Karen Grainger

The pragmatics of political apologies

Despite the wealth of literature generated over the past two decades on the apology as a speech act, the political apology has been relatively neglected as a research topic. This article aims to examine the pragmatics of such apologies as a generic type of discourse by identifying their salient characteristics: they are in the public domain and highly mediated; they are generated by (and generate) conflict and controversy; on the basis of media and viewer evaluations/judgements, they need to contain both an illocutionary force indicating device (Ifid) and an explicit expression of the acceptance of responsibility/blame for the ‘offence’ in order to be clearly perceived as valid apologies; and they rarely, if ever, involve an expression of absolution. Drawing primarily on data concerning recent political events in the UK (especially the Iraq War), the article attempts to set out and illustrate the different types of political apology. The resulting analysis is related both to previous and current apology research and to recent developments in politeness theory.

Special Issue: Apologies: Introduction

Abstract The apology is a speech act which has deep and wide social and psychological significance. In both popular and academic notions of politeness it is perhaps the example par excellence of politeness at work. As Holmes (1998: 217), rightly, contends, “the apology is quintessentially a politeness strategy”. In both public and private interaction, the need for an apology signifies that something has gone wrong and needs to be put right. In terms of spoken encounters, to utter an apology involves the speaker acknowledging some perceived social transgression and the hearer receiving and dealing with this act. The apology arguably puts both speaker and hearer in a precarious relational position and necessitates remedial “facework” (Goffman 1971), usually involving some form of linguistic management. Furthermore, the nature of the apology can be very important in resolving a variety of types of conflict, ranging from uncomfortable moments in conversation through serious breaches of social and/or cultural norms by an individual to incidents with national or international political significance (See Zhang 2001; Harris et al. forthcoming; Jeffries forthcoming). As such, apologies, along with requests, have probably generated more research in the past two decades than any other form of speech act. Much of this research has emerged in relation to pragmatics and politeness theory but has also come from a variety of other disciplines, i. e., sociolinguistics, social psychology, philosophy and foreign language teaching.

The ‘Language Deficit’ argument and beyond

This introductory paper gives some background to the origins of the special issue: it came about as a response to the re-emergence of the discourse of linguistic deficit in educational policy-making. Here, we outline the five papers contained in the issue, all of which challenge the idea that the language of socially disadvantaged children is linguistically deprived. The papers present new theoretical and empirical approaches to the question, and they extend the debates originally articulated by Labov in the 1960s. Overall, we as editors hope that this special issue will stimulate others to take up the argument, using new approaches and including those members of disadvantaged groups who have thus far not been allowed a voice.

The daily grunt: middle class bias and vested interests in the 'Getting in Early' and 'Why Can't They Read?' reports.

It is a long-standing and commonly held belief in the United Kingdom and elsewhere that the use of elite forms of language reflects superior intellect and education. Expert opinion from sociolinguistics, however, contends that such a view is the result of middle-class bias and cannot be scientifically justified. In the 1960s and 1970s, such luminaries as Labov and Trudgill were at pains to point out to educationalists, with some success, that this ‘deficit’ view of working-class childrens communicative competence is not a helpful one. However, a close reading of recent think-tank reports and policy papers on language and literacy teaching in schools reveals that the linguistic deficit hypothesis has resurfaced and is likely to influence present-day educational policy and practice. In this paper, I examine in detail the findings, claims and recommendations of the reports and argue that they are biased, poorly researched and reflect the vested interests of certain specialist groups. I further argue that we need to move away from the pathologisation of working-class childrens language patterns and, once again, inject a sociolinguistic perspective on language and educational failure into the debate.

Indirectness in Zimbabwean English: A Study of Intercultural Communication in the UK

Indirectness in intercultural communication is an area that has received some considerable attention in intercultural pragmatics and in politeness studies, probably largely due to perceived cultural differences between different groups around the world and to the potential ambiguity and miscommunication that can result from this (Tannen 1984). This fact alone suggests that the notion of indirectness is an important one in intercultural pragmatics. However, the exact nature of indirectness, its relationship to politeness and to facework, and indeed whether it exists at all, is not agreed upon by scholars. Furthermore, since the work of Gumperz (1979, 1982) and Roberts et al. (1992) there has been very little work done on intercultural communication in the UK context and still less on the use of African English in the diaspora. Africans, including Zimbabweans fleeing the Mugabe regime, are a recent and growing immigrant group in the UK and so it would seem timely to re-visit questions of communication and intercultural relations.

Offering and hospitality in Arabic and English

Abstract This paper examines the conventional linguistic practices involved in everyday hospitality situations. We compare offers in Arabic and English and, rather than focusing on the differences between the ways interactants in these two cultures make offers, we challenge the notion that offering is in essence differently handled in the two languages. We argue instead that we should focus just as much on the similarities between the ways offers are made, since no two cultural/linguistic groups are diametrically opposed. Furthermore, no cultural or linguistic group can be argued to be homogeneous. Through a detailed analysis of four naturally occurring hospitality encounters, we explore the nature and sequencing of offering and receiving hospitality in each cultural community and discuss the extent to which offers and refusals are conventionalized in each language. In this way we hope to develop a more contextual discursive approach to cross-cultural politeness research. Drawing on Spencer-Oatey’s notion of sociality face, we examine the conventions for being hospitable in order to appear sincere. A qualitative analysis of the data reveals that, while there are similarities in offering behaviour in both English and Arabic, in Arabic, the interactional moves of insisting and refusing are slightly more conventionalized. This however does not constitute a radical difference between the offering norms of these two cultural groups.

Journal of Politeness Research: Introduction

Abstract This issue marks the 10th year anniversary of the Journal of Politeness Research: Language, behaviour, culture. Ten years ago, founding Editor-in-Chief Christine Christie established the journal as an “international and multidisciplinary forum for research into linguistic and non-linguistic politeness phenomena” (Christie 2005: 1). Under her editorial guidance, the journal published a great number of papers which embodied this founding principle. In 2010, Derek Bousfield and Karen Grainger took over the editorship and in 2013 Karen Grainger became the sole Editor-in-Chief, and the Journal of Politeness Research has grown and matured further under the stewardship of Bousfield and Grainger. Today, with the invaluable contributions of authors and reviewers, and the continuous support of the journal’s readership, editorial team and advisory board, the journal remains a flagship for and a pioneer of research into all kinds of politeness phenomena. To celebrate this 10th year anniversary, it is worth reviewing in detail what has been achieved so far, and to take a look at promising future developments of politeness research.

Reality orientation in institutions for the elderly: The perspective from interactional sociolinguistics

Abstract This article applies a sociolinguistic perspective to the appraisal of ‘Reality Orientation’, a form of therapy used with the confused elderly. By drawing on theories of social interaction and empirical research in the area of commmunication and the elderly, I argue that Reality Orientation is methodologically naive and fundamentally ill-conceived as a way of improving the quality of life for the institutionalised elderly. In my analysis, I examine the verbal strategies that therapists are advised to use, as well as some of the basic concepts involved such as ‘confusion’ and ‘reality’. Whilst I acknowledge that Reality Orientation may have its benefits and uses in some spheres, I show that it also has the potential to be detrimental to institutional quality of life by perpetuating the institutional roles of staff and residents and by providing an inadequate panacea for confusion when other solutions may be more effective.

Does money talk equate to class talk? Audience responses to poverty porn in relation to money and debt

This chapter focuses on transcripts collected for the Benefits Street project at Sheffield Hallam University, which elicited audience responses to clips of poverty porn programming. We conducted four focus groups with members of the public from different social backgrounds across the north and Midlands of England and asked our participants what they thought of the representations of the working class that were shown on screen. Using techniques from corpus linguistics (specifically the use of semantic tagging software) and discourse analysis, we focus here on how our participants used terms associated with money and debt. Our analysis aims to ascertain whether talk of money in relation to benefits claimants actually equates to talk about their social class.

“We’re not in a club now”: a neo-Brown and Levinson approach to analyzing courtroom data

Abstract Discursive approaches to analyzing politeness often eschew Brown and Levinson’s theory of politeness as being too dependent on speech act theory and Gricean pragmatics. However, in this analysis of a courtroom interaction I will show how some of the concepts from Brown and Levinson’s theory, such as face-threatening behaviour and positive and negative politeness, can provide us with a vocabulary with which to talk about dynamic situated interaction. These are combined with reference to the norms of behaviour in the context of situation, as well as an appreciation of how meaning is defined as negotiated by participants as they interact. In the interaction under question here I show how the meaning of these utterances can be observed in the data themselves by looking at the sequence and take-up of turns at talk and by commenting on the relationship between the form of the utterances and the context in which they are uttered. In this way, some of the most useful concepts from Brown and Levinson are applied to the data from a constructivist perspective.