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Slavica Perović: YOU WANT AN APOLOGY? WELL, I AM SORRY!
which are remedied by the sole offering of an apologetic formula and the latter
are those redressing actual damage inflicted on the addressee, sometimes including
an offer of material compensation.
Basic theoretical assumptions for the speech act of apology
In our earlier papers we have focused on substantive apologies (Perović 2006,
2008, 2009) and we observed the speech act of apology in its broadest aspect,
that being the level of the cultural script, according to Anna Wierzbicka (2006).
In this respect, the Montenegrin compelling script entails consistent adherence to
given rules of politeness. Compulsion in this script does not encourage apology,
but neither does it call into question its existence, nor the need for this “shockabsorber”
in social interactions. We complemented these theoretical assumptions
with Goffman’s categories of face (1971) and Brown and Levinson’s negative
politeness (1987), towards which Montenegrin society tends since apology carries
an exceptionally high level of threat to face. We then looked at them from
the aspect of conversational analysis (CA), through the category of preferred and
dispreferred responses, and came to the conclusion that the majority of elicited
apologies from our corpus were of the dispreferred type. The most important
finding of this research, in our opinion, is the division of all apologies into “to
do is to say” – which identified certain groups of emotional and non-verbal categories
of apology – and “to say is to do”, which was very diffuse and revealed
a variety of illocutionary forces of apology. In doing so, we introduced into the
linguistic analysis of the speech act cognitive categories of emotion, based on
verbs of mental predication, primarily think, which is derived from feel. This
turnabout of thought and emotion is not only possible but necessary if we are
to describe the significant category of apology in the corpus that we regarded as
pragmatic compensation strategies, where emotions were the speech act. Since it
is strongly culturally predicated, the category of “to say is to do” is significantly
less represented than expected, which gave us grounds to categorise the expressive
of apology under the title of relative universals.
The pragmatics of an aphorism
Apology is a post-event act, since it relates to an event which has in some way
been characterised as an infringement of a certain rule of behaviour, and in that
sense takes on the characteristics of a transgression to which a redressive device
is expected. Ritualistic apologies are expected to be more preferred first than dispreferred
second. “You want an apology?” implies the awareness that one ought
to be delivered and it only remains to be seen whether it will be or not. “In terms
of value attribution, the relationship between event and speech act is reflective
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