Примењена лингвистика у част Ранку Бугарском - Језик у

JEZIK U UPOTREBI / LANGUAGE IN USE
rather than unilateral. (...) The agent assuming responsibility for the event necessitating
the apology is the speaker” (Bergman and Kasper 1993: 82). Thus it is
also clear who should perform the delivery. The quality of this dispreferment
is reflected in the second part of the title, which is the punch line of this aphorism.
In the first, literal layer of meaning, apology is delivered, the compensatory
phrase has been formulated and to all appearances, the speech act of apology has
happened. However, in the second layer of meaning, Grice’s (1975) cooperative
principle is flouted, specifically the maxims of relevance and quantity, permitting
humour. The common knowledge, and expectation too, which is at the basis of
the conversational implicature, is betrayed by ambiguity and therefore one interpretation
of the phrase is made irrelevant. Specifically, “Well, I am sorry”, can
pragmatically function as a speech act of apology, but also of rejection, thus the
semantics of the phrase comes into collision with the pragmatics of the statement
through the infringement of the aforementioned principle of relevance. The play
on words in the aphorism is possible since the semantic expectation from the
first part is not paired with the semantic part of the second, and the illocutionary
forces do not coincide either. Also, the relative ease with which correspondence
at all levels is established in translation comprising the linguistic correlation, the
semantics of the statement as well as the pragmatic conditions under which this
speech act happens in English and Montenegrin point to the (relative) universality
of this phenomenon of politeness.
Substantive ‘sorry’ and ritualistic ‘excuse me’
Robin Lakoff (2003) calls all apology “greasing of the social wheel”, though in
a more narrow sense this might relate to what Goffman calls ritualistic apology.
Since the damage in these apologies is virtual, they do not carry the majority
of the characteristics of apology which we identified in the substantives. This
results in free, unhindered and frequent use of some of the phrases of apology in
Montenegro under specified pragmatic circumstances. That is why we can say
that ritualistic apologies are probably more often heard than the substantive ones.
Very generally, we can translate the Montenegrin izvinite into the English
substantive I am sorry, where, according to Robinson (2004), we can also include
I apologise, and the ritualistic excuse me. Borkin and Reinhart offer a differentiation
which, it seems, corresponds with the discursive and pragmatic execution in
Montenegrin:
Excuse me is more appropriate in remedial exchanges when the speaker’s main
concern is about a rule violation on his or her part, while I’m sorry is used in remedial
interchanges when the speaker’s main concern is about violation of another
person’s rights or damage to another person’s feelings; in other words, the basic
183