A Socio-cognitive Contrastive Study Of Chinese And American Political Apology Speech Acts

Apologies as societal devices to rehabilitate destroyed relationship and remove vengeance have played a leading role in interpersonal and public communication arena.Political apology speech act practice has become an essential means or even a legal device for repairing the national image,promoting justice,impelling reconciliation and mitigating intense social relationship and international relation.With an increasing proliferation in literature on political apologies in the field of politics,sociology and etc,there is a dire need of investigation on the exertion of apologetic discourse,its linguistic patterns and the relation between language use and the manipulation of political intention and action.Within the sphere of linguistics,existing studies on political apologies mainly focus on the combination of speech act theory and Leech’s(1983)politeness principles and Brown and Levinson’s(1987)face and politeness theory.There is a calling for a systemic and synthetic theoretical framework to integrate social and cultural aspects which lead to the discrepancies of political apologies across various nations.The current research proposes a socio-cognitive model of political apology interaction according to Kecskes’(2013)socio-cognitive pragmatic framework.Based on the naturally occurring data of Chinese and American political apology speech acts collected from official and governmental websites,embedding political speech acts into the socio-cognitive framework,the thesis represents a comprehensive analysis of the definition,felicity conditions and strategies of political apologies,and delves into the rudimentary social and cultural factors which yield intersected influence on the production and interpretation of American and Chinese political apology speech acts from three major phases known as prior and actual situational context co-construction,interaction under egocentrism and cooperation mechanisms and interaction between intention and attention.With an aim to deploy a well-founded exploration on the linguistic data,the research employs Chi-square test to combine quantitative and qualitative approaches together,and probes the sorts of illocutionary force indicating devices adopted in both Chinese and American political apology speech acts and figures out the similarities and differences of Chinese and American political apology speech act strategies and the socio-cognitive causes of the discrepancies between Chinese and American political apology speech act strategies.The study finds out that Chinese illocutionary force indicating devices(IFIDs)can be divided into four categories: “dào qiàn/qiàn yì”,“jiǎn tǎo/zì zé”,“kuì jiù/huǐ hèn” and others.Whereas,American political apologies mainly involve four types of IFIDs: “apologize/apology”,“regret”,“sorry” and others.The most frequently used apology strategies in both countries are “taking IFIDs” and “an acknowledgement of responsibility”.Two different inclinations of delivering political apology appear in the contrastive analysis on two nations’ apology strategies,that is,American politicians tend to employ “an explanation or account of the situation” and “a promise of forbearance”,however Chinese politicians are apt to take “an offer of repair” strategy to compensate the damage.A socio-cognitive study of the discrepancies demonstrates that the prior experience of the legality effect of apology in American society,the connotation of courtesy in Chinese apology culture and governmental accountability in contemporary Chinese politics,result in salient prototypical explanation strategy in American apology speech act sets and the offering reparation strategy in Chinese political apologies which lead to egocentrism concerning the individualism and collectivism in both low context American culture and high context Chinese culture which drive public attention abroad and at home.In addition,prior political intention is a cooperation-directed practice which is governed by the relevance that partly depends on actual situational experience in domestic and cross-cultural political context.In conclusion,the present contrastive pragmatic study of political apologies has both theoretical and practical implications for future researches.It has not only enriched the application value on socio-cognitive pragmatic framework,but also opened a new vision for political apology studies and achieved significant outcomes in enhancing political mutual trust and improving international relations.