Previous research and suggested apology strategy frameworks

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Apologies have been a popular topic in speech act performance studies over the years. As mentioned, most studies aim to examine the used apology strategies. Often the goal has also been to investigate how much of the apology speech act set is universal and how much is affected by culture and language, which is why many studies are cross-cultural (Shariati and Chamani 2010: 1690, Jones and Adrefiza 2017: 89). Researchers have often utilized a framework of strategies (or semantic formulas) in their studies that they based on another study or that they created themselves based on their data. Some previous research including their

frameworks will now be introduced.

One of the most influential and commonly cited works in the field is the CCSARP project (A Cross-Cultural Study of Speech Act Realization Patterns) by Blum-Kulka and Olshtain (1984). At the time when they were writing the paper, the project was still in progress. The paper thus describes the project and presents its coding scheme but does not yet present any findings.

The purpose of the project was to examine and compare the speech acts of requests and apologies, produced by native and non-native speakers of multiple languages (Blum-Kulka and Olshtain 1984: 196). Their goal, more specifically, was to look at situational, cross-cultural, and individual variability (ibid.: 197). The languages and varieties studied in the project are Australian English, American English, British English, Canadian French, Danish, German, Hebrew and

Russian (ibid.: 197). In order to collect the data, they utilized a discourse completion test (DCT), which includes different kinds of incomplete discourse sequences that the participants had to complete with the required speech acts (ibid.: 198). The participants of the project consisted of 400 university students for each of the studied languages with an equal number of men and women, and with half being native speakers and half non-native speakers. (ibid.: 199) The five apology strategies recognized in the project are 1. IFIDs, 2. taking on responsibility including the sub-categories a. S [speaker] expresses trait of self-deficiency, b. explicit self-blame, and c. denial of fault, 3. explanation or account of cause, 4. offer of repair and 5. promise of forbearance (ibid.: 207–

208). Most of these strategies are ones where the speaker recognizes that they are at fault and they need to apologize. However c. denial of fault stands out because denying fault is essentially a non-apology strategy, because it is the speaker’s “rejection of the need to apologize” (ibid.:

207). Many apology strategy frameworks include these kinds of non-apology strategies.

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After the publication of the CCSARP project, its coding scheme has been utilized in a variety of studies on apologies. These include, e.g., Scher and Darley (1997), Afghari (2007), Kasanga and Lwanga-Lumu (2007) and Qari (2019).

Olshtain and Cohen (1983) wrote an article on the apology speech act set, where they introduce their framework for apologies strategies as well as studies that they and their students have executed by utilizing it. For example, “The Cohen and Olshtain Hebrew University Study” by Cohen and Olshtain was done with the purpose of assessing cultural competence (1983: 25). The participants of the study consisted of 12 native English speakers, 12 Hebrew speakers who gave responses in Hebrew and 20 Hebrew speakers who gave responses in English (as a foreign language). They presented eight everyday apology situations to which the participants had to provide a response for (ibid.: 25). These responses were categorized according to the apology strategy framework in table 1, and they also created archetypal apologies for each situation based on the data (ibid.: 27). They found signs of native-language transfer in the apology patterns, signs of successful avoidance of said transfer, and signs of deficiency in linguistic proficiency (ibid.: 26). The study indicates that there are culture-specific apology patterns which can transfer when apologizing in a foreign language.

Table 1 below presents Olshtain and Cohen’s (1983) apology strategies. As shown, they also found non-apology strategies or strategies which indicate rejection of the need to apologize.

Table 1. Apology strategy framework by Olshtain and Cohen (1983: 22–23).

The offender accepts the responsibility for the offense committed:

9 1. An expression of apology

A. An expression of regret (e.g. I’m sorry) B. An offer of apology (e.g. I apologize) C. A request for forgiveness (e.g. Forgive me)

2. An explanation or account of the situation (e.g. The bus was late) 3. An acknowledgement of responsibility

A. Accepting the blame (e.g. It was my fault) B. Expressing self-deficiency (e.g. I was confused)

C. Recognizing the other person as deserving an apology (e.g. You are right) D. Expressing lack of intent (e.g. I didn’t mean to)

4. An offer of repair (e.g. I’ll help you get up)

5. A promise of forbearance (e.g. It won’t happen again) The offender rejects the need to apologize:

1. A denial of the need to apologize (e.g. There was no need for you to get insulted)

2. A denial of responsibility

A. Not accepting the blame (e.g. It wasn’t my fault) B. Blaming the other participant (e.g. It’s your own fault)

Shariati and Chamani (2010) study the apology speech act in spoken Persian. They utilized a corpus of 500 apology exchanges which were collected by the researchers and their assistants by utilizing an ethnographic approach, which included them observing and writing down apologies in everyday situations (ibid.: 1691). They found 1000 cases of strategy use in the data of 500 exchanges, which was because one occurrence often included more than one strategy (ibid.: 1692). Shariati and Chamani used previously mentioned Olshtain and Cohen’s (1983) framework for their study’s coding scheme (table 1). The results show that the strategies in the data, from most to least frequent, were IFIDs, acknowledging responsibility with a number of sub-strategies, explanation, offer of repair and promise of forbearance (2010: 1693). The non-apology strategies were included under acknowledging responsibility. They discovered that their findings

“on the one hand, confirm previous findings suggesting the universality of apology strategies and on the other hand, it supports the scholars who emphasize the culture-specific aspect of

language” (2010: 1697).

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Bataineh and Bataineh (2008) did a cross-cultural study of apologies. They studied and

compared the apology strategies of students that are native speakers of American English and native speakers of Jordanian Arabic. Their sample group included 100 American and 100

Jordanian students. The study was done through a questionnaire, which consisted of situations described by other students. The task of the sample group was to respond accordingly to the situations which, in their opinion, warranted an apology. (2008: 800) They found that there were differences in the apology strategies between the two groups, but also between the genders in the same culture (ibid.: 816) (which will be discussed in section 4). Table 2 presents the apology strategies found in their data which are divided into explicit apologies, less explicit apology strategies and non-apology strategies.

Table 2. Apology strategies from Bataineh and Bataineh (2008: 802–816).

Explicit apology Less explicit apology strategies

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Page (2014) looks at corporate apologies with a focus on written tweets on the microblogging site Twitter. The examined data includes tweets from corporates, celebrities, and ordinary individuals. The material includes 1183 apologies which she identified using concordancing tools (like AntConc) and manual analysis. All tweets were coded according to their components. (2014:

33) Common IFIDs were searched from the data and the results show that sorry and apology or apologise were the most frequent (ibid.: 34). She finds that nearly every single tweet consists of an IFID combined with some additional strategies (ibid.: 36). Other components identified in the data include explanations; offer of repair; follow up moves: questions and imperatives; greetings, closings and terms of address (ibid.: 37–40). She concludes that in addition to using an IFID there are other components that can be used in combination with it, and these “may be used in the service of saving the apologiser’s face and re-establishing rapport between the interactants in a strategy of image repair.” (ibid.: 43)

Including the studies introduced previously, most apology studies seem to look at short and quick, everyday instances of apologies. For example, when someone arrives late, they might say something like “I am sorry that I am late; I missed the bus.” However, the focus of this study is on YouTube apology videos which can be very long forms of apology. These videos last for many minutes and are, in essence, monologues, so a single video will include many kinds of strategy combinations, such as explicit apologies, explanations and promises of repair. Based on my research, these kinds of long-form apologies have yet to be studied as much as the short-form ones. This is probably because apologies in video format are not as common as the short, everyday ones that are usually expressed in private domains. In contrast, apology videos are posted to a public platform with the purpose of many people seeing them. Nonetheless, with the rise of social media, it is no surprise that there are increasingly more studies today that focus on apologies on YouTube. However, many of the studies that I could find are not in the field of linguistics. For example, Sandlin and Gracyalny’s (2018) study is about image repair and forgiveness, while Manika et al. (2015) focus on service failure and crisis communication.

Apologies in video format have not received much attention from the field of linguistics, which is why this can be an interesting perspective to examine.

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