Apology Strategies in Jordanian Arabic
Abstract
Most apology studies in the Jordanian context have investigated apologies based on a corpus of elicited data. Rarely have apologies been observed in the natural data; nor have the contextual factors that obligated these apologies been considered. This study is based on a corpus of 1100 naturally occurring apology events, collected through an ethnographic observation. Semi-structured interview was also used to examine the influence of contextual factors (social status, social distance, and severity of offence) on the choice of apology strategies. The respondents for this study were selected via convenient sampling. The naturally occurring apologies were coded using a modified version of the apology strategy typology outlined by Olshtain and Cohen (1983). There are series of findings that are worth noting; the first is that, acknowledging responsibility was the most common apology strategy in Jordanian Arabic. Second, acknowledging responsibility and swearing by God’s name, formed the most frequent combination of apology strategies in this language. Third, another strategy that was high on the percentage of occurrence and deserving discussion was the non-apology strategies. Fourth, the selections of apology strategies were influenced by social status more than the degree of the severity of the offence or the social distance. Last but not least, new culture-specific apology strategies were detected in the corpus and elaborated in the paper. The findings of the study will assist material developers in preparing for resource books or modules for teaching and training of language and cultural awareness. The findings can also be used to raise the awareness about the sociocultural rules that govern the use of language functions.
Keywords
Full Text:
PDFReferences
Al-Abdi, Mohammed. (1981). A Book on Pardon and Apology. Riyadh: Imam Mohammed Bin Saud Islamic University Press.
Al Adaileh, B. 2007. The speech act of apology: a linguistic exploration of politeness orientation in British and Jordanian culture. PhD thesis. The University of Leeds.
Al-Shboul, Yasser, & Maros, Marlyna. (2013). Condolences Strategies by
Jordanians to an Obituary Status Update on Facebook. GEMA Online® Journal of Language Studies, 13(3).
Austin, J. L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. London: Oxford University Press. http://www.dwrl.utexas.edu/~davis/crs/rhe321/Austin-How-To-Do-Things.pdf
Awedyk, W. (2011). On Apologizing in Norwegian. Folia Scandinavica journal. Vol 13 (5), 50-62.
Banikalef, A, & Maros, M. (2013). Social Beliefs for the Realization of the Speech Acts of Apology among Jordanian EFL Graduate Students. English Linguistics Research, 2(1), 134-146.
Bataineh, R. (2004). A cross-cultural study of the speech act of apology in American English and Jordanian Arabic. Ph.D Thesis, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, USA.
Bataineh, R Fahmi, & Bataineh, R. (2008). A cross-cultural comparison of apologies by native speakers of American English and Jordanian Arabic. Journal of Pragmatics, VOL40(4), 792-821.
Blum-Kulka, S, House, J, & Kasper, G. (1989). Cross-cultural pragmatics: Requests and apologies (Vol. 31). Norwood: Ablex Pub.
Brown, P. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage (Vol. 4). England: Cambridge University Press.
Chamani, Fariba, & Zareipur, Parvane. (2010). A cross-cultural study of apologies in British English and Persian. Concentric: Studies in Linguistics,VOL 36(1), 133-153.
Cohen, A. (1996). Investigating the production of speech act sets.. In Susan Gass & Joyce Neu. Speech acts across cultures: Challenges to communication in a second language (pp.21-43). Germany: Mouton de
Gruyter.
Demeter, G. (2006). A pragmatic study of apology strategies in Romanian. MA thesis, Oklahoma State University, USA.
Goffman, E. (2009). Relations in public. New Jersey: Transaction Publishers.
Golato, A. (2003). Studying compliment responses: A comparison of DCTs and recordings of naturally occurring talk. Applied linguistics,VOL 24(1), 90-121.
Gonda, T. (2001). The speech act of apology: apology behaviour of British English and advanced Greek speakers of English. MA thesis, University of Essex, England.
Green, G. (1975). How to get people to do things with words. Syntax and semantics, VOl 3 (4), 107-141.
Grice, H. (1975). 4. logic and conversation. The Semantics-Pragmatics Boundary in Philosophy. Retrieved April 14, 2014 from http://ling.umd.edu/~alxndrw/Readings/Implicature/grice75.pdf
Holmes, J. (1990). Apologies in New Zealand English. Language in society, VOL 19(02), 155-199.
Hussein, R., & Hammouri, M (1998). Strategies of apology in Jordanian
Arabic And American English. Grazer Linguistische Studien VOL7(49), 37-50.
Hymes, D. (2003). Now I know only so far: Essays in ethnopoetics: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Ishihara, N. (2006). Subjectivity, Second/foreign Language Pragmatic Use, and Instruction: Evidence of Accommodation and Resistance. Study I. Emulating and Resisting Pragmatic Norms: Learner Subjectivity and Foreign Language Pragmatic Use. Study II. Centering Second Language (SL) Speakers' Experience: A Study of SL Speakers' Resistance to Pragmatic Norms of the SL Community. Study III. Web-based Curriculum for Pragmatics Instruction in Japanese as a Foreign Language: An Explicit Awareness-raising Approach: ProQuest.
Jacobson, M. (2004). Apologies and apologetic attitude in early modern English. Nordic Journal of English Studies, VOL3(3), 187-204.
Lee, Su Kim. (2003). Exploring the relationship between language, culture and identity. GEMA Online Journal of Language Studies, 3(4), 1-13.
Levy, P, & Lemeshow, Stanley. (2013). Sampling of populations: methods and applications. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.
Long, C. (2010). Apology in Japanese gratitude situations: The
negotiation of interlocutor role-relations. Journal of Pragmatics, VOL42(4), 1060-1075.
Majeed, A, & Janjua, F. (2013). Comparative structures of the apology strategies in english, Urdu and Punjabi: A pragmatic study. ZENITH International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research, VOL3(11), 257-264.
Mir, M. (1992). Do We All Apologize the Same?--An Empirical Study on the Act of Apologizing by Spanish Speakers Learning English. Pragmatics and language learning, VOL3 (8), 1-19.
Norrick, N. (1978). Expressive illocutionary acts. Journal of Pragmatics, VOL2(3), 277-291.
Nurani, L. (2009). Methodological issue in pragmatic research: is discourse completion test a reliable data collection instrument. Jurnal
Sosioteknologi, VOL5(9), 667-678.
Ogiermann, E. (2008). On the culture-specificity of linguistic gender differences: The case of English and Russian apologies. Intercultural Pragmatics, VOL5(3), 259-286.
Olshtain, E. (1989). Apologies across languages. In S. Blum-Kulka, House, J., Kasper (Ed.), Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and
Apologies (pp. 155–174). Norwood: Ablex.
Overfield, D. (1995). Cross-cultural competence and apologies among learners of Spanish as a foreign language. Osamayor, VOL8(10), 45–61.
Patton, M. (2001). Qualitative research & evaluation methods: Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, Incorporated.
Qian, L, & Yang, H. (2005). A critical analysis of the responses to the speech act of apology in Chinese . Journal of Hefei University of
Technolog (Social Sciences), VO6, 37-45.
Salehi, Reyhaneh. (2014). A Comparative Analysis of Apology Strategy: Iranian EFL Learners and Native English Speakers. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 98, 1658-1665.
Sattar, Q, & Suleiman, R. (2011). Refusal strategies in English by Malay University students. GEMA: Online Journal of Language Studies, 11(3), 69-81.
Searle, J.R. (1969). Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge: Cambridge university press.
Shariati, M, & Chamani, F. (2010). Apology strategies in Persian. Journal of Pragmatics, VOL42(6), 1689-1699.
Soliman, A. (2003). Apology in American English and Egyptian Arabic. Paper presented at the Paper submitted to the proceedings of TESOL 3rd annual Graduate Student Forum, Baltimore, MA, USA.
Thijittang, S, & Lê, Thao. (2010). Pragmatics Strategies of English of Thai University Students. Paper presented at the AARE.
Trosborg, A. (1994). Requests, Complaints andApologies: NewYork: Mouton deGruyter
Vollmer, H & Olshtain, E. (1989). The language of apologies in German. In S. Blum-Kulka, House, J., Kasper (Ed.), Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies (pp. 197–218). Norwood: Ablex.
Wierzbicka, A. (1985). Different cultures, different languages, different speech acts: Polish vs. English. Journal of pragmatics, VOL9(2), 145-178.
Refbacks
- There are currently no refbacks.
eISSN : 2550-2131
ISSN : 1675-8021