An Empirical Study On Apology Realization

The research of speech acts is a main field in pragmatics and is an intriguing topic which attracts a lot of attention. The speech act of apologies is one of the most frequently discussed areas, for the multifarious issues and problems displayed in the utterances.This thesis conducts a cross-cultural study on speech act of apology to describe and analyze the use of apology strategies in Chinese and Britain. Two groups of native speakers (native speakers of Chinese and native speakers of British English) and two groups of Chinese learners of English (students of non-English major and students of English major) participated in the study. The data for the current survey are elicited by a written questionnaire in the form of the discourse completion test (DCT) respectively in English and Chinese versions. The questionnaire designed particularly for this study contains 10 socially differentiated situations, which are divided into 3 separate groups on three different social dimensions, i.e., Social Distance, Social Power and Severity of Offence.A thorough analysis on the data collected from the four groups of subjects reveals that the strategy of apologizing explicitly (Strategy 1) is the most widely and commonly used strategy. British and Chinese share some similarities in choice of some strategies and there also exists some differences due to cultural differences. "Ren" and "Li" which characterize the Chinese culture and individualism which features the western culture lead to these differences. The three socio-pragmatic factors do affect both British and Chinese choice on some of the strategies. In the respect of apologizing strategies language learners tend to transfer their native preference into the target language.Based upon the findings, implication for teaching English as a foreign language are presented.