Apologies And Responses In English And Vietnamese Conversations

Abstract

Whenever an apology is made, interlocutors expect a return act of making responses. These pragmatic acts of apologizing and responding to apologies are common activities in communication among interlocutors because using only either of these two crucial speech acts can hardly establish fully effective communication. This doctoral thesis aims not only to investigate the pragmatic acts of apology and response strategies in English and Vietnamese film conversations in terms of gender and power; but also to identify the similarities and differences of apology and response strategies in both languages. The theoretical framework of this study was specified in the light of sociopragmatics. That is, the conversation analysis by Schegloff (2007), pragmatic act theory by Mey (2006, 2013), the apology strategy taxonomy by Trosborg (2011), the response strategy taxonomy by Holmes (1990, 1995), and the direct and indirect speech act theory by Searle (1975) were employed to achieve the aims. This study took a qualitative descriptive and contrastive design with the support of quantitative information. It collected data from conversations extracted from socio-psychological film scripts and subtitles in English and Vietnamese which were released from 2015 to 2020. In total, there are eight exchanges of apology and response strategies identified in English and nine in Vietnamese. Gender-wise, male were more likely than female to apologize directly. Female accepted slightly fewer apologies than male; however, they rejected apologies more frequently than male did. In terms of social power, those with higher power were less likely to apologize and the least to respond to an apology. Those with the lower power, on the other hand, were more willing to acknowledge apologies and accepted apologies more frequently than refused them, while the opposite was true with the higher power. The results revealed ten similarities and eleven differences in both languages. The study is hoped to make a contribution to linguistics since it extended the apology taxonomy by Trosborg (2011) by adding mixed apology strategy and response taxonomy by Holmes (1990, 1995) with ironic acceptance, refusal plus, unsatisfied questions, direct apologizing and mixed apology response strategy. The findings also provided practical assistance to learners of English and Vietnamese as foreign languages.