A Sociolinguistic Study On Chinese Apologies

Apology is one of the most common languages in personal and interactionalcommunication, and is very important behavior in social intercourse. Just likegreeting, requesting, acknowledgement or compliment, apology is closely relevant tosocial life. In the last decades, a number of linguists and language researchers allmade great study and survey on apology from the perspective of cross-cultural,comparative, pragmatic and apology strategic study. Among them, the studies ataboard were much more outstanding, while the apology study in China began laterand got fewer achievements. They only focused on contrastive study between Chineseand foreign apologies, or only on English apologies used in Chinese universities.However, in this thesis, sociolinguistic study will be chosen as the point of departureto probe the apology use in real social context. Adopted by qualitative methods, suchas observation, interview and questionnaires, it will restore the apology use in real-lifecommunication. This thesis mainly aims to investigate the social factors, such asgender, age, social relation, social status will influence the use of apology to whatsome extent; how apologies match the corresponding social context and finallydemonstrate the deep relationship between the use of apologies and identity.Chapter One introduced the purpose, significance and layout of the thesis.Chapter Two is the part of literature review, in which the related theories and researchbackground are introduced. They are definitions and classifications of apologies; thestudies on language and social context and identity and some sociolinguistic theories which are related in the apology communication. Chapter Three mainly expounds theresearch methods of this paper and presents the collected and analyzed data. ChapterFour discusses the results of the research about the Chinese apologies used in socialcontext and the relationship between Chinese apologies and identity. Chapter Fivesummarizes the major results and findings of the whole thesis, and also the limitationsof the present study and suggestions for further research.