Positive and Negative Politeness: A Cross-Cultural Study of Responding to Apologies by British and Pakistani Speakers

Abstract

Speech etiquette is an essential part of culture, behavior and human communication. Based upon a theoretical framework of politeness and face-threatening acts (FTAs), this study investigates cultural differences in apology responses (ARs) moderated by the threatened face type and the relationship between participants. A discourse completion test, consists of twelve situations is used for data collection. The data was collected from 150 Pakistani Urdu speakers (teachers, doctors, army personals, lawyers, journalists and academicians) working in different institutions and 30 British English speakers (faculty members of English Department, Coventry University, UK, Leeds University, UK and British Association of Applied Linguistics members). The findings reveal that Pakistanis are found using more positive face threatening apology responses (Acceptance and Acknowledgment) including Absolution, Dismissal, Intensifiers, and Acknowledgement with Thanking, Advice, and Suggestion, than British speakers who tend to use both positive FTAs (Acceptance) based on Absolution “That’s Okay”, and Dismissal “no worries at all but be careful next time” and negative FTAs based on Evasion with Deflection and Evasion with Thanking. The findings further illustrate that the understanding and demonstration of politeness and face in conversation functions are susceptible to cultural and sociolinguistic variations.

Universality? Cross-linguistic influence?

“…With regard to data collection, different techniques have been used to collect ARs by previous studies, such as corpora (Kitao & Kitao 2014), role plays (Wu & Wang 2016), and discourse completion tasks (i.e., DCTs) (Adrefiza & Jones 2013, Waluyo 2017, Saleem & Anjum 2018. In fact, the validity of data gathered through different instruments has long been debated (Turnbull 2001, Yuan 2001.…”

“…Though the above studies were conducted to investigate the speech act of apology responses (Adrefiza & Jones 2013, Kitao & Kitao 2014, Wu & Wang 2016, Waluyo 2017, Saleem & Anjum 2018, many were conducted in languages other than Chinese, such as Australian English and Bahasa Indonesia (Adrefiza & Jones 2013), American English (Kitao & Kitao 2014), Indonesian English (Waluyo 2017), and British English and Pakistani Urdu (Saleem & Anjum 2018). In other words, the Chinese database regarding ARs remains limited.…”

“…For a better understanding of the speech act of ARs across different languages and cultures, more studies of ARs are needed. Furthermore, most AR studies have been conducted in L1 settings (Adrefiza & Jones 2013, Kitao & Kitao 2014, Saleem & Anjum 2018 rather than L2. Though Wu & Wang (2016) investigated ARs in both Chinese and English, they focused mainly on a cross-cultural perspective.…”

“…Many studies have demonstrated that a high proportion of ARs generally fall into the category of Acceptance (Holmes 1989;1995, Robinson 2004, Adrefiza & Jones 2013, Wu & Wang 2016, Waluyo 2017, Saleem & Anjum 2018. Such an inclination can be explained from different perspectives.…”

“…In fact, studies have suggested that "different languages may use different linguistic forms to encode the same conceptual infor-mation" (Kong & Qin 2017: 22), and a particular speech act may vary in its verbal realization patterns across languages and cultures (Blum-Kulka & Olshtain 1984). Taking apology responses for example, studies have suggested that people from different cultural backgrounds vary in their use of AR strategies (Saleem & Anjum 2018), as shown below.…”