Addressing interpersonal needs in oral interaction: the case of apology responses

This paper investigates acknowledgement responses in 31 open role-plays (about 5,000 words) elicited from American native speakers through written prompts, which instantiate apology exchanges between interactants in different role-relationships in terms of social distance and degree of power. It classifies the apology responses identified in terms of their strategies, content and structural organization, and compares them with those described in previous studies. The data considered instantiate 59 apology exchanges, and 55 of these contain apology response turns which realise 83 response tokens. The apology responses identified may be simple or elaborate in terms of: their functions (i.e. encode one or multiple strategies), structure (i.e. occupy one or more turns), and semantic contribution (i.e. contain one or more head acts and one or more supporting moves). Their head acts and their less frequent supporting moves are variously realised in terms of strategies and semantic types, but both have their preferred realization patterns. This suggests that apology responses are highly conventionalized, but not fully routinized speech acts, with both prototypical and original instantiations. In line with previous studies, the apology responses examined mostly realise strategies favourable to the offender (e.g. accepting the apology, enhancing the offender’s positive face), but they also include strategies that are unfavourable to the offender (e.g. reproaching the offender, referring to the cost incurred) and others that are partially or totally evasive (i.e. replying to topics not mentioned in the apology head act or not relevant to the apology). The study argues for the importance of adopting explicit, both pragmatic and semantic, criteria for the identification and definition of components of speech act exchanges, and suggests that role plays are a reliable source of data for the analysis of conventionalized speech behavior which is probably produced below the level of consciousness.