A Study On The Speech Act Of Apology In Modern Chinese

The speech act of apology is a very common kind of speech act in social life. With thedevelopment of pragmatic theories such as Speech Act Theory, Cooperation Principles andPoliteness Principles and so on, the researches from different countries have applied thesepragmatic theories to the speech act of apology. But this kind of research in China has shortlyappeared, and there are some stereotypes in these researches. One of the stereotypes is thatthe apology strategies summarized by foreign scholars are applied to Chinese researchesdirectly, but what hasn’t been noted enough is whether these apology strategies are suitablefor Chinese and whether these apology strategies include Chinese common strategies.Another stereotype is that most of our researchers still pay attention only to the realizationpatterns of the speech act of apology and apology strategies; they ignore the speech act ofapology responses and responses strategies. The present study attempts to take the upper twoaspects as the starting point, and studies the speech act of apology systematically in Chinese.An apology and its response is an adjacency pair closely correlated with each other; thereforewe should study the two terms at the same time.The chapter one studies the classification of apology and the components of apology.Firstly, this study classifies the speech act of apology in different perspectives. And becauseapology holds some ritualized characteristics, the expression of it has some conventionalelements. The components of apology divide into core compositions (apology, strong words,and address terms) and auxiliary components (paralanguage and body language).The chapter two systematically discusses the apology strategies. Using the collectedcorpus as a database, this paper summarizes the apology strategies with Chinesecommunication based on the previous studies. First part is non-offending apology strategy,this kind of strategy uses apology to express some illocutionary force, rather than a realapology meaning. Next is offending apology strategy, and the author summarizes13strategy-types. The last part is the refusing to apology strategy, which is a special strategy.The third chapter researches the apology responses and response strategies. The authordivides the apology responses into parts: accepting (forgiving) and rejecting. And the presentstudy respectively summarized concrete strategies of responding apologies in the two generalcategories.