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A Discussion on the Culture-specific Feature of Apology

Strategies
Vu Tran-Thanh

Apologizing is an important function in a language that any language learner who desires to
gain a communicative competence in that language has to be able to perform. However, to be
proficient in that, there are much more one has to learn besides the language itself as the ways
people make apologies may differ from culture to culture. As the acknowledgement of a
considerable need for harmony in intercultural communication in todays world of increasing
encounters in international environments, from academic or business meetings to an informal
conversation on an airplane or at the airport, an increasing amount of research in apology
strategies across cultures has been conducted recently. After reviewing existing literature on
the speech act of apologizing by presenting some definitions as well as stressing on its
importance in communication, the essay will present various apology strategies proposed by
different researchers from different studies. Examination of how these strategies share
common nature though differently addressed will also be undertaken. Finally, comparison
between apology strategies in various cultures from recent research will be made and
discussed in order to show the differences. I argue that strategies employed in apologizing are
peculiar to every culture.

There have existed numerous definitions of apology or the act of apologizing in social
communicating in the field, most of which focus on the communicative purpose and the
social aspects that influence the process of communicating. Apology is considered by Holmes
(1995) a speech act to redress an offence which the apologist has committed against the
victim. This concept is rather general and only outlines the main and most-encountered
function of this speech act. Sharing a similar belief to some extent, Bataineh and Bataineh
(2008) describe the speech act of apology as a process through which acknowledgement of
responsibility and seeking of forgiveness are made by the wrongdoer. More detailed in terms
of social relationship, Leech (1983) defines apology as a speech act which compensates for a
face-threatening act as a means to gain restoration of social harmony after being infracted.
Similarly, Olshtain (1989) views the act of apologizing as a way to save face for the hearer as
it, to some extent, humiliates someone in order to seek forgiveness from the hearer. Also
concentrating on the social aspect, Goffman (1971) thinks of apologies as interchanges used
as a means to reestablish social harmony after being offended virtually or realistically. Alike,
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Brown and Levison (1987), while recommending the strategies for politeness, have included
a concept of apologies as the expression of negative politeness, which signals that the
speaker is aware of having threatened the hearers face and now tries to remedy that.

As apologizing is a complicated speech act that not only requires the self-realization of the
mistake from the speaker but also expects him or her to use some certain strategies in order to
gain forgiveness from the hearer or the victim. These strategies can both reflect the speakers
own attitudes toward the hearer and the culture in which he or she has grown up. They are
very important in how effective the apologies are in different situations and can depend on
various aspects. Most generally, Trosborg (1995) claims that there are only two main
strategies: minimizing the degree of offence and acknowledgment of responsibility, after
having reduced his own six strategies. The latter in these two is divided into two sub-
strategies of explanation or account and expression of apology as well. The researcher seems
to have looked into the heart of the matter and generalized the process of apologizing. Using
a more popular type of classification, Kasanga and Lwanga-Lumu (2007), while conducting
their research on apologies in English and Setswana, had followed the strategies classified by
Cohen, Olshtain and Rosenstein (1986), namely: Illocutionary Force Indicating (IFID),
acknowledgement or expression of responsibility, account or explanation, offer of repair and
promise of forbearance. More specific and detailed in describing the act of apologizing with
clear distinctions between the small action that the speaker may take, Fraser (1981) lists a
total of nine strategies, from the most direct to the least one: announcing the apology, stating
ones obligation to apologize, offering to apologize, requesting acceptance, expressing regret,
requesting forgiveness, acknowledging responsibility, promising forbearance and offering
redress. It can be understood here that in most real-life situations more than one of these
strategies could be used. This author has very carefully stated the single steps which the
speaker in any situation that requires an apology may take some. Another way of classifying
apology strategies is provided by Holmes (1989), which includes only four main strategies
and some sub-ones: explicit expression of apology, an explanation or account,
acknowledgement of responsibility and a promise of forbearance. This classification is
mainly the revised version of those proposed by earlier researchers in this essay. Sugimoto
(1997), however, has gone in a complete different way when suggesting three types of
strategies: primary (explicit apology, accounts, description of damage and reparation),
secondary (compensation and promise not to repeat offense) and seldom used strategies
(explicit assessment of responsibility, contextualization and self-castigation and gratitude).
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The author seems to concentrate much on the frequency of the strategies which are employed
by the speaker rather than listing them in terms of language use. A drawback that can be seen
here is that some strategies which may be common in a certain culture or language may not
be as frequently used as those in another. Comparison between cultures and languages may
not be carried out accurately and effectively supposed that the researcher uses this kind of
categorization. Chamani and Zareipur (2010) for the purpose of their research have coded
three main strategies and several sub-ones. These strategies are coded according to
Deutschmanns (2003) taxonomy, which mainly views how the speaker takes responsibility
or rejects it. These are: explicit expression of apology, taking on responsibility and
minimizing responsibility. It can be seen that though the researchers in the field may have
different ideas and types of classifying apology strategies, most of them share the same belief
in viewing the communicative purpose and the social aspect of those to remedy the situation.
The strategies may vary in the way they are named, however, it can be closely examined and
understood that they are all similar things in the communication process.

There has existed a large amount of research in the field examining the different strategies for
apologizing that speakers of different languages from different cultures employ, most of
which shows clear distinctions between them. The following paragraph will show results
from research in attempting to assessing the apology strategies mostly from Arabic cultures
in comparison with British and American ones, adding two from Europe (Polish and
Hungarian). As the first to be counted, Kasanga and Lwanga-Lumu (2007) while conducting
a study on apology strategies in English, Setswana English and Setswana from 200 university
students from the University of Johannesburgs Soweto and the University of Pretoria have
found that among the five strategies (IFID, Responsibility, Explanation, Repair and
Forbearance) differences can be seen in the strategy of responsibility when 71% of English
speakers employed this while only 18% and 16% employed by Setswana and Setswana
English speakers respectively. In addition, Setswana and Setswana English speakers tended
to offer reparation more often (26% and 20% respectively) than English speakers (12 %).
This can be understood that English speakers seem to obtain forgiveness by taking
responsibility on their own rather than offering reparation to the hearers. Additionally, Jebahi
(2011) reported the survey results from 100 first year to third year university students at the
Higher Institute of Humanities from Tunisia, Northern Africa with the age range from 19 to
25. According to the subject descriptions, the language used by those students in the
situations was Tunisian Arabic and they were asked to complete a questionnaire describing
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10 different situations. The results showed that 64.9% and 51.5% employed the statements of
remorse and percentages of accounts strategies respectively. Considerably small percentages
of these students used the strategies of self-castigation (0.7%), minimization (0.6%), blaming
the victim (0.5%) and humor (0.3%). Although the findings might also depend on the
relationships between speakers, it can be understood that people from Tunisian culture had a
tendency of lessening the hearers sorrow by means of IFID rather than criticizing, under-
estimating the problems or being humorous. Another survey from a Arabic culture was
conducted by Nureddeen (2008) among 110 college educated adults in Sudan with 10
different social situations of 1082 responses to a discourse completion test. The overall use of
strategies revealed the two most frequent ones were explanation (70%) and IFID (65%) while
the least common one was promise of forbearance (1%). Finals IFIDs, concern for the hearer,
minimization and denial of responsibility were also in the category of low frequencies (from
6% to 7%). Although the researcher did not generalize the results to all Sudanese Arabic
speakers, this study has somehow provided an insight into the strategies that Sudanese Arabic
people used. Mostly, they tried to cool the hearers temper and explain the situations in seek
of forgiveness. Also examining an Arabic culture in comparison with a Western culture,
Bataineh and Bataineh (2008) conducted a cross-cultural study investigating the apology
strategies employed by speakers of American English and Jordanian Arabic. All American
respondents were undergraduate students at Indiana University of Pennsylvania in the USA,
and the Jordanian ones were from Yarmouk University and Jordan University of Science and
Technology in Jordan. The total number was 100 American and 100 Jordanian students (50
female and 50 male participants each). Although the researchers have spared a lot of room
analyzing the differences between genders in using apology strategies, which is not the main
objective of the research, they have somehow highlighted how students from the two cultures
were different in apologizing. Jordanian respondents tended to use more manifestations,
which served as a means to maximize the expression of apology so as to gain sympathy from
the hearer. Additionally, high frequencies could be observed when Jordanian students mostly
employed both negative and positive assessment of responsibility when assigning themselves
and others the blame. However, American participants tended to exclusively assign the blame
to others and employed only negative assessment of responsibility. One other study that
focuses on different strategies used by Arabic and English speakers was conducted by Al-
Zumor (2011) among American English, British English and Arabic speakers. However, this
research has gone a step further, which was quite pedagogy-oriented, by requiring its Arabic
respondents to use English in responding to the provided situations besides using their mother
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tongue. Although the study would have been less complicated for its prime objective to be
understood if the researcher hadnt included a pedagogical purpose, detailed analysis has
been provided and cultural differences have been proved to have influence on those
participants. The results revealed that among the six main strategies that the author listed,
Arabic speakers tended to admit their deficiency while most American English and British
English speakers seemed to prefer offering repair to the hearer. Al-Zumor (2011) explained
that differences in cultures serve as the main reason why the participants used the strategies
with various degrees, adding that this study would have a pedagogical value in implementing
into language teaching materials. Comparison between English and Arabic languages and
cultures was also performed by Chamani and Zareipur (2010) when they carried out a cross-
cultural study of apology strategies between British English and Persian speakers. The
authors coded Deutschmanns (2003) taxonomy and categorized the strategies into four
groups: explicit only (expressions of apology), explicit and minimization (expressions of
apologies accompanied by minimization of responsibility), explicit and responsibility
(expressions of apologies and taking on responsibility) and multiple (combined usage). They
also selected 500 British English examples from Deutschmanns (2003) selection of 3070
examples produced by over 1700 speakers and collected 500 apologies exchanges in Persian.
Prime differences were found that 80% of English speakers only used explicit while only
37% of their Persian counterparts employed this. The Persian speakers also preferred explicit
expressions of apology combined with minimization with 38% of them used these two
strategies together. Speakers of both types showed similarities in the way that few of them
employed explicit and responsibility and multiple with 2% and 3% of English speakers and
11% and 14% of Persian speakers used each respectively. It can be understood here that
while most English speakers tried to persuade the victim to forgive with the use of words,
Persian speakers also attempted to minimize their responsibility. Speakers of both languages
did not seem to take on much responsibility when causing misery. Another study on two
languages from Europe was conducted by Suszczyska (1999), who studied the strategies in
apologizing in three European languages, namely English, Hungarian and Polish among 14
American, 20 Hungarian and 76 Polish students using a discourse completion test. The author
has found that though similar in the ways they combined more than one strategy in a
situation, those speakers showed considerable differences in general. The researcher divided
the apology strategies into two main categories, which were self-strategies (self-dispraise,
non-intentionality or self-deficiency) and other-strategies (expressing concern or offering
help or repair). It was reported that all speakers from the three cultures offered help to the
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hearer, while only 24% Polish and 40% Hungarian speakers expressed concern in comparison
with 71% English counterparts. However, the English seemed rather reluctant in taking
responsibility while only 14% of them used self-strategies compared with 60% and 40% of
Hungarian and Polish speakers respectively.

It can be concluded here that apology strategies, though differ in the way they are called,
categorized and defined by linguists, all reflect the core of the act of apologizing. However,
there might exist the fact that differences may exist in how they are employed by speakers of
different languages from different cultures. It cannot be denied that the act of apologizing is
very important in gaining communicative competence and the knowledge of using it in form
of strategies may influence how effective the process is. Being able to understand how these
strategies are peculiar to different cultures can provide learners of a certain language the
ability to use it successfully. Numerous studies have been performed in the fields of
sociolinguistics generally and pragmatics particularly to analyze the distinctions that
culturally lies in how the strategies are utilized. Research has shown that divergent strategies
are utilized by speakers from various cultures. People from a certain culture may have a
tendency to take on responsibility while some from another may employ offering repair to the
hear instead. Although the results from those papers may sometimes show conflict
conclusions of what strategies people from a culture may use, they all show that how and to
which extent people use the strategies are very specific in every culture.
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