh, Ruba, and Rula Bataineh 2006 “Apology Strategies of Jordanian EFL University Students. Journal of Pragmatics 38 (11): 1901–1927. ; 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. ),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 1995Holmes, Janet 1995 Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.; 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. ). 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. , 1995Holmes, Janet 1995 Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.) 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. , 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. , 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. , 1995Holmes, Janet 1995 Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.) 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. 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. ). 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 2008 Corpus Linguistics with BNCweb: A Practical Guide. Oxford: Peter Lang.).

Following previous studies (e.g. Goffman 1971Goffman, Erving 1971 Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order. New York: Basic Books.; Holmes 1995Holmes, Janet 1995 Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.; Ogiermann 2009Ogiermann, Eva 2009 On Apologising in Negative and Positive Politeness Cultures. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. ), 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 1996 Conversational Routines in English. London/New York: Longman., 2019Aijmer, Karin 2019 “ ‘Ooh Whoops I’m Sorry! Teenagers’ Use of English Apology Expressions.” Journal of Pragmatics 142: 258–269. ; Deutschmann 2003Deutschmann, Mats 2003 Apologising 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. ; 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. ; 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. ). 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).

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. , 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 2003 Apologising 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. ; Aijmer 1996Aijmer, Karin 1996 Conversational Routines in English. London/New York: Longman.).

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.

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).

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. , 1995Holmes, Janet 1995 Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.; Robinson 2004Robinson, Jeffrey 2004 “The Sequential Organization of ‘Explicit’ Apologies in Naturally Occurring English.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 37: 291–330. ). 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. . 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. , 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.

‘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).

Following Holmes (1995)Holmes, Janet 1995 Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman. 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. , ‘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 1971 Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order. New York: Basic Books.). 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 1995Holmes, Janet 1995 Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman., 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. ) and gives the recipient a way out.

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).

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).

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.

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 2003 Apologising 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’.

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 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. , 1995Holmes, Janet 1995 Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.; 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. ) 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. , 1995Holmes, Janet 1995 Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.) 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. relied on second-hand reports and DCTs, respectively. Deutschmann (2003Deutschmann, Mats 2003 Apologising 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. . 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. , 1995Holmes, Janet 1995 Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.). We would thus concur with Deutschmann’s (2003Deutschmann, Mats 2003 Apologising 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. 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 1996 Conversational Routines in English. London/New York: Longman. observed 45.4%, and Deutschmann (2003)Deutschmann, Mats 2003 Apologising 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 2003 Apologising 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. ). Particularly noteworthy is that of Jucker (2019)Jucker, Andreas 2019 “Speech Act Attenuation in the History of English: The Case of Apologies.” Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 4 (1): 1–25. 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 2019Jucker, Andreas 2019 “Speech Act Attenuation in the History of English: The Case of Apologies.” Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 4 (1): 1–25. , 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 2003 Apologising 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. ; Jucker 2019Jucker, Andreas 2019 “Speech Act Attenuation in the History of English: The Case of Apologies.” Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 4 (1): 1–25. ). In a similar vein, Williams (2018)Williams, Graham 2018 Sincerity in Medieval English language and literature. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 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 2018 Sincerity in Medieval English language and literature. London: Palgrave Macmillan. , 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.

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 1983 Apologies and Remedial Interchanges: A Study of Language Use in Social Interaction. Berlin: Mouton. , 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.

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. , 1995Holmes, Janet 1995 Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.; 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. ), 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.

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. 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. 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. , 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 2013 Women, Men and Language: A Sociolinguistic Account of Gender Differences in Language, 3rd edition. London: Routledge., 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 2013 Women, Men and Language: A Sociolinguistic Account of Gender Differences in Language, 3rd edition. London: Routledge. 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. , 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. , 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)Holmes, Janet 1995 Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.. 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 2003 Apologising 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 1987 Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ). 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 1995Holmes, Janet 1995 Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman., 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.; Holmes 1989Holmes, Janet 1989 “Sex Differences and Apologies: One Aspect of Communicative Competence.” Applied Linguistics 10 (2): 194–212. , 1995Holmes, Janet 1995 Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.; Coates 2013Coates, Jennifer 2013 Women, Men and Language: A Sociolinguistic Account of Gender Differences in Language, 3rd edition. London: Routledge.). Nevertheless, a caveat should be mentioned, i.e. neither the gender differences found in this study nor those reported in Holmes (1995)Holmes, Janet 1995 Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman. 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.; Johnson and Meinhof 1997Johnson, Sally, and Ulrike Hanna Meinhof 1997 Language and Masculinity. Oxford: Blackwell.; 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. ).

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).

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. , 1995Holmes, Janet 1995 Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.). 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. , 2019Jucker, Andreas 2019 “Speech Act Attenuation in the History of English: The Case of Apologies.” Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 4 (1): 1–25. ), 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. ; Jucker 2019Jucker, Andreas 2019 “Speech Act Attenuation in the History of English: The Case of Apologies.” Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 4 (1): 1–25. ). 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. ). 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. . 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 1996 Men and Women in Interaction: Reconsidering the Differences. New York: Oxford University Press.; Weatherall 2002Weatherall, Ann 2002 Gender, Language and Discourse. London: Routledge.). 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.