Apology is intended to 'set things right' through "remedial
work" (Goffman 1971). This involves, in some cultures, a face
threatening act on the part of the Speaker who undertakes
an apology to maintain or re-establish social equilibrium or
harmony (Edmondson 1981 and Leech 1983) between
speaker and hearer.
Several studies across languages (Cohen and Olshtain 1981,
Olshtain 1983, Trosborg 1987, Holmes 1989) investigated
the different social and contextual factors that influence
native speakers to select one or a group of "semantic
formula(s)" (Fraser 1981) in the act of apologizing.
Nevertheless the literature is still in its infancy (Fraser 1981
and Holmes 1989) in respect to the gender differences
between speaker (apologizer) and hearer (recipient), and in
the comparison of Spanish and English. Therefore this study
aims to investigate which strategies, semantic formulas and
excuses are most commonly used by female and male
speakers of Chilean Spanish and Australian English.
To determine similarities and dissimilarities between their
apologies, a role play was carried out in their mother tongue.
Twenty two Chileans (twelve females and ten males) who
had lived for not more than three years in Australia and
twenty Australians (ten males and ten females) who, like the
Chileans, varied in age from 17 to 30 and who were students
of secondary or tertiary institutions helped as informants in
this study.
The speech event was designed to elicit an apology and was
held constant for both groups.
Results show that Chileans in comparison with Australians
make less use of explicit expression of apology. Nevertheless
they appear to give more explanations than Australians in
the act of apologizing. Dissimilarities in both languages were
also found in the use of speaker and hearer oriented
apologies and in the the use of some strategies and
intensifiers, in which the addressee gender played an
important role in both languages.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/219184 |
| Date | January 1989 |
| Creators | Masini, Marisa Isabel Cordella, n/a |
| Publisher | University of Canberra. Education |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | ), Copyright Marisa Isabel Cordella Masini |
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