Sandra J. Harris

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.

Requests and status in business correspondence.

Abstract The purpose of this study is the identification of possible linguistic variations in business correspondence containing requests which are attributable to the influence of the interpersonal variables of power, social distance, imposition and, in particular, status. In order to minimise interference from personality traits, a set of 32 authentic texts written by or to the same managing director of a joint-venture were selected from a larger corpus of over 200 documents containing requests. Syntactic, lexical and structural variations have been found between two main text-types of documents, relational and routine correspondence. Moreover, the varying pattern of influence of interpersonal variables seems to support a non-additive model of politeness as proposed by Holtgraves and Yang (1992).

Politeness at work: issues and challenges

Abstract In this article we will attempt to address some of the issues that arise in researching politeness in the workplace, especially, though not exclusively, in the context of multicultural and multilingual encounters. We propose to look at debates around the nature of politeness and their relevance for research in work settings and to discuss the contribution made to these debates by analyses of politeness in the workplace. Finally, we will discuss some of the methodological problems that field researchers will face when conducting research on the field, especially in intercultural work contexts. These will include, for example, issues such as the choice of methodology/s, confidentiality, the nature of the involvement of the researcher, making use of multi-method approaches, the comparability of analytical categories across different languages and culture. Finally, we suggest, very briefly, some directions for further research.

9. BUSINESS AS A SITE OF LANGUAGE CONTACT

Although business settings have been a site of language contact for many years, the field of “language in business” has changed substantially during the past two decades. The proliferation of topics and approaches has contributed to shaping what is now an eclectic disciplinary field, methodologically diverse. Thus, this review of the field will necessarily move beyond sociolinguistic approaches and theories of variation and change. In particular, the globalization of the workforce and the growth of multinational and multilingual corporations have strengthened the perception of English as the “lingua franca” of international business, though some recent research challenges aspects of this perception in multicultural corporate settings. Intercultural communication, especially recent developments in that field, including its “discursive turn” and its current preference for qualitative studies, has made a significant contribution to the study of multicultural/multilingual business interaction. In the concluding section, we discuss three particular areas of development: (a) the growth in the use of new media and the analysis of that use and its impact on business discourse in context; (b) the shift from the analysis of written to spoken discourse and from simulated data to naturally-occurring corporate language; (c) and the increasing need to study the language of the multilingual workplace. We argue for redressing the balance of research into business as a site of language contact in favor of less well-represented languages and cultures through indigenous discourse studies, and we note in particular the increasing frequency and importance of work involving Asian languages.

Interruptive strategies in British and Italian management meetings

This paper reports the findings of research which examines the contrasting roles played by interruptive strategies in British and Italian management meetings. Much of the work on interruptions originates within conversation analysis (Bennett, 1981; Kennedy and Camden, 1983; Jefferson, 1973, 1984, 1986, 1993; Schegloff 1987; Roger et al., 1988, etc.) and has focussed on either gender or power or both (Zimmerman and West, 1975; West, 1979; West and Zimmerman, 1983; Dindia, 1987). Most of these studies involve dyadic conversation. Little research has been done on business discourse (Drummond, 1989), and relatively few studies have attempted cross-cultural and/or cross-linguistic comparisons (Murata, 1994; Makri-Tsilipakou, 1994). Defining what is to count as an interruption in sequences of natural language data involving speech overlap is a complex matter, especially if interruptions are seen as indicators of power. Our research attempts to define what we call interruptive strategies and their pragmatic significance in British and Italian management meetings, which are task-oriented and multiparty speech events. Power relationships are an important variable, and this paper examines the cultural and linguistic differences which the respective use of interruptive strategies by British and Italian managers reveals

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.

Epilogue: Facework and im/politeness across legal contexts

There is now a growing body of interesting and relevant work on this subject, though it has yet to attract the attention it deserves from scholars in legal studies. The five papers included in this special issue are both various in their approaches to face and politeness and wide-ranging in that they make use of data from both American (Tracy) and British legal contexts (Johnson and Clifford, Luchjenbroers and Aldridge), including historical courtrooms (Archer and Cecconi). Methodologically, all of the papers are data driven in choosing to analyze substantial amounts of natural language taken from diverse British and American legal contexts and in seeking to bring to bear recent theoretical work in the areas of both facework and im/politeness upon what has been until now perhaps a less obvious but increasingly important setting, the courtroom. This is not an easy task and raises a number of interesting issues, not least of which is that the relationship between facework and im/politeness has proved to be a problematic one. Lakoff (1989), in her original essay on The Limits of Politeness, proposes, significantly, that theories and descriptions of politeness should be extended beyond “ordinary dyadic conversation” (1989: 101), where the object is to avoid conflict, to two discourse types (psychotherapy and law) where conflict is an intrinsic element. Lakoff ’s article contains no specific reference at all to face and concentrates solely on politeness. She refers at some length to Grice but not to Goffman, and the seminal work of Brown and Levinson (1987), published two years earlier, is cited in her references but not discussed. On the other hand, Goffman, at least in his original 1967 theory of face, has almost nothing to say about politeness. This contrasts sharply with the later perspective and theoretical grounding of Brown and Levinson, who ultimately devise, in conjunction with politeness, what is essentially a theory of face, prompting the tendency, still prevalent, to define politeness primarily with reference to face. (See O’Driscoll 2010, for an interesting recent attempt to clarify the differences between