Apologies and Remedial Interchanges: A Study of Language Use in Social Interaction 9783110907728, 9789027933607

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Apologies and Remedial Interchanges

Marion Owen

Apologies and Remedial Interchanges A Study of Language Use in Social Interaction

Mouton Publishers Berlin • New York • Amsterdam

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Owen, Marion, 1 9 4 6 Apologies and remedial interchanges. Revision of thesis (Ph. D.) - University of Cambridge, 1980. Bibliography: p. 1. English language - Spoken English. 2. English language - Social aspects. 3. Conversation. 4. Speech acts (Linguistics) I. Title. PE 1369.094 1983 420'.1'9 83-13375 ISBN 90-279-3360-X ISBN 90-279-3370-7 (pbk.)

© Copyright 1983 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin. All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form - by photoprint, microfilm, or any other means - nor transmitted nor translated into a machine language without written permission from the publisher. Typesetting: Asian Research Service, Hong Kong - Printing: Druckerei Hildebrand, Berlin Binding: Luderitz & Bauer Buchgewerbe GmbH, Berlin. Printed in Germany.

for Gladys and Trevor Owen

Contents

Introduction Transcription notation

1 9

1. Erving Goffman: Sociology by Metaphors 1.1. Ritual, drama, and face 1.2. Components of the remedial interchange 1.2.1. Non-linguistic components 1.2.2. Accounts 1.2.3. Apologies 1.2.4. Requests 1.2.5. Responses to remedial moves 1.2.6. Priming moves 1.3. Ritual vs. substantive issues 1.4. Ritual constraints vs. system constraints

11 17 17 18 19 21 23 24 26 28

2. Units of Natural Conversation 2.0. Introduction 2.1. Turns and moves 2.2. Larger units 2.3. An illustrative analysis 2.4. 'Conversational units' and 'sentences'

31 31 33 37 46

3. Remedial Moves in English 3.0. Introduction 3.1. Priming moves 3.2. Primary remedial moves 3.2.0. Introduction 3.2.1. Apologies 3.2.1.0. Introduction 3.2.1.1. Type (i), incorporating apology, apologies, or apologise 3.2.1.2. Type (ii), incorporating sorry 3.2.1.3. Type (iii), incorporating I'm afraid 3.2.2. Accounts

49 50 62 62 63 63 63 65 88 92

3.3. Responses to primary remedial moves 3.3.1. Formulaic responses 3.3.2. Extended responses 3.3.3. Withholding of response

97 97 101 103

4. Remedial Moves as Mocutionary Acts 4.1. The problem 4.2. The semantic history of apology and apologise 4.3. Austinian speech acts revisited 4.4. Apologies in Searle's theory of speech acts 4.5. Other remedial moves as illocutionary acts 4.5.1. Primings 4.5.2. Remedial responses 4.6. Conclusions

105 109 114 115 135 135 137 141

5. Remedial Interchanges and Other Aspects of Conversational Organisation 5.0. Introduction 145 5.1. Preference systems in conversation 145 5.2. Remedial interchanges and other sequences 152 5.2.1. Assessment sequences, with particular reference to compliment-response pairs 152 5.2.2. Thanking exchanges 155 6. A Basis for the Cross-Cultural Study of Remedial 6.1. Introduction 6.2. Data 6.3. A framework for comparison 6.4. Cross-cultural data 6.4.1. PRM strategies 6.4.2. Remedial response strategies 6.5. The English data re-examined 6.6. Conclusions Notes Bibliography

Interchanges 161 164 166 174 174 179 180 183 185 189

Introduction

The aim of the research presented in this book is to examine some properties of language use in social interaction, focussing on one kind of linguistic exchange: the remedial interchange. Remedial interchanges are those sequences of utterances that in English characteristically incorporate apologies. They were chosen as the subject of close study initially because of the pioneering treatment given by Erving Goffman (1971), which we discuss in Ch. 1; this work is rich in the suggestions it offers for further research, but is in need of more explicit empirical support than that provided by Goffman himself. Our corpus of remedial interchanges is presented and analysed in Ch. 3. The constituent moves of remedial interchanges also promised to make a good testingground for existing models of conversation, especially speech act theory, which we examine in Ch. 4; this chapter also includes a history of the words apology and apologise in English. Through the study of remedial interchanges we aim also to construct a model that will be applicable to other interchanges and to conversation in general; an outline of this model is given in Ch. 6. Chapters 2 and 5 concern fundamental issues in conversation research: the nature of the units out of which conversation is constructed (Ch. 2), and the notion of 'preference' (Ch. 5). Chapter 5 also examines the similarities between remedial interchanges and other conversational sequences. A broader aim in this work is to demonstrate that everyday conversation is not disordered, rambling, and 'casual' (and therefore not amenable to systematic investigation) as many have said or implied,1 but ordered, coherent and well-suited for the achieving of interactional goals. It follows from this that the speakers who produce such orderly conversations are themselves skilful, accomplished participants in the societies in which they live, in part actually creating those societies through the everyday conversations they engage in with friends, work-mates, shopkeepers and so on. We hope to demonstrate these communicative skills, showing that the forms that utterances take are finely adjusted to the functions they are designed to serve.

2

Introduction

An additional goal of this research is to show that the by now traditional methodology of 'core' linguistics, especially syntax, will not carry over successfully into the domain of language use. By 'traditional' methodology is meant the construction of grammars or parts of grammars on the basis of intuitions about the grammaticality or ungrammaticality of isolated sentences. This we take to be a valid method in the domain for which it was developed, but intuitions about language use can be shown to be unreliable, operating as they are required to do over much longer stretches of speech than the single sentence; indeed, the very relevance of the 'sentence' to the use of language is questionable, and this issue is taken up in Ch. 2. Linguists who have extended this method to the study of apologies, for example, have produced idiosyncratic and highly language-specific results. Katz (1977), for instance, sees apologies (and mutatis mutandis, congratulations and thanks) as expressive illocutionary acts (as does Searle: see Ch. 4) which have the affect of paying a debt; in the case of apologies, compensating the victim for the harm done by the offence. Presumably such an analysis is to be understood in some metaphorical way, but Katz does not appear to recognise any distinction between what Goffman calls ritual and substantive concerns in interaction (see Ch. 1). McCawley's (1974) analysis of the verb apologise is conditioned by the fact that it forms part of an argument aimed at justifying post-transformational lexical insertion in a generative grammar, in particular the rule of EQUI-NP DELETION deriving (2) from (1):

(1) (2)

x request (y forgive x for (x do z)) x apologise to y for z.

However, as we shall see (Chs. 4 and 6) apologies and requests for forgiveness are neither semantically synonymous nor straightforwardly functional equivalents. Some speech act analyses recognise to a greater extent the complexities and richness inherent in remedial interchanges, but are hampered by the requirement that form is to be related to function by one means only, i.e. through the applicability of the appropriate set of felicity conditions for each,speech act. In Ch. 4 we make a serious attempt to compile such a set for the act of apologising, concluding not only that the form of such conditions

Introduction

3

depends on exactly which facts they are being constructed to account for, (there being no rigorous method for choosing between alternative formulations), but also that for some acts it is not possible to establish any workable set of felicity conditions. The strategy we have used is that of basing our analyses on a corpus of naturally-occurring conversational material i.e. talk which is not engaged in primarily for the purposes of the recording. Such material may be contrasted with that used for most work in social psychology, in which subjects are invited into the laboratory and - with greater or lesser degrees of subtlety - told what sort of interaction to engage in. For example, two individuals may be asked to 'get acquainted' with each other, and given twenty minutes to do it in. The resulting conversations may teach us a good deal about how people behave when they are told to get acquainted, but this is not necessarily how they would go about it in the normal course of events. It does not follow, of course, that such experiments can tell us nothing about natural conversation, but we have no basis on which to decide what this might be. The problem that faces us is that in the laboratory we can control many variables, including where people sit, and thus obtain a full, high-quality recording, both visual and auditory, of what happens. (We would then have the problem of transcribing the visual material, an extremely time-consuming process). Outside the laboratory we have to take what we can get and, as yet, we cannot put the visual component on record, as the equipment for doing so is too obtrusive. Two resolutions of the problem are available: we can record fact-to-face interaction, knowing that we are losing any visual cues that were available to the participants, or we can use telephone conversations, where no visual cues were present in the first place. The latter type of material thus has the advantage that all that was available to the participants is available to us. It has been suggested, however, 2 that the visual channel is so important that (i) (ii)

sound-only and telephone because of interaction

data from face-to-face interaction is seriously inadequate, conversations have to be conducted in special ways the lack of a visual channel, and are thus not typical of in general.

4

Introduction

The extent to which (ii) can be shown to be untrue is clearly significant for the decision we make concerning (i). Ironically for the present context, such evidence as there is against (ii) comes from the psychology laboratory. One experiment, (Butterworth, Hine and Brady 1977) appears to show that visual back-channel signals are not replaced by sound signals in telephone conversations. Such results do not, of course, rule out the possibility of other differences; the ways in which telephone conversations are opened and closed, for example, (Schegloff and Sacks (1973)) seem intuitively unlike most face-to-face conversations, and we may be inclined to put this down to the lack of visual information. However, this is only a partial explanation, since some of those features are shared by those face-to-face interactions in which the period of co-presence and the period of talk coincide, e.g. meetings in the street. There seems to be little evidence in favour of (ii), therefore. As far as (i) is concerned, the view that the visual channel is at least far less important than the auditory can be supported by the following observations: (a) A speaker can be sure — given that he and his coparticipant are engaging in talk at all — that his auditory messages will be heard, or that if they are not, that he will soon discover this. Since hearers do not look at speakers continuously, however, a speaker cannot be sure that any visual signals he makes will be received. (b) A speaker can, of course, monitor his coparticipant to ensure that he himself is being monitored, but he cannot rely, to the extent that he can with his vocal signals, on his visual signals being correctly interpreted. These considerations suggest that we can continue to work with sound-only recordings, either until videorecording equipment becomes cheaper and less obtrusive, or until it is demonstrated that by doing so we are either (a) making invalid interpretations of face-to-face interactions, or (b) in using telephone material, that we are studying a special kind of interaction, so that our conclusions will be inapplicable to any other data. The recorded examples used in this dissertation were collected in a variety of ways. A portable casseette recorder was carried

Introduction

5

during transactions in shops, for example, or positioned behind the counter with the assistant's help, the researcher herself being absent. Other material was collected from telephone conversations. In much of the data recorded, therefore, one or both participants were aware that a recording was being made. We do not believe that any real evidence exists to show that this knowledge affects what is said in a way that would invalidate the type of analysis made in this study. It is perhaps preferable, in any case, to take the risk of 'distortion' from this source rather than engage in too much surreptitious recording; in all the data in which participants were recorded without their knowledge, names and other means of identification have been changed. The data is transcribed using the symbols listed at the end of this Introduction. It is neither feasible (becuase of the quality of the recordings) nor necessary to make a phonetic transcription of what is said, as our analysis is not made on that level. This point is, however, becoming a matter of debate between ethnomethodologists and some linguists, and we should make our position clear. Transcription of data within the ethnomethodological tradition has developed during the 60s and 70s (especially influenced by the techniques of Gail Jefferson) from the use of normal orthography to a curious, hybrid, pseudophonetic system designed to give an accurate impression of how the original recording sounds, e.g. (3)

. . . . the twunny sekint Wednesdee night

A considerable degree of goodwill is required for the interpretation of such transcripts; while the words 'twenty' and 'second' are represented 'phonetically', we have to assume that 'Wednesday' (at least the first syllable) and 'night' are not. The 'phonetically' rendered items also have to be read with some variety of American pronunciation for the technique to be at all effective. Intonation is usually represented in such systems if at all, by a simple notation, e.g. '?' at the end of an utterance indicates 'question intonation'; this does not suggest any underlying understanding of the intonational systems of English, nor any willingness to recognise the considerable body of research that exists in this field. We ourselves use the system of O'Connor and Arnold (1973), with some modifications; the set of symbols used is listed at the end of this Introduction.

6

Introduction

These matters are important because a central claim of the ethnomethodologists is that their variety of conversation analysis 'insists on giving its audience equal access to all the data being analysed.' (Atkinson and Drew 1979:26). Now from the sociological perspective from which such workers view the issues, they are indeed presenting the 'raw data' to a far greater extent than most traditional sociology, which requires its readers to accept much selective description and pre-analysis, without providing any access to the objects of description themselves. In our opinion, however, there remains a failure to appreciate the effects of translation from one medium (spontaneous talk) to another (transcription) and the concomitant decisions of an '-emic' nature that have to be made. One alternative is genuinely to attempt to transcribe everything, (e.g. Pittenger, Hockett, and Denehy 1960), but the result is an unwieldy, complex representation, and the process is of course so time-consumsing that a corpus that would be adequate for a study of this type simply could not be produced in transcript form. In any case, at some stage a decision still has to be made concerning which factors will be treated as having crucial importance. Finally, a naive faith in a transcript as a full representation results in the transcript itself becoming the data; this is of course often necessary for the presentation of material — as here — but should be recognised as ultimately unsatisfactory. Transcription in normal orthography at least makes it clear that no claims are being made about the phonetic qualities of the speech sounds produced. Intonation, however, can affect so radically the interpretation of utterances that some representation of it is essential. The frequency of stressed syllables thus marked also gives some indication of the speed of production, with concomitant assimilations and effects on vowel quality. Some indications of voice quality are occasionally given where this is felt to be significant. Pauses are marked only approximately; here again, the ethnomethodologists' claims that differences of 0.1 seconds are crucial are hardly supported by their transcription procedure, which involves estimates that vary from one piece of data to another according to the transcriber's intuitive sense of the overall pace and 'beat' 4 of the talk, but are glossed for publication (e.g. Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson 1974:732) as tenths of seconds.

Introduction

7

It is also necessary to be more explicit about how the body of data collected and transcribed in this way is put to use, since I shall be arguing that reliance on intuition alone can produce misleading results in the domain of conversation analysis. Data is used in a study of this kind in a qualitative rather than a quantitative way. Clearly if we wanted a corpus for the purpose of statistical analysis, the amount of data collected for Ch. 3 would be seriously inadequate. An analogy may be drawn, however, between the approach to data of the structural linguist and the transformational generative grammarian. The structural linguist aims to collect a substantial corpus of sentences of the language he is describing, and then to write a grammar that will account for all the sentences in the corpus. The generative grammarian, on the other hand, uses as data the intuitions of the native speaker about the grammatical and ungrammatical sequences in his language, and constructs his grammar (a) to represent those intuitions and (b) to generate more sequences which can then be checked for grammaticality against the native speaker's judgements. Both these approaches involve idealisation, but in different ways. In the first case, the structural linguist does not suspend his judgement but applies his (or his informant's) intuitions to the corpus and may reject some actually-occurring sequences as ungrammatical, and supply others that do not appear in the corpus but are known to be possible. The generative grammarian studies linguistic competence: the tacit knowledge the native speaker has of his language which when manifest in actual performance is modified through its interaction with other factors such as the degree of attention, or memory limitations. The position is set out by Chomsky in the opening paragraphs of Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965). The conversation analyst stands somewhere between these two position with regard to his use of data. Unlike the generative grammarian he must take actual utterances seriously. While he may recognise that deviant sequences occur he will look for overt acknowledgement or implicit recognition of their deviance by the participants. At the same time, however, he must do more than merely describe a corpus. Applying his own intuition — utilising his own 'conversational competence' — he should attempt to provide general statements that will generate new and acceptable

8

Introduction

sequences, just as a generative grammar can produce an infinite set of grammatical sentences from a finite set of rules. However, whereas generative grammar was able to build on many centuries' work in grammatical description, no such body of knowledge exists in the study of conversation. While our ultimate aim should be to provide a 'grammar' of conversation, a great deal of descriptive work must also be done, to which it is hoped this volume — especially Ch. 3 — will make some contribution. The book is a revised version of a dissertation submitted in 1980 for the degree of Ph.D. in the University of Cambridge. A longer version of Chapter 2 was published in Pragmatics Microfiche 3.5 (1978), and a revision also appears in Conversation and Discourse: Structure and Interpretation, edited by Paul Werth, (Croom Helm, 1981) My thanks are due to many members of the Department of Linguistics in the University of Cambridge, both staff and students, but especially to Stephen Levinson (my research supervisor) and to Terry Moore. I am also most grateful to the Social and Political Sciences Committee in the University of Cambridge, who gave me financial support in the form of a quota award from the Social Science Research Council. Finally, I particularly want to thank my husband, Andrew Smith, for his tolerance and encouragement and for very many hours of discussion, without all of which this book would not have been possible.

Transcription Notation

Intonation Nuclear tones:

.low fall .low rise " high fall ' high rise 'fall-rise "rise-fall v. etc., nuclei as above, but with extra prominence (extra-wide pitch-range, or increased amplitude, or both) I prominent stress • non-prominent stress i low-pitched prominent stress " - h i g h or mid level tone * sliding head (frequently occurring with fall-rise nuclei) II boundary o f major tone-group I boundary of minor tone-group L J marks enclosing passage at relatively low pitch

Other marks and symbols // point during a turn at which second speaker begins ('interruption point') / 'self-interruption' { simultaneous speech by two or more speakers ( ) indecipherable passage (words) unclear passage

1.

Erving Goffman: Sociology by Metaphors

1.1. Ritual, Drama, and Face

The central object of this study - the remedial interchange is derived directly from certain specific writings of Erving Goffman; the domain of this work is, however, somewhat different from that covered by Goffman, being in some respects more limited and in others broader. It is not only appropriate, therefore, but essential, to consider in some depth those portions of Goffman's work that are concerned with remedial interchanges and the more abstract and general phenomena of which remedial interchanges are a reflection and a realisation. One of the most striking characteristics of Goffman's work is his use of metaphor: by viewing everyday social interaction in the light of other, more specialised, kinds of activity, features of it are brought into relief that might otherwise pass unnoticed. Two metaphors in particular run through Goffman's work from his thesis (1953) to his more recent work (1974): the religious and the dramatic, giving rise to two concepts of central importance: ritual, and performance or impression management. The first of these is motivated partly by a concern on Goffman's part to accord substantial significance to the minutiae of everyday face-to-face interaction in public settings, for it is in these details, and their patternings, that he locates social order. It is now unremarkable, in popular as well as academic writings, to demonstrate concern with such matters, but in the immediate post-war period this was not so; indeed, Goffman's writing has been instrumental in effecting this change. He uses the religious metaphor to underline the importance he attaches to the details of everyday interaction: In contemporary society rituals performed to stand-ins for supernatural entitles are everywhere in decay, as are extensive ceremonial agendas involving long strings of obligatory rites. What remains are brief rituals one

12

Erving Goffman: sociology by metaphors indivdual performs for and to another, attesting to civility and goodwill on the performer's part and to the recipient's possession of a small patrimony of sacredness. What remains, in brief, are interpersonal rituals. These little pieties are a mean version of what anthropologists would look for in their paradise. But they are worth examining. Only our secular view of society prevents us from appreciating the ubiquitousness and strategy of their location, and, in turn, their role in social organisation. (1971:89)

Although this particularly clear statement comes from a relatively recent work, similar references are scattered throughout Goffman's earlier work; in his thesis, for example, he suggests that A case may be made for the view that the best model for an object to which we give consideration is not a person at all, but a sacred idol, image, or god. It is to such sacred objects that we show in extreme what we show to persons. . . . An idol is to a person as a rite is to etiquette. (1953:104)

Such assertions, however, although based in part on close observation, appear to form premises in Goffman's arguments rather than conclusions; suppose, he suggests, that (temporarily setting aside any evidence to the contrary) we examine social interaction in this light: we might then find that it does indeed have many of the properties of religious ritual, the objects of that ritual being the interactants themselves. In Ch. 3 of Relations in Public (1971), Goffman draws the picture in greater detail, using Durkheim's distinction between positive and negative rites. He claims, first of all, that in the secular world, negative rites are not "an occasional restriction, but . . . a central organisational device of public order" (1971:89). Furthermore, whereas religious ritual consists (for the non-believer, at least) of monologue, "interpersonal rituals have a dialogistic character" (ibid) which is produced in different ways by positive and negative ritual. Positive, or 'supportive' interchanges arise because of the need for mutual support; an offer accepted, for example, should be received with a show of gratitude. Negative dialogues occur when infractions are made, 'the offender having to provide remedial accounts and assurances and the offended a sign that these have been received and are sufficient; in brief, a "remedial interchange' occurs" (1971:90). Goffman continues by underlining the importance of these types of dialogue: . . . . these two basic interchanges, the supportive and the remedial, are among the most conventionalised and perfunctory doings we engage in and traditionally have been treated by modern society as part of the dust

Ritual, drama, and face

13

of social activity, empty and trivial. And yet, as we shall see, almost all brief encounters between individuals consist precisely and entirely of one or the other of these two interchanges. In brief, whenever one individual rubs up against another, he is likely to say hello or excuse me. Surely it is time to examine 'Hello' of 'Excuse me' or their equivalent. Moreover, as we shall see, conversational encounters of the more extended kind are typically opened and closed by these devices, if not built up in terms of them. Surely, then, in spite of the bad name that etiquette has given to etiquette, it is time to study these performances, (ibid).

The sacred property of individuals to which these interpersonal rituals are directed is what Goffman calls face, a concept which belongs also to the other metaphor employed, that of a dramatic performance. Sometimes the metaphor is that of face as a "sacred image" (e.g. 1967:32), elsewhere it is the individual's ie//-image, or the impression he gives to others of himself: a dramatic concept. The dramatic metaphor is the predominant one in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959). In his thesis (1953) Goffman had already made the valuable distinction between communication in a narrow sense (i.e. information conveyed intentionally by the individual about himself, using means whose primary function is the transmission of that information, particularly verbal means), and expressive or symptomatic behaviour, which may convey a great deal but which is not engaged in primarily for communicative purposes. Goffman then proceeds deliberately to blur this distinction, for much of his interest lies in the extent to which it is possible for the actor to control his expressive behaviour. The book is concerned with the means individuals use to control the impression others receive of them; in discussing these, Goffman talks in terms of stage-craft, stage management, and the 'actor', the last being a term he continues to use to describe the human being engaged not only in direct interaction with others but in any public place in which he can be observed. In such situations the actor is both a performer - "a harried fabricator of impressions involved in the all-too-human task of staging a performance" - and a character - "a figure, typically a fine one, whose spirit, strength, and other sterling qualities the performance was designed to evoke" (1959: 244). Goffman ends the book by describing his technique of analogy as "in part a rhetoric and a manoeuvre," a "scaffold" (1959: 246) erected to build something else with, which should afterwards be dismantled. In ordinary life,

14

Erving Goffman: sociology by metaphors

unlike the theatre, 'real' and 'actual' things can happen to the performed characters; nevertheless, stage actors must also sustain a definition of character and situation by the very same means that an individual uses in the 'real' world; only in this way can a stage performance be 'realistic'. The idea of a consistent performance or impression is developed further in the essay On Face-Work which forms part of the collection entitled Interaction Ritual (1967). Goffman opens this essay by labelling the "pattern of verbal and non-verbal acts by which (the actor) expresses his view of the situation and through this his evaluation of the participants, especially himself' (1967:5) as a line. Subsequently, The term face may be defined as the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact. Face is an image of self delineated in terms of approved social attributes — albeit an image that others may share, as when a person makes a good showing for his profession or religion by making a good showing for himself, (ibid).

Face is thus a concept that has a place in both of Goffman's principal metaphors, the religious and the dramatic; the need for attention to face gives rise to ritual, which Goffman glosses here as "acts through whose symbolic component the actor shows how worthy he is of respect or how worthy he feels others are of it. . . . One's face, then, is a sacred thing, and the expressive order required to sustain it is therefore a ritual one" (1967:19). The dramatic aspect of face lies in the fact that it is the result of the actor's efforts at impression, or role-management. An individual's emotional involvement with his own face is paralleled by a similar involvement in the face of others; while his own face "can be his most personal possession and the centre of his security and pleasure, it is only on loan to him from society; it will be withdrawn unless he conducts himself in a way that is worthy of it" (1967:10). The resulting "rule of self-respect" thus has a counterpart in the "rule of considerateness": Just as the member of any group is expected to have self-respect, so also he is expected to sustain a standard of considerateness: he is expected to go to certain lengths to save the feelings and the face of others present, and he is expected to do this willingly and spontaneously because of enotional identification with the others and with their feelings. In consequence, he is disinclined to witness the defacement of others, (ibid)

Ritual, drama, and face

15

The result of this is that "the person tends to conduct himself during an encounter so as to maintain both his own face and the face of the other participants" (1967:11), though we should think of face-preservation as normally a condition of interaction, rather than its objective. Face-preserving behaviour has a positive, 'approach' aspect and a negative, 'avoidance' aspect, parallel to positive and negative rites in religious behaviour; these are both parts of the phenomena grouped together and known as 'politeness'. The pervasive influence of face-preserving requirements in interaction has been studied by Brown and Levinson (1978), in a paper to which we shall return in later chapters; one particular kind of activity, however, occurs when face is damaged, thus briging face into the interactional focus for a time. This is the corrective (later, 'remedial') interchange, which here Goffman sees as having - in its classic form - four moves. These are (1) (2)

(3) (4)

challenge, by which participants take on the responsibility of calling attention to the misconduct, offering, "whereby a participant, typically the offender, is given a chance to correct for the offence and re-establish the expressive order". acceptance, by the person(s) to whom the offering is made, and thanks, in which the forgiven person conveys a sign of gratitude to those who have given him the indulgence of forgiveness (1967:2022).

This is the basic structure of the remedial interchange that Goffman develops later in Relations in Public. The need for mutual maintenance of face provides a rationale for cooperation in facesaving activity: "Resolution of the situation to everyone's apparent satisfaction is the first requirement; correct apportionment of blame is typically a secondary consideration" (1967:28). This cooperation is revealed in the rarity of overt priming actions (challenges, in the above terminology) discussed in Ch. 3 below; to draw attention to the failure of an individual to perform remedial work is to damage his face by pointing out both the original offence and the derived offence arising from his failure to initiate remedial activity, but it is also to risk damaging one's own face should the challenge fail. On occasions, also, as Goffman remarks, "the offender and the offended simultaneously attempt to initiate an apology" (1967:27-28). A section of the essay on face-work puts forward the idea that the self has two 'ritual roles':

16

Erving Goffman: sociology by

metaphors

the self as an image pieced together from the expressive implications of the full flow of events in an undertaking; and the self as a kind of player in a ritual game who copes honourably or dishonourably, diplomatically or undiplomatically, with the judgmental contingencies of the situation. (1967:31)

This dual nature of the self, Goffman claims, allows an actor who has damaged another's face to perform remedial work voluntarily without damaging himself as an "object of ultimate worth" (1967: 32). Similarly he can choose to belittle himself and underplay his positive qualities, "with the understanding that no one will take his statements as a fair representation of his sacred self" (ibid). It is essential, however, that the actor is allowed to exercise these rights of his own free will. This notion of the dual self is one that is taken up again in Relations in Public, and it is to this that we now return. Although Chapters 3 and 4 of Relations in Public — concerned with supportive and remedial interchanges respectively — are explicitly a development of the earlier essay, Goffman curiously (in view of his rejection of a legal model for remedial work: see 1.3 below) appears to abandon the notion of face in favour of the more judicial metaphor of norms '. A social norm is that kind of guide for action which is supported by social sanctions, negative ones providing penalties for infraction, positive ones providing rewards for exemplary compliance. (1971:124)

The norms Goffman is most concerned with are those to do with "territories of the self' and the norms governing the individual's rights to such territories, and the model therefore remains compatible with the more abstract concept face. Territories may be fixed (houses and gardens) or temporary (park benches and restaurant tables) but in either case the occupier of the territory has the right to claim it as his own and the right to attempt to exclude others from it. Any attempt to encroach on another's territory can thus be seen as a particular way of damaging his face, in that the offender is treating the victim as one to whom territorial respect is not due. This interpretation is perhaps justifiable when we bear in mind that 'territory' includes such abstract areas as the individual's 'information preserve' — 'the set of facts about himself to which an individual expects to control access while in the presence of others (1971:63) — and his "conversational preserve" - "the right of an individual to exert some control over

Components of the remedial interchange

17

who can summon him into talk and when he can be summoned" (1971:64).

1.2.

Components of the Remedial Interchange

1.2.1. Non-Linguistic Components

The basic verbal components of the remedial interchange are substantially the same as those enumerated in Interaction Ritual and listed above. However, since in Relations in Public Goffman goes into far greater detail and elaborates some of the concepts involved, we shall trace here the outline of the later model. The fundamental requirements for the initiation of a remedial interchange (RI) are non-linguistic; they are: the offence, the offender, and the victim or claimant. Goffman enriches these notions as follows: In order to understand remedial work, I think it is useful to assume that the actor and those who witness him can imagine (and have some agreement regarding) one or more 'worst possible readings', that is, interpretations of the act that maximise either its offensiveness to others or its defaming implications for the actor himself. This ugliest imaginable significance I shall call the 'virtual offence'. (1971:138-139)

Along with the virtual offence we have the corresponding "virtual offender", "the individual most likely to be perceived as the party at fault", and the "virtual claimant", "the individual who is the most obvious choice for he whose claims have been infringed" (ibid). One source for such a "worst possible reading" is mentioned earlier by Goffman: since social norms are usually couched in general terms, applying to a particular event as an instance of a class of events, any deviation from that norm on any occasion can give the impression that the actor "may be delinquent with respect to the whole class of events" (1971:126). These notions may help to explain the readiness of individuals to perform remedial work for some offences that may in themselves seem

18

Erving Goffman: sociology by metaphors

trivial; the touching of another's leg with one's foot under a table, for example, will almost always give rise to an apology, though neither party believes any physical harm has been done. The danger, however, is that without remedial work, the victim may perceive the offender not just as 'someone who kicked my leg under the table just now' but as 'someone who doesn't show proper regard for the physical control of his body' or as 'someone who does things like kicking people under the table'. (I take it that under certain circumstances a sexual significance may also be given to such an act, and it may therefore be necessary to guard against this interpretation.) Remedial work may therefore be called for to deal with extremely slight offences, because of their virtual significance. Goffman then proposes the following definition of the function of remedial work: The function of remedial work is to change the meaning that otherwise might be given to an act, transforming what could be seen as offensive into what can be seen as acceptable. (1971:139)

We can operate with this definition only if we remember that by "the meaning that otherwise might be given to an act" Goffman refers to the virtual significance of the offence. Without this concept, it would not be possible to see all remedial work as having this function, and in fact it will be more useful for our purposes to limit the 'meaning-changing' function to one type of remedial move, the account, which is only one of three remedial moves examined by Goffman, the other two being apologies and requests.

1.2.2. Accounts

Goffman treats accounts essentially within a legal framework, since it is in courtrooms that we find the most extensive and varied use of these resources. He distinguishes five strategies that the actor can adopt: (1)

The 'traverse' or 'joinder', arguing that the supposed offensive act did not occur at all,

Components (2)

(3)

(4)

(5)

of the remedial interchange

19

An admission that the act occurred and that the accused performed it with knowledge of the consequences, but redefining the act so that it can be seen as something other than an offence. Scott and Lyman (1968) call these justifications, "The putative offender can agree that the act occurred and that he did it but present the mitigation that he was ignorant and unforseeing, excusably so, and could not reasonably be asked to have acted so as to forestall it" (Goffman 1971:141), Pleas claiming reduced responsibility by virtue of reduced competence, or excuses, only partially reducing the blame imputable to the actor, An admission of carelessness or ignorance of the consequences of the act.

We shall return to accounts in Ch. 3, but we should specify here that we shall be considering only those accounts that occur along with apologies or in place of them. Accounts, in the wider sense of explanations of actions, may be provided not only in response to actual or anticipated challenges or primings, or where they are required for remedial purposes, though it is true that in the broadest possible sense of 'remedial work' (a sense that Goffman sometimes seems to have in mind) any explanation of one's actions, if relevant, is remedial by contrast with its absence.

1.2.3. Apologies

Goffman's conception of the ritual roles of the self has already been mentioned; it plays a central part in his understanding of the function of apologies: An apology is a gesture through which an individual splits himself into two parts, the part that is guilty of an offence and the part that dissociates itself from the delict and affirms a belief in the offended rule. (1971:143)

The justification for this seemingly complex analysis is Goffman's model of the individual, in particular the notion of roles and the possibility of role-distance: . . . . apologies represent a splitting of the self into a blameworthy part and part that stands back and sympathises with the blame giving, and, by implication, is worthy of being brought back into the fold. This splitting is but one instance, and often a fairly crude one, of a much more general phenomenon — the tendency for individuals when in the immediate

20

Erving Goffman: sociology by metaphors presence of others to project somehow a self that then is cast off or withdrawn from. In the case of apologies, there is usually an admission that the offence was a serious or real act. This provides a contrast to another type of splitting, one that supports an account, not an apology, in which the actor projects the offensive act as something not to be taken literally, that is, seriously, or after the act claims that he was not acting seriously. (1971:144)

A difficulty with this 'metaphorical' technique of analysis lies in remarks like that above to the effect that in apologies, an admission is usually made that the offence 'was a serious or real act'; if we are to take this literally, then the evidence that will be presented in Ch. 3 argues against the claim, since such admissions are not found in any overt form in the corpus. But if what is intended is that, in apologising, the individual implies that the offence was real, then the data actually collected supports the hypothesis, in that no instances are found of apologies occurring with the type of account described here by Goffman. Similarly, although the description of the two roles involved in the act of apologising is an interesting and plausible one, the evidence brought by Goffman to support it is of an abstract kind, to do with the distinction between ritual and substantive issues in interaction. (See section 1.3 below.) Finally, it is not entirely clear what class of utterances or utterance-substitutes Goffman means to cover by his use of the term 'apology'. He of course includes expressions such as 'I'm sorry', but it would be a curious account that did not. Elsewhere, however, he also uses the term to describe particular instances of 'body gloss' — those actions and gestures through which an individual portrays an image of himself, particularly, here, those displays he can use to correct bad impressions that might otherwise be given. For instance, suppose a passenger travelling alone on a train notices a gold locket on the floor of the train; if he picks it up, intending to hand it in to the lost property office, he can attempt to demonstrate — by acting conspicuously and openly — that he is not pocketing the object with the intention of keeping it. The assumption he hopes others will make is that if he had in mind to keep the locket he would pick it up surreptitiously; he is not behaving thus, and therefore has 'honest intentions'. He might also, of course, say something to another passenger; in such situations, gesture and utterance may be interchangeable. Interest-

Components of the remedial interchange

21

ingly, such an example can support Goffman's description of apologies as essentially concerned with portraying the actor's overt attitude to social norms; a man who intends to keep the locket could behave in precisely the same way, controlling the impression he gives of his moral worth. However, the very possibility of manipulating the signs in this way undercuts their effectiveness. There is a case, then, for expanding the definition of apology to include such activities as body gloss, to the extent that it can perform the same functions. However, we shall be limiting the term 'apology' to a much narrower class of actions. First, we shall only be discussing verbal apologies, since this study is concerned with the use of language in social interaction. Second, and as we hope to show, somewhat arbitrarily, we shall label apologies only those utterances that include the phrases 'I'm sorry' or 'I apologise' and variants of these.

1.2.4. Requests

Another important, and by far the largest, class of remedial moves discussed by Goffman is requests, which unlike most accounts and apologies, occur before the offending act. Goffman's justification for including requests runs as follows: A request consists of asking licence of a potentially offended person to engage in what could be considered a violation of his rights. The actor shows that he is fully alive to the possible offensiveness of his proposed act and begs sufferance. (1971:145)

Requests are therefore remedial because their absence would be seen as an offence; similarly the absence of an account or an apology can be seen as an offence, but with the difference that where these occur an offence has already been committed. A request, by contrast, according to Goffman, is oriented to the offence that would take place if the request were not made. This description makes some sense when applied to requests of the kind Goffman is particularly concerned with, i.e. encroachments on another's territory. Requests to borrow goods, for example, convert the offensive taking of another's property into an accept-

22

Erving Goffman: sociology by metaphors

able act. It is not so easy, however, to look at other requests in the same light, because the offence cannot occur at all without the request. If I ask a stranger to tell me the time, for instance, I am indeed encroaching on his privacy or right to remain undisturbed, but I cannot get him to tell me the time without making a request, short of approaching him, taking hold of his wrist and examining his watch: other requests for information do not allow even such unlikely possibilities. (It is perhaps noteworthy that the example Goffman gives of a request for someone to do something is of the police asking a suspect to empty his pockets; in such cases the requester does have the right to do the requested act if the requested fails to comply.) There is a remedial aspect to requests, however, which lies in the way a request is made; a polite request for the time can be viewed as remedial, not by contrast with the total absence of the request, as with apologies, but with some less polite way of making the request. A difference therefore exists between accounts or apologies, and requests, which goes beyond the fact that the latter occur before the offence and the former after it, though the differences arise partly through this contrast. Goffman's analysis at times views remedial activity as pervading all verbal interaction, in that it is the realisation of attention to negative face and thus underlies the phenomenon of negative politeness. On this interpretation, we should expect to find remedial work in all kinds of verbal acts, not just remedial interchanges. This case is made by Brown and Levinson, who list (1978:70-73) a great many verbal acts that intrinsically threaten face (either the speaker's or the addressee's) and that are thus likely to be performed in ways that recognise that risk. On the more limited interpretation, however, remedial interchanges are those concerned specifically with repairing damage to face, where face-preservation itself becomes the object of the conversation for a time, however short. It is this more constrained notion of remedial work that this study will concern itself with, thus including apologies and accounts, but excluding requests. Another quite independent reason for not including requests in the domain to be studied here is simply that to do this would widen the field to unmanageable proportions. Furthermore, a substantial amount of research has already been conducted by

Components of the remedial interchange

23

linguists into the forms of requests, mainly from a speech act point of view. However, Ervin-Tripp (1976) has presented data and analysis of request forms in American English, and the work of Brown and Levinson (1978) also covers the field from the point of view of a strategic analysis. This work is therefore limited to the field described above, which has been less intensively cultivated so far. Existing linguistic analyses of remedial moves and interchanges fall into two categories: those taking a speech act standpoint, and a few brief treatments of other kinds. The former are discussed at length in Ch. 4: the latter have been mentioned briefly in the Introduction.

1.2.5. Responses to Remedial Moves

Goffman enumerates three acts that may follow apologies or accounts: relief, followed by appreciation (on the part of the provider of the iapology/account), followed, finally, by minimisation. He does not include any examples of such complete sequences from what we are calling remedial interchanges, but only from those including requests. The sequence might then run as follows: remedy relief appreciation minimisation

A: B: A: B:

Can I use your phone to make a local call? Sure, go ahead, That's very good of you. It's okay. (Goffman 1971:177)

Note that the full sequence, in which the foregoing begins with a priming move, appears to be impossible, since a request is a remedy that must be produced before the act in question (here, picking up the phone); if a request is produced, there is no justification for priming (unless, perhaps, the recipient of the request judges it to be inadequate for the weight of the favour asked). In fact, in those RIs with which we are concerned, it is hard to see what kind of utterances could fill the relief and appreciation slots without the resulting sequence appearing bizarrely formal and explicit. What Goffman calls minimisations are, however, found regularly; these he defines as acts

24

Erving Goffman: sociology by metaphors on the part of the victim that repeat in diminished form the relief he provided as the second move, shows appreciation of the appreciation shown him, and rather fully terminates the exchange. In current American speech, examples of this are: 'You're welcome', 'That's all right', 'Think nothing of it', or 'It's okay'. The effect is that the victim graciously makes light both of what he has suffered and of the quality of character he must have to make light of this sort of thing. (1971:176-177)

Our justification for categorising the responses found to apologies as minimisations rather than relief moves lies partly in the formal similarities between the moves in third position after requests in sequences like the above, and those occurring in the slots immediately after apologies and accounts, and we shall be examining in Ch. 5 the similarities between RIs (and their component moves) and other exchanges. Furthermore, the function we identify as belonging to apology-responses is more akin to that of the minimisation, as defined above, than to the relief, which includes acts or utterances granting requests, and also, rather confusingly, apologies and accounts themselves when produced in place of gran tings, as in the following example: remedy

A:

Would you pass the milk?

relief

B:

Gee, I'm sorry. There doesn't seem to be any left in the pitcher. (1971:174)

However, we shall not be adopting the term minimisation as a label for all the utterances used in response to apologies and accounts, for the following three reasons: firstly, we cannot in any case adopt Goffman's definition as it stands, since the exchanges we are concerned with do not include relief and appreciation moves; secondly, the term minimisation offers an apt description only of some response moves; and thirdly, we shall be making a distinction (in Ch. 3) between two types of 'positive' responses, acknowledgements and acceptances.

1.2.6. Priming Moves The final move Goffman identifies in the RI is, in fact, the move that most commonly — when it occurs at all — occurs first in the sequence. As he suggests, in the 'basic remedial cycle' it is the offender who speaks first, but

Components of the remedial interchange

25

When a claimant or victim finds that expected remedial work is not forthcoming, he can act so as to call attention to the work that needs to be done. The query or 'interrogative challenge' thereby conveyed is not quite a first move in its own right because the response it seeks is for the party that should have made a first move to make that kind of effort. (1971: 189)

This is the priming move. Our discussion of primings in Chapters 3 and 4 will be concerned mainly with those that do occur in first position in the interchange, but it is appropriate here to mention Goffman's observation that priming actions may in fact occur at any point in the cycle: When, in the ordinary course of events, a virtual offender provides a remedy, the recipient can hesitate in providing relief, or even mildly dispute the adequacy of what is offered, and by doing so induce a replay of the remedy. (1971:190)

Ways of performing other moves, or withholding them altogether, then, can lead to their functioning as primings. Finally, it will be particularly important in our discussion of primings to note that of all the moves in the RI, these are the most elusive of description. Goffman accounts for this as follows: Note the performance of a priming move inevitably opens up the possibility that instead of this act inducing the occurrence or reoccurrence of the standard remedial cycle, a run-in may occur, the recipient taking the position that improper demands are being placed on him. For this reason, priming moves tend to be made in various disguises. (1971:191)

The phenomenon is a particular case of indirect communication, or indirect speech acts, to use the linguist's or philosopher's term; Goffman's general term for these phenomena is overlays: 'tacit meanings to be understood as contained in other meanings' (1971: 203). The possibility of overlays is created in part by the means largely ignored by linguists but studied in depth by conversation analysts: the determination of the function of an utterance by its placement with respect to other utterances and features of the situation. Goffman's examples of overlays include the following: Father

: (To daughter who stands before him on the phone) You on the phone? Daughter : Oh! I'm sorry, I forgot you wanted it. (1971:205)

As Goffman points out, "it is likely that the response that results will be understandable only if it is assumed that the implied move is in fact being made" (ibid). In this example, the father's question is apparently redundant; appealing to general conversational

26

Erving Goffman: sociology by metaphors

principles such as those proposed by Grice (1975) we can interpret it as non-superfluous if we take it to have some 'superordinate' function, such as priming. Given other contextual information, of course, other interpretations could be made; if we had been told, for example, that the other members of the family were ready for an outing and were waiting for the daughter to finish her phone call, the father's utterance could be taken as an exhortation to hurry up. Priming moves, as we shall see, typically depend on such information for their interpretation.

1.3.

Ritual vs. Substantive Issues

Although Goffman uses vocabulary such as 'offence', 'offender' and 'victim' throughout his account of RIs, he ultimately rejects the judicial model, for two reasons. Firstly, he suggests that the traditional view of social control divides the world in which that control is exercised into three distinct parts: in the first, the crime is committed, in the second the trial takes place, and in the third, the punishment (if any is necessary) is inflicted. This separation enables the three phases to be studied separately, but as Goffman points out, in the domain of public order 'the scene of the crime, the halls of judgement, and the place of detention are all housed in the same cubicle', and the complete cycle of crime, apprehension, trial, punishment, and return to society can run its course in two gestures and a glance. Justice is summary. (1971:137)

Social situations are, he suggests, "settings for racings through versions in miniature of the entire judicial process" (ibid). The second reason Goffman proposes for taking the judicial model cautiously is more important: he points out that whereas in the judicial sphere, penalties vary substantially according to the severity of the crime, in the case of remedial work the same is true only to such an attenuated degree that the analogy becomes misleading and clouds the real issues. Although he concedes that

Ritual vs. substantive issues

27

"there is some evidence supporting this actuarial approach" in that "often a brief apology is given for a minor offence and a protracted apology for something bigger" (1971:146) Goffman is more struck by the fact that even in cases where serious consequences result from an offence, and there may be no way of providing substantive compensation, "all the offended can do is say he is sorry" (1971:148). Such expressions are, he claims, .... relatively little open to gradation. The fact - at least in our society is that a very limited set of ritual enactments are available for contrite offenders. Whether one runs over another's sentence, time, dog, or body, one is more or less reduced to saying some variant of 'I'm sorry'. The variation in degree of anguish expressed by the apologiser seems a poor reflection of the variation in loss possible to the offended. (1971:148-149)

These observations illustrate, for Goffman, the important distinction to be made between ritual and substantive concerns in dealing with offences. These two distinct, independent processes he describes as follows: One is ritualistic, whereby the virtual offender portrays his current relationship to rules, which his actions appear to have broken, and to persons present whose territories should have been protected by these rules. The second is restitutive, whereby an offended party receives some compensation, especially of a material kind, for what has been done to him and, by implication, to the rules that otherwise would have protected him. (1971:147)

The ritual component of remedial work is the component in which the 'split' between the roles of the self is manifested; even if substantive restitution is impossible, the need for remedial work is not lessened. Goffman here claims to "derive a property of interactants from interaction" (1971:148) i.e. to derive the notion of the 'split self from the observable distinction between substantive and ritual concerns. The right relationship of the individual to social rules must be re-established, whether the offence is so serious that this would appear to be impossible, or so trivial that substantive issues do not arise. The very necessity for ritual remedial work, regardless of the offence, illustrates both the significance of remedial work in maintaining or restoring the face of the participants and its power in restoring equilibrium even after social disaster has occurred. While accepting as valid and useful Goffman's distinction between ritual and substantive concerns, we take issue with two aspects of his treatment of the problem. Firstly, we suggest that

28

Erving Goffman: sociology by metaphors

he undervalues the subtlety of variation possible in the basic remedial move of apology (and the possibilities are increased further if an account is available in addition). After all, since it is ritual work that is being done, we should not expect the variation that does occur (which will be presented in detail in Ch. 3) to be in any substantive way proportional to the severity of the offence. The possibilities for variation are much richer than Goffman suggests here, though in his later discussion of the structural variations on the basic remedial cycle he does demonstrate some of this potential (concentrating, however, on the structure of the interchange rather than on the variability of the individual moves.). Secondly, instead of a simple two-way distinction between ritual and substantive concerns, with RIs (including both apologies and accounts) seen as directed towards the ritual side of the dichotomy, we propose a continuum on which ritual and substantive concerns stand at opposite ends. On such a continuum, apologies have a place at the ritual end, material compensation at the substantive extreme, and accounts stand somewhere in between. This kind of image allows us to see the different types of remedial work as functionally equivalent, while not losing sight altogether of the ritual/substantive contrast.

1.4.

Ritual Constraints vs. System Constraints

In Replies and Responses (1976) Goffman is concerned with the structure of conversation as the product of two kinds of constraints; here again we find ritual issues contrasted with another type of concern. This time the distinction is between ritual constraints and system constraints on interaction, which is another aspect of the contrast described in the preceding section. System constraints are concerned with linguistic communication as a communication system, a means for transmitting information. These constraints thus include

Ritual constraints vs. system constraints

29

A two-way capability for transceiving acoustically adequate and readily interpretable messages. Back-channel feedback capabilities for informing on reception while it is occurring. . . . (1976:264)

As Goffman then suggests, we can "draw our basic framework for face-to-face talk from what would appear to be the sheer physical requirements and constraints of any communication system" (1976:265). By no means all of everyday conversation, however, can be accounted for by such constraints, and Goffman proposes a set of 'ritual constraints' which will not merely supplement but interact with, and to some extent supercede, system constraints. The notion of ritual constraints is essentially equivalent to the wider concept of remedial concerns defined above, but is defined here as a set of constraints regarding how each individual ought to handle himself with respect to each of the others, so that he not discredit his own tacit claim to good character or the tacit claim of the others that they are persons of social worth whose various forms of territoriality are to be respected. (1976:266)

I suggest that we can read 'tacit claim to good character' as 'face' in the sense of Goffman (1967). An instance of the way in which ritual constraints may come to make system constraints effectively redundant is this: an answer to a question is required not only because (let us assume) the questioner wants the information that the answer will provide, but because asking a question is a facethreatening act, and the provision of an answer assures the questioner that the recipient is not offended. Ritual constraints, then, like remedial and supportive ritual in the earlier (1967, 1971) versions, influence all of conversation, but Goffman adds that in addition to the fact that any act performed during talk will carry ritual significance, some seem to be specialised for this purpose — ritualised in the ethological sense — and these play a special role in the episoding of conversation. (1976:269)

He mentions particularly such interchanges as those containing greetings, farewells, thanks, and so on, but of course, RIs are the prime example, not only forming episodes in their own right but also having potential, like the examples be gives, for bracketing sections of conversations. (The role of remedial and other interchanges in marking phases of interactions will be discussed in Ch. 5.)

30

Erving Goffman: sociology by

metaphors

Goffman concludes the opening section of Replies and Responses with a list of ritual constraints which he presents as a 'ritual model': 1. An act is taken to carry implications regarding the character of the actor and his evaluation of his listeners, as well as reflecting on the relationship between him and them. 2. Potentially offensive acts can be remedied by the actor through accounts and apologies, but this remedial work must appear to be accepted as sufficient by the potentially offended party before the work can properly be terminated. 3. Offended parties are generally obliged to induce a remedy if none is otherwise forthcoming or in some other way show that an unacceptable state of affairs has been created, else, in addition to what has been conveyed about them, they can be seen as submissive regarding others' lapses in maintaining the ritual code. (1976:269)

Constraint (1) recalls the general concerns of face and the virtual offence introduced in On Face-work and Relations in Public respectively. (2) provides the means of dealing with offences, and specifies the need for acknowledgement or acceptance. (3) specifies the need for priming moves, equivalent to 'challenge' in the earliest model. This list of constraints, designed to provide the rationale for all the concerns in conversation not to do with the simple transmission of information, thus specifically provides for mostof the components of RIs. (The stress Goffman puts on priming moves, seeing them as an obligation rather than an option or right, is discussed in Ch. 3.) As Goffman puts it, unlike grammatical constraints, system and ritual ones open up the possibility of corrective action as part of these very constraints. Grammars do not have rules for managing what happens when rules are broken, (ibid)

2.

Units of Natural Conversation

2.0.

Introduction

An earlier version of this chapter (Owen 1978) was originally written in order to elucidate certain questions that were arising in the study of 'remedial interchanges' (cf. Goffman 1971, Ch. 4). The formulation of a research topic in such terms implied the existence of at least one kind of internally coherent unit of conversation, the interchange, which is itself built up out of smaller units. We therefore began to examine a wider range of conversational material (consisting of naturally-occurring, tape-recorded talk) in order to establish just what the 'building blocks' of conversation are. The first section of this chapter is a brief summary of the treatment of turns and moves given in Owen (1978); much of the work of other researchers described there is by now becoming familiar and is widely available in published form (e.g. Schegloff (1968), Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974)). In the subsequent sections we deal first with larger conversational units, and then provide an analysis of the use of 'well', which we hope illustrates the value of this approach. Finally we consider the relationship between conversational units and the linguistic entities known as sentences.

2.1. Turns and Moves

In our earlier paper (Owen 1978, see also Owen 1980) we adopted by and large the by now classic treatment of turns and turn-taking given by Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974).

32

Units of natural conversation

However, we gave additional consideration to the problem of just what stretches of talk by one speaker can count as turns. In the first place, we distinguish turns proper from back-channel utterances (cf. Duncan and Niederehe (1974) which, far from being attempts to take the floor, actually ratify the continuing speaker's right to hold it. Back-channel utterances take forms such as 'mmhm', 'uhhuh', and 'yeah': Schegloff (1968:380) calls them "demonstrations of continued, coordinated hearership" and points out that they are not heard as 'interruptions' in spite of being produced simultaneously with another's talk. Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974) label the point at which speaker change can occur as a transition-relevance place (TRP). They observe that TRPs occur at "possible completion points' of 'sentences, clauses, phrases, and one-word constructions, and multiples t h e r e o f ' (1974:721 ), 1 but since they acknowledge that features such as intonation will have to be taken into account they recognise that their account is only a partial one. The occurrence of TRPs can account for some examples of overlap between turns, as in the following example: (1)

Salesman : we can 'fix you 'up | we 'have got them 'both in vstock // I'two 'three 'four I'and 'two 'three Jive|| Customer : you shave got them -both in -stock I on "have you III'that's ssomething|| Salesman : ,yes II

Two instances of overlap occur here; in both cases the 'second' speaker begins at a possible completion point during the 'first' speaker's turn. We suspect, however, that even a syntactic-prosodic account of TRPs must give way to some kind of functional explanation; in our terms this could take the form of a requirement that a turn must contain at least one move. We take the term move from Goffman (1976:272) where he defines the unit as "any full stretch of talk or of its substitutes which has a distinctive unitary bearing on some set or other of the circumstances in which the participants find themselves". A turn may, under various conditions, contain more than one move. 2 For example, data published in Owen (1978) show how a speaker may preface his turn with a phrase such as 'first of all', indicating that a list will follow; his addressee should therefore not take the first apparent completion point as an opportunity to take the floor. In a sense such phrases create from the material they preface

Larger units

33

a single 'super-move' in which smaller components can be identified. 3 A turn may also contain the second part of one adjacency pair 4 and the first of another; the most obvious ordering of such structures is as follows: (2)

Customer Shopkeeper

'you've 'sold "out of -Listeners |,have youII : yes I'm 'terribly -sorry -dear I-we Vhave|| *is there -something "special -in it -this -week II

In this example the shopkeeper's turn consists of (at least) two moves: 5 one, positioned first, responds to the customer's question, and the second initiates a second adjacency pair. Other arrangements are possible, however: (3)

A : hel,lo I'can I ,help you|| B : oh 'heUoUyes ||

This has the following structure: A:

[greeting]

-

[offer]

-

[acceptance].

J B:

[greeting]

I

Turns are thus structural units into which functional units — moves — are slotted. The turn-taking system described by Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974) is functionally motivated, since speaker change can be shown to depend on the type of moves being made: for example, speaker change 'should' occur immediately after a question (in that its absence will be noticeable to participants and analysts alike), whereas following an assessment or evaluation the requirement for a response still operates but is less powerful.

2.2.

Larger Units

Analysis of data demonstrates that it is often necessary to look beyond a single turn in order to analyse it into its component moves, and to establish what those moves are. The use of terms such as 'response', 'answer', 'adjacency pair' and 'exchange' implies that moves are part of larger functional units of some

34

Units of natural conversation

kind. The adjacency pair is in fact the smallest of these, defined (in terms of utterances) by Schegloff and Sacks (1973:238) as a sequence of two utterances produced by different speakers, one immediately following the other, and tied together in a special way which is "partially the product of the operation of a typology in the speakers' production of the sequences". Thus utterance types can be divided into 'first pair-parts' and 'second pair-parts' such as question/answer, offer/acceptance or offer/refusal. Threepart exchanges are also possible, such as complaint/apology/ acceptance, in which the middle component acts both as a second pair-part to the first component and a first pair-part to the last. However, it is not utterances that are tied together to form adjacency pairs, but moves. Goffman (1976:259) provides the following example: (4)

A : have you got coffee to go? B : milk and sugar? A : just milk.

If we search B's turn for an answer to A's question, we conclude that the unstated answer must be 'yes', since otherwise B's question would be irrelevant. B's turn can thus be treated as containing a conflation of two moves, giving us two adjacency pairs within only three turns and three utterances. Similarly in extract (2) above, three adjacency pairs can be found within three turns. 6 We even find what the grammarian would call 'self-embedding', where the nested structure is of the same type as the matrix pair: question/answer nested in question/answer is particularly common. Such patternings Jefferson (1972) calls 'side-sequences', and the following extract illustrates this: (5)

Cj 'would you 'rather I 'wrote a ,cheque|| Sj xyeahll you 'got a "card I s'pose | a "banker's -cardll C2 : 'yes I Jiavel ^yes|| S2 yes I 'think -so | in „this -case||

The pair structure of (5) is not quite as clear-cut as in the imaginary data often constructed, since the salesman answers the question in Cj — provisionally perhaps — before inserting the first part of an embedded question/answer pair. Nevertheless, (5) has the structure:

Larger units [question]

35

n

1

I

[ (answer) ] (20), it occurs in the closing pair of turns: (27) M : ^right I xpity II ^anyway I 'thanks 'very smuch|| A : ^mm I "sorry II Since statements of intention also commonly form part of closing sections, we find apologies occurring after these too, especially when the speaker expresses the intention to return to whatever he was doing before the interaction began: (28) C : fright | I'm 'going to get 'back over the ,road | and 'finish off me vbreadhhhh II R : -yeah | I'm '"sorry to have sort of -dragged you "over I -Pete II.

Priming moves

59

This example has affinities with the phenomenon discussed by Schegloff and Sacks (1973:250) in their treatment of the closing of telephone conversations; they show how materials developed somewhere in the conversation may be picked up again and used in the closing sequence; notable among these materials is whatever activity the called person was engaged in at the time of receiving the call. In (28), it was the caller whose activity had been interrupted, since he is returning a call in which R had left an apparently urgent message for him. Schegloff and Sacks' own example has the caller enquiring about the called person's activités at the beginning of the call: (29) B : Are you watching Daktari A : no:no B : oh my gosh Officer Henry is uh-locked in the cage wi-((0.4)) the lion, hheh

thus neatly allowing B to state what he is doing, and providing A with a resource for ending the call: the closing section is initiated with (30) A :

Okay, I letcha go back tuh watch yer Daktari.

Since it is more usual, however, for a telephone call to interrupt some activity of the called rather than the caller, extracts such as (28) are more typical (if we can see the 'caller' as the 'called' in a sense, for the reasons given). An alternative would have been for R to have said 'I'll let you get back to your bread'; as he does not, and the issue is raised by C (the 'interrupted' party), an apology is appropriate on R's part, as otherwise he could be seen as paying insufficient attention to C's wants or rights. A statement of intention also precedes the apology in the following closing section: (31) A : so'that can be delivered from our'stores within a .day|| B : "oh | well 'that's 'jolly .good I so I'll 'go 'home and 'do a 'bit// of ,measuring|| A : and I'm'sorry t o ' k e e p you .waiting|| C : 'that's all,right ||

RIs also occur at the beginnings of conversations, immediately after greeting sequences: (32) M : "5-81-0 -1 ,711 T : is 'that 'Marion ,Owen|| M :

Nyeah||

T :

'this is ((name)) from 'Trinity 'Hallll

60

Remedial moves in English

M : oh 'hello II T : 'heLlo I! I'm ^sorry I -didn't -come to your supervision on •Tuesday II (33) M : ^5-81-0-1 ,711 D : ,hul lo I 'Marion || M : ^yeah|| D : it's ^David I ,here II M : 'hul,lo | 'how are *you II D : 'I'm 'better -now | , thank you || vsorry I -didn't "make it on •Friday | / / 1 was M : 'it's a s shame|| D : -absolutely-stricken down with ^food-poisoning ||

This positioning is related to the issue of topic organisation; certain topics 'should' come first, and offences for which apologies are appropriate are among these. The important issue here, however, is that often we cannot explain the occurrence of an apology by reference to only the immediately preceding move, even though' that is an easily characterisable move — e.g. a greeting or a 'how are you?'/response sequence — but we may need to refer to the phase or section of the conversation in which the apology occurs. We can sum up our observations about the moves preceding apologies/accounts as follows: some apologies occur in the slots immediately after four types of moves: (i) (ii) (iii) (iv)

statements of troubles corrections requests not complied with remedial responses.

We may be able to treat at least (i), (ii) and (iii) as first pair parts of adjacency pairs (cf. 2.2.) (i.e. moves that create a slot for a 'conditionally relevant' next move) to which apologies/accounts are among the possible seconds: By conditional relevance of one item on another we mean: given the first, the second is expectable; upon its occurrence it can be seen to be a second item to the first; upon its nonocurrence it can be seen to be officially absent — all this provided by the occurrence of the first item. (Schegloff 1972:364)

Given that conversational relevance is expected by participants, any slot following a first pair part will be 'inspected' (by its recipient and the analyst) to see whether it can stand as a second to that first. If (i)-(iii) are first pair parts, two consequences follow: first, if primary remedial moves (apologies/accounts)

Priming moves

61

are produced in second position with respect to these firsts, they will be treated as responses to them; second, if no apology/ account (or alternative second pair part) follows, its absence will be 'noticeable' i.e. may be remarked upon by participants, or the offender may be reportable as having 'failed to apologise', or the move the offender does produce may be marked in some special ways. However, because our corpus consists of RIs, we do not have within it a collection of moves (i)-(iii) as such, which we would need in order to pursue this hypothesis; however, the foregoing indicates what sort of evidence we would be looking for. Other apologies occur in conversational locations that are only partially describable in terms of the immediate priors. These include (v) (vi)

opening sequences (following greetings) closing sequences (following statements of intention and thanking pairs).

Whereas in many instances of types (i)-(iii) ((iv) is a much less clear case) it could be said that remedial moves were produced in response to the immediately preceding move, whether or not that move was actually made with the intention of eliciting a remedy, the cooccurrence of remedial moves with greetings and thanks is to be explained by the fact that both regularly occur in opening and closing sequences. We conclude that it is not possible to identify primings as a type of move defined in terms of speaker intention. Nevertheless, definable relationships, such as we have described, can be shown to hold between apologies/accounts and the moves that precede them, with the result that inferences concerning speaker intention may on occasions be justifiable.

62

Remedial moves in English

3.2. Primary Remedial Moves

3.2.0. Introduction

The primary remedial move (PRM) is the sine qua non of the remedial interchange. Moves following PRMs, for example, cannot, by definition, occur independently as remedial responses. PRMs themselves, by contrast, can and frequently do stand alone as the only move in an RI, though the longer and more elaborate they are, the less likely they are to occur alone. We use the cover term PRM both in order to establish a language-independent, functionally-defined concept which will be developed further in Ch. 6, and also to allow for the languagespecific problem in English of which utterances may be described as apologies. We do not wish to jettison the term 'apology' altogether, since it is part of the meta-language of everyday English, and a culturally significant notion in that it can be of considerable importance, both interpersonally and legally, whether or not someone can be said to have apologised. Nevertheless, there is no clear boundary between utterances which 'are' apologies and those which are not. Even accounts may on occasion get described as apologies, and this recognises an important functional equivalence to which we shall also be addressing ourselves in Ch. 6. 'Apology' in its modern sense is in fact highly specific to English. Many European languages have words which most dictionaries translate as 'apologise' e.g. s'excuser, entschuldigen, scusarsi, etc., but the lexicographers are here recognising another functional equivalence, which we also discuss in Ch. 6. (The Greek verb from which the English is derived has not changed semantically in the same way; for discussion of this, cf. 4.2.) There is also the behaviour describable as 'being apologetic': a deferential demeanour that may not include any verbal apologies as such. PRMs in English vary — as suggested in Ch. 1 — along a scale from ritual to substantive, apologies standing at the ritual end of the scale, with accounts in the middle (i.e. partially ritual and

Primary remedial moves

63

partially substantive) and the entirely substantive possibility of material restitution, which will not concern us here, at the other extreme. The following discussion will proceed by separating apologies from accounts; although this can be a misleading distinction, it is a convenient way of approaching the data. The chart on p. 64 gives a key to the types of PRM available in English, with the section in which each is treated; this is provided to aid reference, and does not represent any claims concerning, for example, psychological reality or sequences of decisions made by participants.

3.2.1. Apologies

3.2.1.0.

Introduction

The ordinary language usage of this label for utterances has a limited scope that seems to restrict its use to the description of utterances that contain one of the following 'key words' or phrases: (i) (ii) (iii)

apology, apologies, or apologise sorry I'm afraid + sentence pro-form.

The use of one of these key words 3 guarantees that the move is remedial almost as unequivocally as the use of 'thank' constitutes thanking. We shall examine each type and its sub-types in turn.

3.2.1.1.

Typed), incorporating 'apology', 'apologies', or 'apologise'

The use of type (i) is rare in spoken English; it is used when either formality or absolute unambiguity is required. Even then, the bare 'performative formula' is rare. Only two instances of the spoken use of these words are found in the corpus (which contains over seventy apologies using 'sorry') and neither of these are straightforward cases. One occurs in the course of a conver-

64

Remedial moves in English

00

fS t-

o 2 ^ ^ ' t-i «t«s tMi s^ -s. «a M « o » C s S » > , 0 >M •S' c -S «5 o ^ O £

J3

/—.

c O oCD "S S Ss hq s 2 o

c > Ji 2 ® 5

G c CO

J

0

a E •3 s fc 2P Qi •v. 0 a ^ S H

£

OJ O 4> 3 | §r S f-< ca ft

co « "> A

E 6 OH

05

'JP 3

Primary remedial moves

65

sation consisting entirely of a lengthy account: R is reporting to V that confirmation of a job promised to V will not be made when expected. The conversation lasts for 4% minutes and is on this topic throughout; R makes many commitments to V that the matter will be put right. Immediately before the closing section, R utters the following: (34) R : . . . I "hate -being in -this po-sition I be-cause it's -it's 'treating you 'very ,badly Vanessa II I 'am ,sorry I 'do ac'cept my apologies|| .

We cannot tell whether it is the utterance 'I am sorry' that R is labelling 'my apologies' or whether it is that utterance itself that constitutes the apology; however, not a great deal depends on what is 'actually the case' here, since either utterance is nonproblematically describable as an apology. The other instance of the spoken use of type (i) is the opening of a lecture: (35) I suppose I ought to apologise for not living up to the title . .

It is significant that this occurrence is in a situation where although spoken, it forms part of a monologue, where the possibility of other forms of apology being ratified as such by the addressee does not exist. The other uses of type (i) found are all in written form: similarly a kind of monologue. (36) An apology to our customers Over the past weeks we have set out to improve the range of products we sell. Because of this, many grocery items have been temporarily out of stock, for which we sincerely apologise . . . . (37) I know that during the past weeks, the alterations to the store have caused difficulty and irritation. I would like to apologise for the inconvenience and thank you for being so patient.

In these examples, ambiguity is avoided through the use of the explicit terms, and the addressees' interpretation of the utterance (or text) as an apology is guaranteed.

3.2.1.2.

Type (ii), incorporating

'sorry'

By far the commonest way of performing a PRM in English is to produce an utterance including the key word 'sorry' in the appropriate syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and prosodic framework. We shall begin by describing the syntactic frame.

66

Remedial moves in English

Just as the PRM is the one move that must occur in order for an RI to be performed, so 'sorry' is the one essential component of this type of PRM. We can represent the syntactic frame into which this item must be slotted by using the parenthesis-andbracket notation from transformational grammar: parentheses enclose 'optional' elements, brackets enclose elements one of which must be selected. The syntactic frame is as follows: / r (that) S I m

(38) / ( } | ([intensifier]) sorry | J 111 am J f I |

to

V P

if S about that

(38) seems to capture all the variations that occur in the corpus and not to predict any impossible combinations. (Nothing is said about intonation, but this will be discussed as each type is presented.) On examining the data, however, we do not find all these possibilities occurring with equal frequency. The following list shows the frequency of occurrence of the forms that are found: 5 (A)

Form sorry

Number

in corpus 19

(B)

{ ¡ ' ^ J sorry

14

(C) (D) (E) (F) (G) (H) (J) (K)

I'm [intensifier] sorry [intensifier] sorry (I'm) sorry (that) S (I'm) sorry to VP I'm very 6 sorry S I'm sorry if S sorry about that I'm sorry about that

7 1 8 12 1 1 7 1

(L)

s o 6 sorry about it

1

In fact out of 24 possible combinations derivable from (38), only twelve occur, and of these only seven occur more than once (counting the (B) forms separately). Notable features are (i) (ii)

(iii)

the 'expansion' of 'I'm' to 'I am' only occurs preceding the single item 'sorry'. intensifiers occur almost exclusively in the frame 'I'm sorry'; they do not precede 'sorry' by itself, or sentence or VP complements. 6 'sorry about that' behaves almost like a non-variable 'packaged' phrase; in only one case is it preceded by 'I'm', and never occurs (in the corpus) with an intensifier.

Primary remedial moves

67

These observations should not be understood as claiming that the combinations not found in the corpus cannot occur, but only as suggesting that certain forms - roughly a third of the possibilities — predominate strongly. These predominating forms will be discussed individually below. (A)

sorry

This is the form most frequently used where the RI consists only of a PRM, and where no other verbal reference is made to the offence. Offences such as momentary slips of physical control — dropping things, for instance, provided no damage is done and no great disturbance caused — and slips of the tongue, are usually dealt with in this way: (39) (Salesman demonstrating gas cooker) . . . ^yes | well in "this one|| you can con"trol them| you -see| ¿that's the .other • one | "sorryJj you've >got to "find. . . .

In similar circumstances an acknowledgement may be given without any real disruption of the flow of the conversation: (40) comes from the same interaction as (39), but in this case C (the customer) knocks a component of a gas burner onto the floor: (40) C : yeah if you 'only 'spill ||"sorry / / i f you "'only . . . S : 's ' all .right II

C recapitulates her utterance after the interpolation of the RI, and the conversation continues. These are trivial offences; a brief apology of this type may also be produced where the offence is more substantial, but the relationship between the participants is a closer one; in extract (41) the two speakers are students living in the same house: (41) (A puts a bottle on a table, obstructing M's view of TV) M : f .hey I N you -building up a'barrier -for me|| 1 ((M moves bottle)) A : .oh I "sorry ||

Here no acknowledging move is made. The same form may thus be used for insignificant offences and more serious offences between individuals in a closer relationship, suggesting a kind of 'trade-off between seriousness of offence and closeness of relationship. (42) concerns an offence that surely harms the 'offender' more than the 'victim'; the setting is a TV quiz show; C is the contestant and P the compere; C has just given a wrong answer:

68

Remedial moves in English (42) C : "sorry P : no don't a"pologisel I-want you to-get it vright ||

In this example, the offence can only be interpreted as damaging P if we see it as disrupting the smooth flow of the show, for which he is responsible. (43) is somewhat similar: it comes from a telephone call between a mother (M) and daughter (D) in which D is waiting for some information that M is attempting to read: (43) M : I 'haven't 'got my x specs on II 'can't xread it || ((2 sees)) "sorry || D : 'can't you 'read at xall these -days with-out // or are you . . . .

With this example we are moving on to those instances in which it can be misleading to isolate the 'apology' and examine its form without considering the conversational context in which it appears; it may, for example, be only one component in a more elaborate sequence of remedial moves. (44) is taken from a phone call between two strangers; M is arranging to call and see a piano at the house where A lives, with a view to buying it (the piano does not belong to A): (44) M : . . . I "wondered | if -I can -come -round to " night I is ^that at •all "possible || A : 'to-night II well it'll 'have to be be1 fore um'let's .think || ((1 sec)) um be'fore 'eight o.clock II M : 'mm,hm | 'mm,hm || well "actually I '"as you're "in | -could I 'come 'round ^shortly II A well um 'I'm on x night -duty factually II M 'uh,huh Lyes || A so I'm I'm 'still in .bed I if y o u , like II v M ah Udear I'didI ' g e t y o u ^ p l l A 'no well 11 was 'just a'bout a'wake//( -) M v ah L sorry II

Two features in this extract give M's apology a more than perfunctory quality: one is the intonation of 'sorry', which has a low pitch, fall-rise nucleus giving an effect of earnestness or sincerity; the other is M's previous turn, in which she has already expressed concern about the offence. Brief apologies of this type may also precede an 'announcement' of the offence by the offender; by 'announcement' here we simply mean that following 'sorry', the offender's utterance serves to inform the victim what the apology was for, rather than that the utterance is produced for the purpose of announcing the offence. A common format is one in which 'sorry' prefaces a self-correction:

Primary remedial moves

69

(45) L : voh""sorry • dear |it's 'fifty veight and a half 11 not uh P : oh so it's xmuch-cheaper|| In (46), M turns away from the phone to speak to a third party: (46) C : . . . if he "gets any ( time) to come | 'you ,know I Til vsend •him || M : right urn 'Monday I oh well "sorry I I'll 'just 'have to xcheck with -someone || ((turns away)). (47) is a complete telephone call: the pause between the first two turns, together with C's request, probably convey to R what the problem is; nevertheless, it is appropriate for C not only to apologise but to state the problem, thus explaining why she is ringing off: (47) R : "6 9-112-2 6,411 ((4 sees)) C : 'can you re^peat that -number pleasef| R : erit's '6 '9 ,1 1 '2 '2 '6 ,4 || C : 'sorry I I've 'got the 'wrong number II R : '0,K 1 "bye || C : 'good ,bye || Note that the apology in (47) can be distinguished intonationally from the (E) type of format ((I'm) sorry (that) S); the utterance consists of two minor tone groups, indicated by a step up in the pitch of the stressed syllable 'got' from the level of 'sorry'. Without this step the apology would be of the (E) type, and rather odd as an apology in this context, since (E) formats are used where both participants already know that the offence has occurred (cf. discussion of this format below) and thus cannot be used to inform the recipient of the offence. Format (A) apologies not only precede but may follow requests for repeats: (48) (from Crystal and Davy (1969:116-117)) A : . . . only um it's it's a minor complication but um B "sorry II didn't get that (49) P : 'M 'staircase in the 'OkLCourt II M : 'which one -sorry || The intonation of (A) apologies is most commonly a shallow fallrise, with peak amplitude occurring immediately after the onset of voicing. This may be contrasted with the 'sarcastic' apology, which has an exaggerated fall-rise, in fact (phonetically) a risefall-rise, with peak amplitude coinciding with the highest point reached by the fundamental. 'Sorry' following requests for repeats,

70

Remedial moves in English

as in (49), is often attached internationally to the tail of the preceding nucleus, and can be distinguished from a hypothetical (50) ,which one I "sorry ||

which would be more appropriate is the repeat requested were a substantial or complicated one, perhaps involving a misunderstanding rather than a mishearing as in (49), or if the apology were for some offence unrelated to the request, rather as in (40). The inclusion of 'sorry' within the tone-group of the request in (49) clearly establishes the apology as made for the 'offence' of mishearing or the virtual offence of paying insufficient attention. Mention must be made, finally, of the possibility of using 'sorry', where it is the only component within a turn and has a rising nucleus, as a repeat-request. The item with this intonation and in this position will not be heard as an apology as such, 7 except in the sense that it is clearly not accidental that the apology form is used for this purpose, since it requires the addressee to repeat all or part of his utterance. Indeed, the conventional form of repeat-request in British English — 'I beg your pardon' and its reduced form, 'pardon' — are also clearly derived from remedial moves whose function has become specialised. We suspect that it is still possible to use 'I do beg your pardon' as a PRM and not as a repeat-request, though no instances occur in the corpus.

(B) \1 \ m } sorry 1 am' These forms, in which the subject and verb of the sentence are explicit, are less perfunctory than type (A) and are therefore often used for slightly more serious offences. Such a simple statement can, however, obscure the substantial possibilities for variation that arise once the form of the move reaches even this apparently low level of complexity. The simplest form, (A), may be seen as related to (B) forms, in which a full sentence with subject and verb expresses a felling experienced by the subject. The 'expansion' of 'I'm' to 'I am' allows for stress on the copula which emphasises the idea that the feeling being expressed is indeed experienced by the speaker. It appears, therefore, that these 'expansions' of the basic (A) apolo-

Primary remedial moves

71

by, in which the expansions are 'to the left' of the essential component 'sorry', are made for expressive purposes. This is by contrast with expansions made 'to the right', which as we shall see, serve other ends. On p. 68-69 we showed how 'sorry' is used in conjunction with self-corrections and statements of difficulties that do not originate in any way in an utterance or act of the other party; the offender, in- effect, realises and corrects his own mistake before his interlocutor has any opportunity to draw attention to it. As we saw in 3.1., however, corrections initiated by the 'victim' are often followed by apologies, which are of the (B) type, as in example (11), repeated here: (51) B : huljo I Alan II and'Terry II A : huklo | -you were "close | I'm ^Adrian I but "there you ,goll B : s oh -yes I I'm "sorry i um III 'just 'wanted to 'make a 'couple of 'points....

Example (10) also displays the same feature: (52) B :

. . . could I speak to Mrs. George please ((1.2 sees)) A : we have a Miss George B : oh I'm sorry Miss George then

In Ch. 2 the following extract was analysed (p. 48): (53) B : ^ you're -not the -guy -down -there who "kick-starts -em -are you || A : - e r " n o I I er 'you,know|| B : hhhhhhh A : oh "kick-start 'em || I'm "sorry I I -didn't "get ythat || 'heh 'heh 'heh||

In the first part of A's second turn, A displays his understanding of the joke made by B by repeating the phrase ('kick-start') which formed the kernel of the joke, prefacing this with 'oh': the same preface is used in (51) and (52). It is also used in (41) (p. 67), and in (44) (p. 68), 'ah' (used twice) serves the same function, that of expressing surprise, thereby conveying that the offender did not know of the offence until informed of it by the victim, and thus could not have performed it intentionally. This is one realisation of the function Goffman assigns to the whole RI viz., that of 'striking in some way at the moral responsibility otherwise imputed to the offender'. (1971:139). However, examples (41) and (44), though sharing the same structure as (51), (52) and (53), i.e.

72

Remedial moves in English (54) A : correction/'notification' of offence B :

(I'm) sorry

have type (A) apologies, not type (B) which, as I have suggested, is the commonest form in this structure. However, (41) as already stated, occurs between close friends and shows other unusual features (such as the explicit complaint), and (44) contains other remedial moves, not merely the apology. These and similar variables show that we cannot expect to find more than a broad correlation between the verbal form used and the gravity of the offence or the structure of the particular RI. Intonation provides many of the possibilities available for increasing the expressiveness of type (B) apologies. The commonest form is similar to type (A) i.e. with a fall-rise nucleus on 'sorry'. We noted (pp. 69-70) that 'sorry' can be used for repeatrequests, given certain qualifications concerning intonation and move-turn relationships, viz: that the utterance must (i) (ii)

(iii)

have a fall-rise nucleus and a specification of the 'trouble', as in (48), follow an explicit request (by the same speaker) for a repeat of some part of the preceding utterance, as in (49), in which 'sorry' forms part of the tail of a rising nucleus, or be the only component of the turn, and have a rising nucleus.

Type (B) apologies, however, can only be used as repeat-requests under condition (iii), and this 'releases' more possibilities of variation for use with remedial moves proper. For example, both rising and level nuclei can occur: (55) A : so I 'can't 'help you at ,all I I'm,sorry|| (56) R : Thate -being in -this po-sition| be-cause it's -it's 'treating you 'very .badly Va-nessall I 'am ,sorry | 'do ac'cept my s apologies|| (57) A : syes I I'm "sorry | there's 'nothing at 'all that we can .do for you II

(C), (D) and (G): (I'm) [intensifierj

sorry (S)

We group these formats together for discussion because of the similarities between them and because there is only one example each of types (D) and (G) in the corpus. If we were justified in distinguishing types (A) and (B), however, we should, strictly speaking, maintain (C) and (D) as distinct types. The following intensifiers occur in the corpus:

Primary remedial moves

73

terribly awfully so (+ ever so) very.

The inclusion of 'very' is tentative; it occurs once, in the only instance of a type (G) format in the corpus: (58) S : I'm Very -sorry I -have to "go || L : not at "all || S : I "mean, that ||

In our earlier discussion of this example we showed how participants' responses to utterances can aid the analyst in interpreting those utterances. We suggested that S's first turn is pragmatically ambiguous between a literal or 'sincere' expression of feeling and a remedial apology, and that the latter reading would have been far more likely with the following intonation: (59) I'm 'very "sorry 11 'have to "go ||

It would be interesting to find other instances of the (G) format with 'very' as the intensifier, to see if they are ever unproblematically treated by recipients as remedial, or whether difficulties and ambiguities regularly arise. In the absence of further data, however, there is little that can be said either about the (G) format or the choice of 'very'. The rest of this discussion is therefore concerned with the (C) format. The commonest intensifiers by far are 'terribly' and 'awfully'; going beyond our corpus we might add to these a few more of the same small class of adverbs about which Fowler (1965) makes the following characteristic comment: It is strange that a people with such a fondness for understatement British should have felt the need to keep changing the adverbs by they hope to convince listeners of the intensity of their feelings, by a process of exhaustion, they have arrived at such absurdities as (Fowler 1965:618)

as the which until, these.

Fowler mentions 'dreadfully', which is certainly found in type (C) apologies (though not in our corpus), and 'fearfully', which is now somewhat archaic; to these we can add 'frightfully', but this too seems to be falling out of use. The choice of intensifier from amongst this group is probably idiosyncratic; certainly 'awfully', 'terribly', and 'dreadfully' seem entirely equivalent in this context. Note again that intensifiers, increasing the affective power of the apology, are necessarily inserted before 'sorry', so

74

Remedial moves in English

that this modification occurs in the same position (with respect to 'sorry') as 'I'm' and 'I am'. Furthermore, intensifiers nearly always occur with 'I'm' or 'I am', as the fact that only one instance of type (D) occurs in the corpus indicates. With the (C) format comes a dramatic increase in the possibilities for varying intonation and thus increasing still further the expressive potential of these formulas. Type (B), as we saw, can carry stress on 'I', 'am', or 'I'm', but the nucleus remains on 'sorry', and is predominantly of the fall-rise shape. With the introduction of intensifiers, however, the nucleus may be 'moved back' to be carried by the intensifier. Furthermore, both intensifier and 'sorry' may be nuclear in the same utterance. The most frequent of these intonational variants is similar to the commonest form of types (A) and (B), in that the final stressed syllable is the nucleus and the move ends on a rising pitch; here, however, the nucleus is a simple low rise, but with a high stress on the intensifier providing the counterpart to the initial high starting-point in types (A) and (B). Examples (60)-(62) are of this type: (60) C : oh I'm 'so,sorry | I 'have the 'wrong „number II (61) A : "no | I've got 'no .quarter -pound boxes I at 'all | I'm 'awfully ,sorry my -dear || (62) C : "oh I my ,god I you must be 'loathing -me -down -here I I'm 'ever so,sorry II

In each case the intensifier carries the first stress in the tone group, and 'I'm' constitutes the pre-head (along with 'oh' in (60)). Alternatively, the nucleus, still on 'sorry', may be like that of types (A) and (B), i.e. a fall-rise: (63) R :

. . . I'm'awfully "sorry I-Anne's a"way all-week ||

The fall-rise nucleus may, however, be placed on the intensifier: (64) A : yes I'm "terribly -sorry -dear | -we 'have ||

Where both the intensifier and 'sorry' are nuclear, the only pattern we find in the corpus is that of a high fall + low rise, as in these examples: (65) A : I'm "awfully ,sorry | that's-one-paper-we've-sold v out-of II (66) M : I 'think you 'must 'have the 'wrong Nnumber|| C : "really || oo I'm "terribly,sorry ||

Generally speaking, the more pitch variation there is in the utterance, and the wider the pitch range is, the more expressive the utterance appears to be. We might expect, therefore, to find

Primary remedial moves

75

these 'bi-nuclear' types used more frequently with more serious offences than those that occasion types (A) and (B). This hypothesis is supported by the evidence in the following sense: more 'elaborate' apologies — i.e. those, quite simply, containing more words and with greater pitch variation — are suitable for those offences which the speaker takes to be serious (or wishes to be thought to take to be serious). Many caveats have to be added, however. First, there is room for considerable idiosyncracy: certain speakers, it would appear, regularly use more elaborate apologies for offences for which other speakers use simpler forms. Speaker A in extracts (61), (64) and (65) uses type (C) apologies exclusively in the examples that we have recorded of his transactions, and this is an aspect of his personal speech style, recognisable as such by its very divergence from common practice. Nevertheless — and here we introduce our second caveat — the match between categories of offence (or degrees of seriousness of offences) and types of apology is sufficiently fuzzy to allow such variation without necessarily prompting any special inferences concerning speaker intention. Thus speaker A in the above mentioned examples, though he uses a somewhat more elaborate form than might be expected, is not taken to be either overpolite (obsequious) or insolent (though over-politeness). Third, as already suggested, the fact that the PRM may be only one component of the remedial work engaged in by the speaker means that, taken in isolation, PRMs may well not show any close correlation with the seriousness of the offence. For example, (62) contains other remedial work within the same turn as the apology, and taken over all, the turn is highly expressive,'involved' and 'sincere'; qualities it derives partly from its extremely wide pitch range, a feature not adequately represented by the simple notation used here. That there is some such correlation, however, is indicated by the fact that (66) is interpretable as a 'joking' apology, although given for an offence for which apologies are appropriate, and to a stranger (though not face-to-face). This impression is again not one that can be conveyed by the transcript alone, but whereas (60), which also uses an intensifier, is straightforwardly polite (i.e. the form and prosody of the apology match the offence), (66) has a different interpretation. The use of 'really' with a high

76

Remedial moves in English

falling tone, appropriate for extreme surprise (I take it surprise at reaching a wrong number is inappropriate in itself), and the use of 'oo' rather than 'oh' to preface the apology, together with the double nucleus (as compared with the single low rise in (60)) make the remedial work excessive for this offence and contribute to the 'joking' interpretation. Perhaps what finally distinguishes this example from hypothetical cases in which the speaker is felt as rude is that the vowel qualities indicate that the speaker is grinning quite broadly, though the reason for this remains a mystery.

(E), (F), and (H): other cases incorporating S or VP

complements

These types have been grouped together because they all use the expression '(I'm) sorry' with either a full complement S (types (E) and (H)) or a complement from which the subject has been deleted (in transformational terms) under the condition of identity with the subject of the higher S (type (F)). That is, we are assuming a transformational relationship between sentences such as (67) and (68): (67) John expected that he (= John) would pass the exam (68) John expected to pass the exam.

'Expect' is unusual, however, in that it can take either kind of complement; 'be sorry' is a predicate that share this property: (69) John was sorry that he was late (70) John was sorry to be late

are both grammatical and apparently synonymous; however, we find that sentences like them, but with first person subjects, are not interchangeably used in all contexts as PRMs. The first point to note is that in some instances the subject is retained while in others it is deleted; in other words, the difference in expressive power between types (A) and (B) is also available for these forms, and has the same effect there. Secondly, we have discussed already the format (I'm) [intensifier] sorry (that) S

and shown it to be a problematic case; nevertheless, there seems to be no justification for excluding the possibility of this combination of features. Examining types (E) and (F) (we shall discuss the one instance

Primary remedial moves

77

in the corpus of type (H) separately) in order to consider their potential as PRMs, we find the following features: (i)

(ii)

(iii)

In type (E) the subject of the complement S is explicit, and the verb in the complement is finite; in other words, its surface form is that of an isolated full sentence. In type (F) the subject of the complement S is deleted (or 'understood' to be identical with the subject of the higher S, which may also, of course, be deleted) and the verb in the complement is nonfinite, with 'to', In either type the verb in the complement may have perfect aspect.

These features combine to produce the following sub-types of the (E) and (F) formats: features of verb in complement

complement subject specified

to + non-finite

finite

(E)la

yes

no

yes

no

yes

no

(£)lb

yes

no

yes

no

no

yes

( E >2a

yes

no

yes

yes

yes

no

(E)2b

yes

no

yes

yes

no

yes

(F)l

no

yes

no

no

no

no

(F)2

no

yes

no

yes

no

no

sub-type

Examples (E)u (E) J t ) (E)2a (E)2b (F)j (F)j

perfect aspect

tense pres. past

of these types are: I'm sorry I'm late 8 I'm sorry I was late 8 I'm sorry I've been late 8 I'm sorry I'd been late 8 I'm sorry to be late I'm sorry to have been late

(E) 2 b seems to require the usual sequence of tenses for the use of the past perfect, and is thus strictly ungrammatical as it stands, i.e. without the addition of further material as in the following constructed example: (71) I'm sorry I'd (already) left when you got here

78

Remedial moves in English

No examples of this type occur in the corpus; nothing more will be said, therefore, about format (E) 2 b . We hypothesise that instances of types (E) and (F) can be cross-classified or grouped together as follows: (1) Subtypes ( E ) l b , (E) 2a and (F) 2 are used — when the offence occurred during an earlier encounter between the participants or during a recognisably distinct, earlier, phase of the current encounter — to present the offence as 'completed' and thus beyond negotiation. The speaker offers a candidate offence description (see below) as if it were not open to challenge. (2) Subtypes (E) l a and (F)j are used — when the offence is continuing or has a continuing effect — to present to the victim an evaluation of the offence which he may then reject as a way of accepting the remedial work. We are suggesting, therefore, that variations in tense and aspect in the verb of the complement S or VP, along with a choice between syntactic structures (i.e. the choice between (E) and (F)), are available to speakers in producing PRMs so as to have differing interactional effects. Format (E)j b is used with past time adverbs in the following examples, both of which offer a simple description of an action (or in these cases, an absence of action). Note, however, that in neither of these examples does the complement inform the recipient of the offence; because of its nature, the occurrence of the offence is already mutual knowledge between the participants.9 (72) D M D (73) T

: . . . "sorry I -didn't "make it on -Friday / / 1 was : 'it's a "shame|| : -absolutely -stricken down with 'food -poisoning|| : I'm "sorry I -didn't -come to your supervision on -Tuesday II

These two examples could not have been expressed in the (E) 2a or (F) 2 formats, as the results would be ungrammatical because of the use of perfect forms with past time adverbs: (74) (a) (b) (75) (a) (b)

* sorry I haven't made it on Friday ? sorry not to have made it on Friday * I'm sorry I haven't come to your supervision on Friday ? I'm sorry not to have come to your supervision on Friday.

The status of the (b) sentences is somewhat doubtful because of the ambiguity of 'have' with the to+infinitival construction, as

Primary remedial moves

79

pointed out by Palmer (1974:55) and Comrie (1976:55) who notes that "in English, in certain nonfinite verbal constructions especially, the Perfect form . . . does not necessarily have perfect meaning". Thus (76) the security officer believes that Bill was in Berlin before the War.

can be paraphrased as (77) the security officer believes Bill to have been in Berlin before the War.

Returning to examples (72) and (73), in both these examples the offence is clearly in the past, concerned as it is with an encounter planned for a past time, but that did not take place because of the non-arrival of the offender. (78) concerns a visit paid to a solicitor (who is the addressee) by A's landlord; A is calling to find out what happened at the meeting: (78) A : I'm "sorry we -had to -put him "on to you I 'but um you know we 'just 'couldn't get Nrid of -him |,basically ||

This example has an (E) 1 b format, but is different from (72) and (73) in that the subject of the complement S is not identical with that of the higher S; it therefore cannot be deleted, so that an (F) format could not have been used on this occasion with the same meaning. Format (E) 2a is exemplified in the following: (79) B :

. . . "sorry I've been so long in getting in ,touch with you || I rang a ^couple of times ^yesterday I and you weren't' in 10 ll (Crystal & Davy 1969:116-117)

(80) and (81) show variations on the basic (E) 2 a format in the same way that (78) differed from (72) and (73) as examples of the ( E ) l b type: (80) S : (81) C :

. . . 'thanks for fringing I I'm "sorry you've -had to ,chase on •this I this is\just with with a -long -Christmas"holiday || . . . they've 'given 'me the 'wrong 'number || 'sorry you've been troubled ||

Here again, no equivalent (F) forms exist because of the nonidentity of the two subjects in each case. In both examples the speaker is enabled, by using these variations, to avoid specifying the agent of the offence; in (80) be describing the trouble caused to the victim by the offence, and in (81) by using a passive structure in the complement S, thus enabling the agent to be deleted. (82) and (83) are instances of the (F) 2 format: (82) S : ((entering room)) "sorry to have arrived ,late||

80

Remedial moves in English (83) C : .right | I'm 'going to get 'back over the „ road | and 'finish off me xbreadhhO R : ,yeah | I'm ^sorry to have sort of -dragged you "over I -Pete ||

(82) is, as we have said, a classic instance of the use of material from the opening of a telephone conversation to bring that conversation to a close (Schegloff and Sacks 1973:249-250). The format of the apology is sensitive to its positioning in the closing sequence, in that it treats the offence as completed; it can thus serve as a way of accepting the candidate closing move offered by C. For the reasons we have specified, the apologies in these three formats that actually occur in the corpus are sometimes limited to a particular form. Thus (72) and (73) cannot be replaced with forms using perfect 'have', retaining the specified subject, because of the constraints on the use of the perfect aspect in English. (78), (80) and (81) cannot appear with the to+infinitive form because they do not meet the identical-subject condition. Apart from these constraints, however, there is a general interchangeability between formats ( E ) l b , (E) 2 a and (F) 2 , indicating at least a partial overlap between the senses of the simple past, present perfect, and perfect infinitive constructions. So, for instance, (79)

sorry I've been so long in getting in touch with you

could have been formulated (79a) (79b) (83)

sorry I was so long in getting in touch with you or sorry to have been so long in getting in touch with y o u I'm sorry to have . . . dragged you over

and

could have been replaced by (83a) (83b)

I'm sorry I dragged you over or I'm sorry I've dragged you over.

By contrast, formats (E) l a and (F) 1 are used, as already suggested, for offences which are either continuing as the PRM is uttered, or for which the description offered by the speaker is available for denial by the recipient. However, while there are ten instances of format (F) t in the corpus, there are none of format ( E ) l a , though this would appear to be perfectly grammatical and acceptable. In fact, this is the format that we might expect to find used to remedy offences that have unequivocally occurred, and for which the candidate description offered by the speaker is relatively unavailable for

Primary remedial moves

81

challenge by the recipient. For instance, to take our constructed example of this type, (84) I'm sorry I'm late:

if the speaker arrives at 2:30 for a two o'clock appointment, he is undeniably late. Let us therefore examine the examples we have of format (F)j and then consider the possibility of rephrasing them in the (E) l a format. This is clearly a less reliable strategy than the use of actual examples would be, but we need to imagine only alternative utterances, not whole contexts. We have the following instances of format (F) 1 in the corpus: (85) (86) (87) (88) (89) (90) (91) (92) (93) (94)

"sorry to -take -all -your ^change II "sorry to "complicate things | I'm "sorry to -change -things a-round only a -day -just before || I'm 'sorry to 'do it// 'only a 'day I'm "sorry to -do it at -such -short "notice | I'm 'sorry to 'keep you .waiting || I'm 'sorry to keep you 'waiting for so Jong || "sorry to contuse I -but um/ I'mNsorry to -ring -rather, early || I'm "sorry to -treat you -like a "number II

The following features of these moves should be noted: (i)

(ii) (iii) (iv)

The to+infinitive construction entails deletion of the agent in the complement — the sentence describing the offence — though the agent of the matrix S may remain. The verb in the complement is unmarked for tense and aspect. Quantifiers — all, only, such + adjective, rather — are frequently used in the offence description. Even where quantifiers are not used, the verb used may be evaluative of the offence, e.g. 'complicate', 'confuse', and thus open to negotiation as a description of the offender's act.

The combined effect of these features is that the offence description given by the speaker is not presented as 'established' or 'given'. If we now attempt to rephrase some of these examples in format ( E ) l a , we find that this involves both specification of the agent of the offence and also the assignment of tense and aspect to the verb. Since the tense must be present in order for the formats to be interchangeable at all, we would have to decide whether the verb should have progressive form. A reformulation of a few of the examples will show that in most cases the choice must be progressive if anything like the same meaning is to result: 11 (85a) "sorry I -take -all -your,change || (85b) "sorry I'm -taking -all -your ,changel|

82

Remedial moves in English (87a) (87b) (93a) (93b)

I'm "sorry I'm *sorry I'm "sorry I'm "sorry

I -change -things a round only a -day -just be'forell I'm -changing -things a-round only a -day -just be'fore || I -ring -rather ,early || I'm -ringing -rather ,early ||

The non-progressive forms can only be interpreted with 'habitual' meaning, e.g. (93 a) suggests that the speaker 'rings rather early' every day, or on some regular basis; similarly with the other (a) forms. The use of the progressive, however, produces the interpretation that the act described is taking place as the offender is speaking; the to + infinitive forms of the actual examples (85)(94), by contrast, leave the timing of the act with respect to the utterance unspecified. In (87), for example, the possibility remains open that the addressee will not accept the speaker's proposal to change an appointment, whereas (87b) presupposes that the change is going ahead. By the use of format (F)j, therefore, the speaker can both show regard for the recipient's needs, and at the same time include terms offering a negative evaluation of the act, which the recipient may then reject (thereby accepting the remedial work, cf. 3.3.). Continuing with example (87), the speaker describes his offence in such a way as to show that he is aware of the inconvenience it may cause to the addressee, an implication the addressee may then deny (though in fact in this case the speaker continues, so that there is no slot for such a move). In (88) and (89), in which the same speaker makes the same request to two other recipients, an acceptance is produced. Example (93) was selected for comparison with its 'alternatives' because in this case the (b) variant is quite feasible, since the action described — that of the speaker telephoning the addressee — is undeniably occurring; an evaluative verb is not used here. Nevertheless, the verb is modified in an evaluative way — 'rather early' — and this component of the act-description is challenged by the recipient as follows: (95) C : I'm "sorry to -ring -rather,early II um R : "no it's 'all,right I it's 'not .early ||

On p. 78 we put forward the hypothesis that apologies in formats (E) and (F) could be cross-classified into two sub-groups, each with one use in accordance with its 'factual' interpretation, and another 'metaphorical' use, thus presenting the offence as either past (or metaphorically, beyond negotiation) or continuing (and thus open to negotiation). We showed that subject to certain

Primary remedial moves

83

constraints in particular cases, the first group (formats ( E ) l b , (E) 2 a and (F) 2 ) present the offence either as actually past or in some other way closed to re-interpretation. The opportunity of offering an alternative interpretation is thus given to the recipient of the apology. In the case of the second group (formats (E) l a and (F)j), it appears on the basis of our imperfect evidence that for continuing offences, format (E) l a will be used (though with progressive form), but where the offence is being evaluated by the speaker, format (F) 1 is used. The two hypothesised functions of formats (E) l a and (F) 1 are thus not shared by these formats to the extent that the parallel functions of the first group can be fulfilled by any member of that group. The claim being advanced for apology types (E) and (F) in general — that speakers describe their offences in ways that leave the description and evaluation of the act open to negotiation — is supported by the one instance in the corpus of the (H) type of apology: (H)

I'm sorry if S.

This format is in fact close to the (E)1 a format. The example is: (96) A : . . . 'it's seonantics we're -arguing a-bout at the -moment l| •think that they -have their um L : we're'not,arguing || A : hhhh 'all,right I 'we're discussing II I'm "sorry if I'm annoying you || um 'l -think that/ 'i -think that "they -have -their.. . .

Here we have what would otherwise be an (E) l a format (with progressive verbal form) but for the inclusion of ' i f , which changes the interpretation of the move. It seems to be at one and the same time even more tentative a description than would be given by the to + infinitive form, i.e. (97) I'm "sorry to arfnoy you

and yet the use of the present progressive form puts the named activity to a greater extent 'on record', making it less open to negotiation. The total effect might be glossed: 'I may be annoying you, but I intend to continue doing what I'm doing even if it is annoying you'. It is noteworthy that no acknowledgement or acceptance is given to the remedial move in spite of a pause left by the speaker (partially filled by 'um') in which an acknowledgement could have been produced. The exchange forms part of an argument during a radio phone-in programme.

84

Remedial moves in English

The intonation of(E), (F) and (H) apologies All instances of this type (with two exceptions which will be discussed below) have one of only two intonation patterns: (i) (ii)

sliding head + fall—rise nucleus compound fall + rise nucleus

O'Connor and Arnold (1961) state that these are the patterns that occur with apologies in general; their overall thesis concerning the use of intonation is that tone-group patterns convey attitude, and that the attitude conveyed varies according to the syntactic sentence-type and interactional function. Pattern (i), they claim, when used with statements, has the following effects: 'grudgingly admitting, reluctantly or defensively dissenting; concerned, reproachful, hurt, reserved, tentatively suggesting; (in echoes) greatly astonished' (1961:170). In warnings the pattern conveys 'concern or reproach' but In apologies, where the concern might seem to be appropriate, this tone group tends to suggest reservations on the part of the speaker. (1961:71)

However, although the examples they construct support this claim (e.g. I'm sorry (but I'm afraid it's impossible); I beg your pardon (but I'm afraid I must contradict you)), it is not similarly supported by our data. The alternative pattern, (ii), is, O'Connor and Arnold suggest, used with statements for 'appealing to the listener to continue with the topic of conversation; expressing gladness, regret, surprise' (1961:232) and is thus a suitable pattern for use with apologies. (The occurrence in this pattern of two nuclear tones means, of course, that it cannot occur with types (A) and (B) since there is only one stressed syllable in these types; it does, however, as we have seen, occur with types (C) and (D).) O'Connor and Arnold's claims for these two patterns thus predict that greatly differing attitudinal effects would be produced according to which pattern is used; however, this does not seem to be the case. It does appear that for both types (E) and (F), pattern (i) is used when more material, such as an account, is produced by the speaker, and pattern (ii) when the move is turn-final. This does not reflect a difference in emotive effect, although the source of O'Connor and Arnold's predictions for pattern (i) may be revealed if we examine the type of material with which the speaker follows up his apology. We have indicated

Primary remedial moves

85

that this is frequently an account; in that an account is designed to alter the recipient's interpretation of the offence, it can be seen as thereby simultaneously reducing the need for ritual remedial work. Thus the 'reservations' the speaker may have in produsing an apology may be that since he is about to produce an account, the 'offence' may then not require an apology. For example, extracts (78) (p. 79) and (72) (p. 78) show apologies followed by accounts, where in both cases the apology has a sliding head and rise-fall nucleus. The accounts offer explanations for the act that are designed to reduce its offensive potential. The exceptions mentioned above both occur in the same conversation and are produced by the same speaker. In each case the apology has a stepping head and a low fall nucleus, and in each case the apology is used as a possible pre-closing move. The examples are listed as (90) and (91) (p. 81); the first of these has been discussed briefly in 3.1. (p. 52) and the whole passage will be analysed in Ch. 5. We might propose, as a strong hypothesis, that low-fall nuclei will not be used with apologies of this format except when they are being used as closing moves. To summarise our discussion of formats (E), (F) and (H), we offer the following remarks. Firstly, we have suggested that expansions of the minimal apology (A) preceding 'sorry' are the principal location for the communicating of emotive effects, and that the use of intensifies in particular serves this purpose. Nevertheless, the use of a complement S or VP provides a location for additional emotive communication, by the use of a wide pitch-range, for example. Secondly, in using these formats the speaker has the opportunity of offering a candidate offence description which may then be rejected by the recipient as reflecting too negatively on the offender. Thirdly, it may be added that this stress on the evaluative function of these types of apologies is related to the fact that they are not used to announce what the offence is; instead, the speaker presupposes knowledge (on the part of the addressee) of the potential offence.

86

Remedial moves in English

(J), (K) and (L): (I'm) (lintensifler]) sorry a b o u t } This is the final apology format using 'sorry' that we have to consider. In fact all but two of this group in the corpus are of the (J) format, i.e. (98)

N

sorry a bout .that ||

and it is notable that the intonation of this type is non-variable, except in the one case in which a name is used as a tag term of address, and in this example the second nucleus is shifted to the stressed syllable of the name: (99)

x

sorry a-bout that .Marion II

In the one example of format (K) ((100) below) the same pattern is used, with 'I'm' forming the pre-head. The use of this format as well as its intonation is consistent; it is used to deal with offences that are — at least at the time of the RI — beyond the control of the offender, either in a literal sense, in that, for example, the trouble has been caused by a third party, or in a 'metaphorical' sense: the offender can use this format to convey that the offence is 'in the past', 'now finished with', and for that reason beyond alteration. The effect may be derived from deictic 'that' as a distancing device. ('This' could be used for continuing offences, though we do not have any examples). Some data will make this usage clearer. In the conversation from which the following extract is taken, E has established that M will not be attending a seminar; M infers the reason for E's enquiry: (100) M : you'wanted'someone to re'cord it I vdidn't youhhhhh II E : .yeaheheh || M : heheh no 'I'm Nsorry a bout .that || erm I "am going to-morrow but um

In (101) the speakers have been discussing a photograph accidentally taken of G, probably by M as she was investigating a fault on the camera: M G M G M

: 'oh .well Tsorry a-bout .that : and 'right 'close ,up|| : 'oh .dear II : ahhahah//hah : haha

The effect is that of closing the discussion of that issue; this format may also be used as the second PRM in an extended RI:

Primary remedial moves

87

extract (94) (p. 81) is only the first PRM in a sequence already discussed in connection with 'priming' moves (p. 55): we repeat it here: .Yeah | O-K Veronica | 'point ,taken || I'm 'quite 'sure that// (102) B um 'London M I'm 'Marion |, actually || B 'sorry || ,oh|| M 'you were 'talking ( ) to vMarionll B 'oh | 'am -I | oh ^yesll 'that's//,right| M .Marionll B I 'haven't 'crossed you voff II I'm 'sorry to -treat you -like a "number// M i 'oh | that's,quite all -right ( )|| B 1 but I 'have to 'write 'people's 'name down to remember them || 'sorry a-bout -that, Marion || M oh 'that's all,right ( ) || The offender producing this type of apology cannot, of course, guarantee that an acceptance will be produced and the matter closed; if no acceptance is offered, further remedial activity may occur. In the following extract J has informed A that J's employer will not be available to see A, as A had expected; J attempts to make an alternative appointment: (103) J : . . . sno | 'that's no vgood I we/I 'think we 'talked about 'that be'fore//1 de'tided 'that 'wasn't any 'good|| A : (uhhuh) J : "soil xsorry about ,that hhll A : and you 'don't think he'll 'be here to,morrow II J : I Mon't "think -so | vno || The conversation continues on the subject of the appointment, digresses for a time to another topic, and then resumes as follows: (104) J : 'well II A : I'll 'have to 'find myself 'something to be 'getting son -with | I 'think I -probably ,can|| "hope -soil 'that's the jnain -troui ble hh I 'cos I/'you ,know 11 'haven't got 'very much to 'do | J :I "you A : i in the -sense that (somehow) J :I 'no || A : I've got ""plenty to "read I but 'nothing specific || J : jioll A : v anyhow | I 'think I 'can ((less than 1 sec)) J : 'well ll'sorry a-bout,thatII A : oh 'that's all,right I it's 'not "your -fault II Notice that three times J produces a closing marker ("so, 'well),

88

Remedial moves in English

twice followed by an apology of the (J) type, but only the third offer of a closing is accepted, by an acceptance of the apology, and the conversation then moves into its closing section. Apologies in this format may thus close down whole conversations, not just RIs, especially, of course, where the RI is the main 'topic' of the conversation as a whole. We have already seen that other types may be used in this way as closing devices, but to do this as effectively as format (J) they have to have intonation patterns unusual for their format, (cf. pp. 84-85). By contrast, this use of (J) apologies is the normal one for this type. Only one apology of type (L) occurs in the corpus; it is unusual in three ways: it incorporates an intensifier ('so'), it uses 'it' instead of 'that', and it has an unusual intonation pattern. Most hearers of the extract find it unusual, though not in any way that would prompt the drawing of special inferences about the speaker's intentions. The extract is included here for the sake of completeness: (105)

N : ~um 'my 'wife's for'gotten to 'put any "Teles -by this •morning || B : 'are there -none Jefthhhhhh|| N : 'she'is an^idiot II B : no "sail,right II N : ( ) B : 'that's all bright I I'll 'leave it -then II N : 'all bright ||'so,sorry a-bout itII B : 'that's ' 0 , K II

3.2.1.3. Type (iii): 'I'm afraid Expressions using 'I'm afraid' appear to have some remedial function, but one which is less clear-cut than in the case of types (i) and (ii). Why is this? In the first place, we take it that it is not difficult to distinguish remedial expressions using 'I'm afraid' from expressions of the speaker's mental condition of 'fear'; this is done partly syntactically: (106)

I'm afraid of NP

(107)

I'm afraid to VP

and

are not remedial. In the case of (108) (109)

I'm afraid (that) S and I'm afraid + sentence pro-form (e.g. so, not, I will, etc.)

Primary remedial moves

89

the semantic content of the complement, together — on occasion — with some particular information about the situation, has to be taken into account. (We shall also be claiming that (109) has more remedial potential than (108)). It is likely, for example, that (110)

I'm a' fraid he's 'going to 'fall II

would not be taken as remedial. The following discussion will, of course, be concerned only with those expressions that we are calling potentially remedial, i.e. they seem at least to be candidates for description as PRMs. The formal features of utterances using 'I'm afraid' with full complement sentences are as follows: (i)

(ii)

(111)

'I'm afraid* (where it is not an expression of fear, but is potentially remedial), cannot be detached from either a full complement or a pro-form. It cannot be intonationally independent, for this would be equivalent to full detachment as proscribed above. It must be part of the same major tone-group as the complement or pro-form, and though the stressed syllable of 'afraid' may carry a nucleus, it cannot end with falling pitch. Unlike type (ii) apologies, sub-types (E) and (F), which also have complement sentences, 'I'm afraid' cannot be followed by to + VP and retain its remedial potential.

In the preceding section, we showed that the function of the complement in formats (E) and (F) was to present an evaluation of the offence to the recipient of the remedial work, where the recipient already knows what the potential offence is (cf. p. 78). We now wish to show that in utterances using 'I'm afraid' with a full complement S, the complement must inform the recipient that the offence has occurred; we thus identify the primary function of such utterances as informing, though by incorporating 'I'm afraid' the speaker does also convey his attitude to the news he is giving, with the result that some remedial effect may be achieved. Finally, we shall suggest that 'I'm afraid' used not with a full S but an S-pro-form, is primarily remedial, since it cannot be used to inform the recipient of the offence. (111) (111)

provides an example of the use of 'I'm afraid' with a (pre-posed) 1 complement that informs the addressee of the offence A : there's 'no ^answer I I'm afraidII.

Besides giving new information to the addressee, the complement S may also serve as an account:

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Remedial moves in English (112) (113)

S : I'm a1 fraid 'things have 'got a 'bit bejiind II C : you ^haven't -got -any Double "Deckers in yet (have you)|| S : ~~no I 'still "waiting for -Cadbury's I I'm a,fraid II

The complement S may also present unwelcome information produced in response to a question: (114)

R : x5-8 I -0 1 J II C : is'Chris "Fowler there please || R : er v no I I'm a'fraid he's 'down in 'London for the -weekend I ^actually II

or a rejection of an invitation: (115)

S : would you *like to -come -by "here | after "that II M : erm I "can't I I'm a^fraid II "no II

In these cases a pattern emerges that is very similar to that discovered in the use of'well' (cf. 2.3.): 'I'm afraid' is used to preface dispreferred activities. Note also the use of hesitation in the responses in both (114) and (115). 'I'm afraid' + complement S, like 'well', is not a remedial move as such, but modifies the move it prefaces — which we might label announcing — in such a way that something like remedial work is performed. We return briefly now to one example of 'I'm sorry' used with a sentence complement: extract (72) (p. 78); this contains the PRM (116)

D : ...''sorry I-didn't "make it on-Friday ||

Now this could certainly have been (117)

I'm "afraid I -didn't "make it on -Friday II

but the interpretation would then be that the addressee of (117) did not already know that the speaker 'didn't make it on Friday'. Since in this case that fact is mutual knowledge already, (117) could not, in fact, have been used instead of (116). Expressions using 'I'm sorry' can, of course, be used to inform the addressee of the offence, but in such cases the informing move is intonationally distinct from the apology. Extract (118) provides an example of this construction: (118)

C : I'm "sorry II there's 'no re"ply||

which consists of two moves in sequence: apology + announcing. Had the whole turn consisted of one tone group: (119)

C :

I'm'sorry there's-no re"ply ||

the utterance would be an instance of format (E) instead of (B) (plus the announcing move), and the inference would be that the addressee already knew that there was no reply (or, equivalently,

Primary remedial moves

91

we might say that the expression can only be used appropriately if that is the case) and as a result we have only one move, viz. an apology of format (E). (119) is thus similar to (111) (p. 89) which likewise consists only of an announcement; although there are two minor tone grqups, with the complement pre-posed as the first, the second minor tone group cannot stand alsone, since as we have seen, 'I'm afraid' must have a complement S or proform. (111) is thus a variant of (120) I'm a'fraid there's no ^answer II

and there is no functional difference between the two forms. Further evidence for these distinctions comes from the difference in grammaticality of these two sentences: (121) I'm sorry I've been so long getting in touch with you (cf. (79), P. 79) (122) * I'm afraid I've been so long getting in touch with you.

The complement S is evaluative of something that is common knowledge: we take it that both participants know how long it is since the speaker 'got in touch', but the use of 'so' makes the complement evaluative of that period of time and of the offence involved. Such a term is therefore only appropriate if the recipient already knows of the offence, with the result that (122) is ungrammatical, since 'I'm afraid' must preface an announcing move. 'I'm afraid' may also, however, precede a sentential pro-form instead of a full sentence; in such cases, the fully specified proposition to which the pro-form stands in an anaphoric relationship must be recoverable from' the prior linguistic context. It follows, therefore, that such expressions cannot, unlike 'I'm afraid' + S, convey new information. Instead, their function is to express the speaker's attitude towards information that is already common knowledge, as in the following example: (123) P A P A

: : : :

I "am in fact | a -taxman my'self II i oh'really || vyeah | unTortunatelyhhhh I I'm a'fraid IN am II 'don't a'pologise | 'some of my 'best Jriendsl

It is P's first turn that announces new information to A; following A's response, P responds in turn with two expressions — 'unfortunately', and 'I'm afraid I am' — both of which express his attitude towards the information he has just supplied (or perhaps more likely, show his recognition of society's opinion of taxmen, in that the expressions anticipate, and thus authorise, a negative

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Remedial moves in English

reaction. A's first response is noncommittal as to whether it is a negative reaction or not). Here, then, 'I'm afraid' + pro-form is primarily a remedial move, and indeed is recognised as such by A, though the label he applies to P's move may be designed to cover 'unfortunately' as well. 13 The extent to which type (iii) moves are remedial thus depends on their syntactic-semantic context. Although we have labelled all these forms 'apologies' in order to relate them to a socially significant notion, it is more accurate to consider types (i), (ii) and (iii) as primary remedial moves that are essentially ritual in nature i.e. they do not relate to substantive issues by attempting to reduce the blame assignable to the offender; indeed, in the case of type (ii), sub-types (E) and (F), speakers may even offer a candidate offence description that tends to increase the seriousness of the offence. Such observations lend some support to Goffman's idea that in performing remedial activity offenders orient to the virtual offence, at least to the extent that they do not attempt to reduce the blame that might be attached to them. Types (i), (ii) and (iii) vary in the extent to which their remedial effect is guaranteed, a scale which is reflected in the native speaker's confidence in labelling the three types as 'apologies'; there is no hesitation at all in the case of type (i), very little with type (ii), and rather more with type (iii), instances of which speakers are more inclined to call 'apologetic' rather than full-blown apologies. Nevertheless, there is considerable variability in the use of such terms, as is shown by the willingness on occasions to label even accounts as 'apologies'. In the following section we turn to accounts directly.

3.2.2. Accounts

The preceding section has been concerned with the description of remedial moves that are primarily ritual, in that they concentrate on the interpersonal aspects of the action that is being interpreted as an offence, but do not attempt to alter that interpret-

Primary remedial moves

93

ation in any way. Accounts are moves that do affect the material interpretation of the act in such a way as to reduce its offensive potential. These two strategies would appear at first sight to be mutually exclusive: either the offender should accept that he performed the act and that it was an offence, and perform ritual remedial work, or he can attempt to provide an account, but not both. However, it does not seem that this is the case, as apologies and accounts regularly appear together. In fact we wish to use this cooccurrence to isolate a particular type of account from the general class of explanations of actions, which might, after all, be provided for actions other than offences. We shall be concerned only with those accounts that are produced as primary remedial moves i.e. to deal with offences, and that occur in slots in which an apology either is, or could have been, used as well. The term account should not be understood as restricted to statements that say, in effect, 'I did X (= the offence) because . . .', thought such strategies may be used explicitly, and even when they are not, it is frequently the case that material produced in the course of accounts will permit such statements to be reached as inferences. Austin (1961) distinguishes justifications from excuses; in the former, the speaker accepts responsibility for the act but denies that it was bad, and in the latter, he admits that it was bad but doesn't accept full, or even any, responsibility (1961:176). He gives the following example: "You dropped the tea-tray; certainly, but an emotional storm was about to break out; or, Yes, but there was a wasp" (ibid.). The first is a justification, in that dropping the tea-tray can be seen as a good way of distracting attention from other matters, and the second is an excuse: in no way is the act a good thing to have done, but there were circumstances that made it unavoidable. The distinction is a valid one, and is important for many reasons, but is of relevance to us only in that justifications are not the type of account we are concerned with. They are not remedial acts in our sense, for they cannot be substituted for apologies; we do not find apologies and justifications used together because to do so would require the speaker to hold contradictory beliefs about his action. Excuses, on the other hand, can be used with apologies, for they imply an acknowledgement that the act was an offence and aim to lessen, but not to remove,

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Remedial moves in English

its offensive potential. They do this by attacking in some way the possible act-description that might be assigned to the act if the account is not produced. As Austin puts it, in producing an excuse the speaker's purpose is to admit that it wasn't a good thing to have done, but to argue that it is not quite fair or correct to say baldly 'X did A'. We may say it isn't fair just to say X did it; perhaps he was under somebody's influence, or was nudged. Or, it isn't fair to say baldly he did A; it may have been partly accidental, or an unintentional slip. Or, it isn't fair to say he did simply A — he was really doing something quite different and A was only incidental, or he was looking at the whole thing quite differently. Naturally these arguments can be combined or overlap or run into each other, (ibid.)

Austin's enumeration of strategies thus separates the agent, his action, and the result of that action as components of the actdescription. Goffman's list of account-types covers (i) (ii) (iii)

pleas of excusable lack of foresight excuses, i.e. pleas of reduced competence admissions of carelessness or ignorance of the consequences of the act. (cf. Ch. 1, pp. 19-20).

Goffman is clearly using the term excuse in a sense more limited than Austin's. Scott and Lyman (1968) discuss accounts from a sociological point of view, starting from an interest in the ability of accounts "to shore up the timbers of fractured sociation . . . to throw bridges between the promised and performed . . . to repair the broken and restore the estranged" (1968:46). They define an account as "a linguistic device employed whenever an action is subjected to valuative enquiry . . . a statement made by a social actor to explain unanticipated or untoward behaviour" (ibid.). The first part of this definition would, of course, permit the inclusion of apologies as part of the object of concern, but the latter part — that concerning explanation — limits the domain to justifications and excuses. Scott and Lyman accept Austin's distinction between these two categories. In spite of their claim to be concerned with talk itself, (the stuff of interpersonal rituals, as they call it) Scott and Lyman do not (as far as we know) reach their categories of account by the analysis of first-hand data, but rather from introspection together with sociological and anthropological reports. They reach certain categories that we do not find in our date (e.g. accounts based on an appeal to the irresistible nature of

Primary remedial moves

95

biological drives), though this may of course simply be the result of the culturally-limited corpus that is available to us, and the fact that Scott and Lyman's domain is wider than ours, which is restricted to accounts produced as PRMs). Scott and Lyman's research is directed in the long term towards specifying how in different situations "the actors take bits and pieces of words and appearances and put them together to produce a perceivedly normal (or abnormal) state of affairs" (1968:61). Speakers regularly use as the basis for an account the fact that an action was not done because of some overriding requirement that another action be done, as in the following extracts: (124) A : I'm "sorry I -didn't -come to your supervision on -Tuesday II . . . . but the 'thing 'was I 'had an "interviewll (125) C : hel.lo I I've-got a •lot of ,mail -down -here I of,yours|| R : , have you II C : v yes but I I've -got my -big "conflict | to-night | and I just •can't -bring it 'uphhh || (126) B : . . . I'm "sorry to treat you -like a "number I but I 'have to 'write 'people's 'name down to re,member themll (127) M : I've "got it -written -down -here | I'm "only -not "giving it •to you I cos T 'find it's a 'sort of distraction to -people I to •see the ..words II

These 'higher considerations' may not need to be established explicitly as such, though they may, as in the preceding examples, rely on the recipient's acceptance that some needs and activities take precedence over others. Nevertheless, the fact that many instances (e.g. (124) and (126)) include an apology as well as an account shows that the speaker may recognise that he has still committed an offence, and his account is an excuse, in Austin's terms, not a justification. Sometimes the account consists of an appeal not so much to some higher consideration, but in specifying some event or state of affairs that meant the offence was unavoidable; in these cases too, however, an apology may also be produced: (128)

D : "sorry I didn't "make it on Friday I I was-absolutely •stricken down with "food -poisoning || (129) M : I'm "sorry we -had to -put him "on to you | 'but um you know we 'just 'couldn't get vrid of -him | .basically || (130) M : "haven't-got any-photographs to-show you to"day| N • soh - well | it 'doesn't//"matter II M : I 'am "sorry || "um we 'had a "power -cut -last -night I you .see ||

96

Remedial moves in English

In other instances, accounts may take the form of blame-shifts, either directing the blame to some named person or agency, as in (131) and (132), or to some vague 'they', as in (133): (131)

(132)

(133)

N B N C N

: 'my 'wife's for'gotten to 'put any "Teles -by this -morningll : 'are there -non,lefthhh|| : 'she'is an,idiot|| : you'"haven't got any-Double "Deckers in yet ( have you)|| : "no 'still "waiting for -Cadbury's I I'm a,fraid || (Note that in this example the account and the PRM using 'I'm afraid' are collapsed together). M : 5-8 I -0 1,711 ((1.5 sees)) C : ^ h I Nah || 'one "seven || they've 'given 'me the 'wrong "number II

Although accounts occurring with apologies (i.e. where they follow apologies) may appear without being attached to the apology by any conjunction (as in (128)), very often 'but' is used, as in (124), (126) and (129). 'But' is standardly used to preface the cancellation of some expectation set up by the first conjunct; here, we suggest, the use of 'but' indicates that the speaker recognises some degree of incompatibility between apologies (which accept the blameworthy implications of the act) and accounts (which attempt to reduce the extent of blame). Accounts introduced by 'because' do occur, but not in conjunction with type (ii) apologies; this would result in the construction 'I'm sorry because [account]'. Instead, they follow a specification of the offence, as in (127) and the following example, in which the offence-specification is part of a type (iii) apology: (134)

A : I just 'never got 'round to "writing it properly I I'm a^fraidll •cos 'things overtook -me I at the -end of -last ,term ||

The predominant turn-constructions in which we find accounts in our corpus are thus (a) [ a p o l o g y ^ ]

-

but

[account]

-

because

(b) ["specification! Lof offence

J

laccountl-

Pattern (b) may also be reversed, in which case the conjunction used is 'and', as in extract (125). The rather restricted corpus that we have collected for accounts does not reveal any correlation between these turn-constructions and the type of account produced.

Responses to primary remedial moves

3.3

97

Responses to Primary Remedial Moves

3.3.1. Formulaic Responses

In this section (3.3.) we examine the utterances occurring in positions following PRMs which can be said to be responses to those moves; we also discuss the absence of such responses. We begin by identifying responses that are explicit, and made in one or other of a limited range of formulaic phrases. In Ch. 1 we discussed Goffman's treatment of responses, which he calls minimisations, and stated that we would be making a distinction between two kinds of responses: acknowledgements and acceptances. The recipient of an apology or other PRM has an interactional problem to solve. Assuming that he wishes to make what we may call a 'favourable' response i.e. that he does not wish to indicate that he considers the remedial work inadequate, he has the choice of either acknowledging the remedial work as adequate (thus implying that he considered it appropriate, this implying in turn that he agrees with the interpretation of the offender's act as an offence) or of accepting the remedial work by, as it were, making it out to be unneccessary. The recipient of a PRM is thus obliged either to imply that the offender did indeed commit an offence, or that he has just performed an unnecessary act; neither of these alternatives appears to give 'face' to the offender. The forms used for these two types of responses are very similar to each other: 'OK' is the form used exclusively in that's our corpus for acknowledgements, whereas ' . , OK' or even just 's OK' functions as an acceptance. Other forms used for [that's acceptances are •t> all right (by analogy with OK/it's OK we would expect 'a: 1 right' to function as an acknowledgement, though we do not have any examples in the corpus), 'that's quite

98

Remedial moves in English

all right', 'it doesn't matter', 'don't worry', 'not at all', 'don't apologise', plus in conjunction with any of these, 'no'. The distinction between acknowledgements and acceptances will perhaps be made clearer with the following examples: (135)

Acknowledgement T : I'm "sorry I -didn't -come to your supervision on -Tuesday || M : 'O.Kll Acceptances (136) M : . . . 'sorry a-bout ,that|// it's a 'nuisancell H : oh'that's 0,K|| (137) M : . . . I 'should have re'ceived a report -form | for a -supervisee Iwhom I -teach I and I haven't Jiad -one|| W : i oh I "sorry II M : 's'0,K|| (138) C : "sorry to-take-all-your ,change II N : 'no I "that's all fright ||

If we try substituting 'OK' for the forms used in (136H138), the effect conveyed is quite different: it could be described as a 'grudging' response, and seems to convey agreement with the offender's assessment of his action as warranting an apology, while recognising the adequacy of his remedial work. While it is by no means obvious exactly what the deictic terms in the acceptances refer to, the most likely interpretation is that they refer in a general way to the whole state of affairs the participants find themselves in, and not to the remedial move that has just been made. We are not claiming, however, that this contrast between the conveyed meaning of 'OK' and 'it's OK' (or 'that's OK') operates only when they are used as alternative responses to PRMs. The following preliminary hypotheses may be put forward (preliminary only because insufficient data is available in our corpus for more confident proposals): (1) 'OK'is used (a) in closing sequences (Schegloff and Sacks 1973) (b) to acknowledge the receipt of information, without implying that the recipient aligns himself with any evaluations of that information expressed by the giver. (c) to accept suggestions for action. (d) to mark a mid-turn change of topic.

(2) Apart from their use in accepting apologies, the forms mentioned above are also used to accept thanks (with the exception, of course, of 'don't apologise').

Responses to primary remedial moves

99

Examples of (la) are familiar and need not be provided here, but examples of the other three hypothesised uses for 'OK' occur in the following: (139)

(140)

(141)

E : . . . I was 'wondering whether you were in'tending to 'go to 'Seuren's ,talk this after-noon|| M : 'not to'day I I'm a-fraid II I 'can't 'really 'make it | to "this •one || E : ,ah | ' 0 , K | | C : you "sure | you don't I it is an "awful "lot of it I you "want to •quickly -nip -down "now for it I R : '(XKlTwillll G : . . . 'that 'letter was delivered by 'hand I 'last 'thing on 'Friday// afternoon|| M : ' I Nsee | well you Vould've got got us "here I -but v anyway | _ u m II 'O, K I well I'll 'make an ap'pointment with 'Mr. vFrear | -then ||

(It is possible that the 'OK' in (141) should be interpreted as the proposed initiation of a closing section.) It is no accident that in (139) M's turn also contains a remedial move; we interpret 'OK' as a response to the information 'I can't really make it to this one' because« that information follows the remedial move and is given in a separate tone group; nevertheless, it is possible that it is a response to the PRM, in which case it would certainly be an acknowledgement, in our terms, and not an acceptance. It is in part because the turn as a whole does not have the 'grudging' quality normally conveyed by acknowledgements that we describe it as a response to information. We shall be concerned with hypothesis (2) in Ch. 5. Further evidence for the interpretation of 'OK' as an acknowledgement comes from the broad pattern of co-occurrence between certain forms of apology and forms of response, which is that (i)

'OK' is only used after apologies that either include a specification of the offence or are followed in the same turn by such a specification, and

(ii)

'i' 1 , S , lall right' occurs predominantly after apologies of type (F).1 I that sJ i.e. I'm sorry to VP.

Further examples of pattern (i) can be found in the following: (142) (143)

A M C M

((switchboard operator)) there's 'no .answer I I'm a,fraid I .no | '0,Kl "thank you || oh I'm 'so y sorry | I 'have the 'wrong .number || O K | ,thankyou ||

100

Remedial moves in English

In both of these, as in most cases, we cannot be sure that 'OK' represents a response to the apology rather than to the information given by the offence-specification, which in these examples informs the recipient of the offence. Turning back to (135) (p. 98), however, we find there a clearer case of 'OK' as an apology-acknowledgement, since the complement does not inform the recipient of the offence; we cannot, therefore, interpret 'OK' as an acknowledgement of information. It is significant that apologies of type (ii), sub-type (F) 1 are always responded to (when a formulaic response of this kind is that's produced at all) with the format Jj.^, all right', or in one case, 'that's quite all right'. Examples include (144) (145)

(146)

M : I'm "sorry to ring rather .early Hum P : "no it's'all .right I it's'not,early || C : I'd 'like to 'change um the ^day this -week I if .possible | I'm 'sorry to 'do it// er 'only a 'day R : oh"that's all .right II C : "sorry to-take-all-your .change || N : "no I "that's all .right II

As suggested above, format (F) 1 can be used to present a candidate description or evaluation of the offence which the victim may then reject, as in the above examples; note also the use of disagreement tokens in (144) and (146), and outright disagreement with the offender's evaluation in (144). The intonation of both acknowledgements and acceptances is surprisingly uniform; all examples in the corpus of the comthat's . J that's O K' and all right' have rising monest fforms: < . , it's . Ut s nuclei on 'K' and 'right'. Most of the other formats have this pattern too, with one or two exceptions, extract (146) below, for example, which we treat as a variant of the 'don't worry' format, has a low falling nucleus (with another low fall on the second component of the turn). The voice is low pitched, with a breathy quality, and the overall effect is one of playful chiding, as if scolding a child for some minor fault: (146)

C : is it 'that "serious I that you've looked at the "plans II 'oh xMichael//| -I 'am "sorry II R : hhhh C : you -make me -feel 'absolutely ^dreadful II

Responses to primary remedial moves

101

R : oh 'don't „worry a-bout it for -Chrissake I er it's it's a 'techni vcality || (Note that C's two turns are continuous.)

Another exception to the 'standard' intonation for responses is the following: (from a TV quiz show) (147) Contestant ((having given wrong answer)): "sorry II Compere: no 'don't a'pologise 11 -want you to -get it *right ||

in which a fall-rise nucleus (note that the feature of a nucleus concluding with rising pitch is maintained) serves to set up a contrast between what the contestant did, and what he might have done instead.

3.3.2. Extended Responses Many of the examples already quoted in this section contain, as part of the turns in which remedial responses are made, moves other than formulaic expressions. Such moves include thanks ((142) and (143)) to the offender for their efforts on behalf of the victim; not, as might be supposed, thanks for the remedial work itself. Evidence for this is provided by the following extract: (148)

R : I 'do 'feel ^horribly I embarrassed a-bout it | it it's erm I "hate -being in -this po-sition I be-cause it's -it's 'treating you 'very „badly Va-nessa II I 'am , sorry | 'do ac'cept my apologies || V : ((breathy voice)) „thankyou I „thankyou II hhhl 'mean//| 'thankyou for -being R : and -have a 'lovely .Christmas|| V : 1 thank you for 'being so „kind// a-bout it -all|| R : 'not at „all II

V's thanks, following immediately upon R's apologies, may be taken by R as a response to her remedial move; V's correction of this impression shows that thanks are a possible response to an apology. Why should she then seem anxious to make the correction? We suggest that the circumstances under which thanks are an appropriate response to apologies are these: (a) the offence is a serious one, and (b) remedial work has been performed at some special 'cost' to the offender, and is thus in a sense an offering, for which thanks are appropriate. This unwanted (i.e. by V)

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Remedial moves in English

interpretation is particularly likely here, with R's expression phrased as an offering: 'do accept my apologies'. Thanks indicate even more strongly than acknowledgements that the victim sees the necessity for remedial work; this is not an effect that V wishes to convey here, it seems, especially in view of the fact that the offence, though quite serious, is not R's personal responsibility. Extract (148) thus indicates the way in which thanks are a possible, but a specialised response the remedial moves, and not one that would have been appropriate in examples (142) and (143). Other components in the turns including remedial responses are denials (144) (p. 100), shifts of blame (149) (below), and true minimisations in Goffman's sense (146) (p. 100: we refer to the expression 'it's a technicality'). (149) J : V e i l Ihsorry a-bout .that II A :

oh 'that's all fright I it's not 'your -fault ||

Moves of this kind also occur independently, that is, without accompanying formulaic responses in the same turn. Accounts, for example, may be accepted by 'favourable assessment': (150)

M : I've "got it -written -down -here I I'm ''only -not "giving it •to you I cos// I 'find it's a 'sort of distraction to -people I to -see the .words || B : vyeah I 'that's 'fair ejiough ||

Note, however, that B begins his acceptance of M's account as soon as she has indicated that an account is to be given, i.e. by the production of 'cos'. Type (ii) apologies may be accepted by affiliation with the regret expressed by the speaker: (151)

D : . . . "sorry I-didn't "make it on-Friday//11 was. . . . M : 'it's a ^shame II

We term these responses 'affiliations' to distinguish them from overt agreement with the need for regret on the part of the offender: cf. 5.1. below. With examples like (151) we are approaching the difficult cases in which no response to the remedial work as such appears to be made, and yet the victim does not seem to be withholding a response. The largest class of such examples is those in which the offence is minor, the PRM brief (usually just 'sorry'), and where to provide an explicit response would be to make the offence into too much of an issue: the strategy seems to be that the offence is best ignored. Goffman notes this possibility:

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When actual ritual activity is observed closely, it is often found that the individual who provides a remedy may not, in fact, receive a reply that provides relief, yet he will take for granted that this relief has been provided in effect. He need but be sure that the context is right, that the contingencies of the moment provide him and the other with the common understanding that no reply is really necessary. (1971:185)

It is in cases like these that the absence of a visual record may be particularly misleading; the means by which the offender may be 'sure' that the appropriate 'common understanding' has been arrived at may be simply that the victim continues to engage in interaction without, say, turning away, or giving any facial expression of dissatisfaction; alternatively, an affirmative, accepting gesture such as a smile or a nod may serve instead of words. On other occasions no explicit response may be made to the remedial work, but instead, a response to the substance of an account, or to the object of a correction may be more appropriate: (152) M : I 'haven't 'got my "specs on || 'can't "read it II ((2 sees)) 'sorry II D : 'can't you 'read at Nall these -days with-out//| or -are you (153) L : olT'sorry-dear I it's'fifty eight and a half |'not uh P : oh so it's "much -cheaper II

3.3.3. Withholding of Response

Certain clear cases do occur of the withholding of a response as such; the slot occurs for an acknowledgement or acceptance and the offence together with the remedial work done are sufficient to warrant a response, yet none is given, the effect being that the victim does not want to see the matter as closed, (cf. p. 57 above). (154) M : . . . but I mean we -just -didn't "know I -what this "meant I at 'all I we were just "totally con fused// (and ) G : hhhh "sorry a bout ,that I I 'didn't 'think (I was) 'spoiling your "weekend// ( ) M : well we "did have -rather a -miserable -time I I can "tell you II

M interrupts here to take the slot for an acknowledgement or acceptance with an utterance that does not perform either of

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these functions, confirming as it does the trouble caused by the offender, rather than, say, providing a denial or a formulaic response. In (154) a move is made that overtly rejects the apology; more often, however, the occurrence of a pause immediately following a PRM implicates that an acknowledgement or acceptance is being withheld, and the inference may be drawn that the remedial work offered is being rejected: (155)

M: F : M :

(156)

F : A : L : A :

I'm a'fraid'you've'been ((0.5 sees))'visited || ((0.5 sees)) is 'that "soil "I've been -visited I ,yes|| you „were I ^yes || I'm "sorry we -had to -put him "on to you I 'but um you know we 'just 'couldn't get 'rid of -him| ^basically II he "turned -up a-gain "yesterday || ((1 sec)) so er 'what er 'what did you Nsay II "I -basically "told -him | that as "far as "I was con-cerned . . . . . . . 'it's se, man tics we're -arguing a-bout at the •momentlfl •think that they -have their um we're 'not,arguing || hhh 'all ,right I 'we're discussing II I'm "sorry if I'm an"noying you || um I -think that/ 11 -think that 'they have their -platform . . . .

The effect given in these two cases, especially the first, is one of discomfiture on the part of the offender; note the recycled RI in (155) following the absence of acknowledgement/acceptance, and the long pause following the second apology+account+announcement. A pause followed by 'um' and a recycled start of the prior announcement which is then itself recycled (as in (156)) indicates that the speaker recognises that a response has not been produced. All these features are typical indicators of a preference system (cf. Ch. 2 and Ch. 5). 'Well' may also occur, as in (154), where the victim does speak in the response slot but does not produce one of the 'preferred' responses, either acknowledgement or acceptance. This provides a basis for distinguishing between those RIs that do not include a response because a response is not necessary, and those in which a response is withheld; only in the latter situations do pauses and other markers of dispreferred activities occur.

4.

Remedial Moves as Illocutionary Acts

4.1. The Problem

In Ch. 2 we claimed that remedial interchanges — and conversation in general — consist of sequences of moves, these being the interactionally relevant chunks of dialogue to which sequencing constraints and the insertion of particles such as 'well' are sensitive. It has been suggested, however, (for instance by Levinson (1978)) that moves are in essence no different from speech acts, which are objects studied by linguists and philosophers, not by means of the examination of 'live' data but through introspection and the construction of isolated, individual sentences, which can then be examined for their speech act potential. At first sight it would appear that speech act theory would provide the ideal model for the study of conversation, in view of statements like the following from Austin (1962:139); "what we have to study is not the sentence but the issuing of an utterance in a speech situation". Speech act theory is thus concerned with utterances in context, not sentences, and sees language use as a kind of action, not ultimately any different form any other kind of human action. For example, as Austin points out (1962:119), what is achieved by a performative utterance may be achievable by non-linguistic means; "we can for example warn or order or appoint or give or protest or apologise by non-verbal means and these are illocutionary acts". Speech act theory, therefore, does not require us to make what would be an unjustified distinction between linguistic acts and non-linguistic acts, although in practice most of the philosophical, and of course all the linguistic treatment of speech acts has been concerned with linguistic acts. A speech act model of dialogue is construed by Levinson (1978) as follows: (i) (ii)

There are unit acts — speech acts — that are performed in speaking. Utterances are segmentable into unit parts — utterance units — each of which corresponds to a unit act.

106 (iii)

(iv)

Remedial moves as illocutionary acts There is a specifiable conventional procedure that will assign unit acts to utterance units; in other words there is a function whose domain is the set of possible utterance units and whose range is the set of possible speech acts. Sequences of acts are regulated by a set of conventional sequencing rules stated over speech act types.

Levinson also argues that this model of dialogue, or indeed speech act theory in general, proposes a privileged level of description of conversational units, since by and large rules of production and interpretation (or the function (iii) above) assign one and only one speech act to each utterance unit. However, this assumption is not crucial, and indeed has not been made by all those who have employed a model of this type. For example, Labov and Fanshel (1977:40) write: The original sentences are not in any one-to-one relationship with the actions being performed. This expansion is itself open-ended, and cannot be terminated in any non-arbitrary manner.

Is it possible, then, to view RIs as sequences of speech acts rather than moves? It must be observed first of all that the notion of speech act is a very broad one, and we should recall that Austin distinguished within it the following three components: — — —

the locutionary act: the act of making certain linguistic sounds, or certain orthographic marks; the illocutionary act: the act performed in saying something; the perlocutionary act: the act achieved by saying something, which may be just as intentional as the illocutionary act but which, unlike the illocutionary act, is not achieved by conventional means.

All these are aspects of the speech act, but it is the illocutionary act with which we, like Austin, are primarily concerned. Austin began by identifying a special class of utterances that Warnock (1973) calls 'Mark I performatives'; these include acts such as baptising a child, naming a ship, and bidding at bridge, in which saying is doing through the existence of special nonlinguistic conventions or institutions. This class may, and in fact does, have some members in common with the class of explicit performatives, in which the main verb of the sentence uttered is actually the word for what the speaker is doing in uttering that sentence, but this is a contingent fact. However, having begun by isolating performative utterances, or speech acts, as a sub-class of utterances, Austin then follows his own argument through: observing that there is no formal - syntactic or lexical - way of identi-

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fying performatives, he widens the notion of speech act to include all utterances, so that each locutionary act is associated with an illocutionary act, thus making all utterances performative. Warnock (1973) argues, however, that although the accept of speech act can be broadened in this way, Austin's original isolation of two sub-classes of utterances — Mark I performatives and explicit performatives — remains valid. These are distinctions that we shall need to explore. Let us therefore examine RIs in the light of various theories of the illocutionary act. The first point to make is that we shall have to take each move, or act, individually, as speech act theory is primarily concerned with the description of individual utterances, and not with larger units. Furthermore, the appropriate procedure here is different from that used to establish conversational units and in the analysis of RIs as sequences of moves i.e. through the study of tape-recorded examples. In this enterprise, by contrast, we will need to consider what the felicity conditions are for each move or act in turn i.e. what the conditions are that they need to satisfy (or what propositions must be true) in order for the utterance to be a a successful performance of the act in question. The obvious move to start with is the apology, partly because it has been used quite plentifully as an example by many writers on illocutionary acts, including Austin himself and Searle; they have also been discussed by others such as Barrett (1974), Norrick (1978) and Fraser (1981), who asserts: "an apology is incontestably a type of illocutionary act" (1981:261). All these writers have assumed, not unreasonably, that an utterance of 'I apologise' is performative, that apologise is thus a performative verb, and that the illocutionary act performed in the utterance of 'I apologise' is the act of apologising, and not some other, distinct act. In addition, their writings assume a relationship of some kind between utterances of 'I apologise' and another class of expressions, which native speakers have no hesitation in reporting as 'apologies', viz. our type (ii) apologies (Ch. 3) incorporating sorry. We will consider here some of the major versions of speech act theory insofar as they touch on this relationship. It is unfortunately not clear from Austin's own writings what his understanding of this problem was. Much of How to Do Things with Words (1962) is taken up with attempts to establish criteria

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— whether syntactic or lexical — for 'performativeness'. It was, as we have said, the discovery that performatives cannot be distinguished from constatives by such means that led Austin to abandon the distinction altogether. In the course of the investigation, however, Austin presents the following examples of utterances or expressions ranging from 'pure performatives' through 'half-descriptive expressions' to 'mere reports': performative I thank I apologise I approve

half-descriptive I am grateful I am sorry I approve of

reports I feel grateful I repent I feel approval (Austin 1962:79).

All the instances (and there are others) that Austin gives of 'reports' convey that the speaker feels some particular emotion, and Austin suggests that "there are numerous cases in human life where the feeling of a certain 'emotion' or the adoption of an attitude is conventionally considered an appropriate or fitting response or reaction to a certain state of affairs" (1962:78). He comments that it is possible and usual actually to feel the emotion or wish in question; and since our emotions or wishes are not readily detectable by others, it is common to wish to inform others that we have them. Understandably . . . . it becomes de rigueur to 'express' these feelings if we have them, and further even to express them when they are felt fitting, regardless of whether we really feel anything at all which we are reporting, (ibid)

However, we should also consider in what sense 'I apologise' is the 'pure performative' 'counterpart' of the 'half-descriptive' 'I am sorry'. While the utterance of either of these expressions will be reportable as an apology, the semantic relationship between them is far less obvious than in the case of the other examples that Austin gives (though similar problems arise with 'I thank'). A modern dictionary (Chambers' Twentieth Century Dictionary, 1972 ed.) glosses 'apologise' as 'to put forward a defence' and '(now usually) to express regret for a fault'. Austin at this point remarks on the ambiguity (in illocutionary force) of expressions like 'I'm sorry', commenting that they "suffer from or profit by a sort of deliberate ambivalence, and this is fought by the constant introduction of deliberately pure performative phrases" (1962:79). His view of the development of languages would probably not be accepted by historical or comparative linguists today, depending

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as it does on the notion of a 'primitive' language or stage of development of a language, lacking performative verbs and thus suffering from ambiguity, equivocation or vagueness (1962:72). Also, as we have seen (Ch. 2) ambiguity in illocutionary force is not necessarily a handicap for language users. However, Austin sees the existence within in a language of a rich system of performative verbs as an indication that both the language itself and the culture that uses it are, in some sense, at an advanced stage of development. Although this view may not have much validity, it happens that the historical change in meaning of 'apology' and 'apologise' in English does provide an instance of the course of development imagined by Austin to be a general one.

4.2. The Semantic History of'Apology' and 'Apologise'

The first borrowing into English from the Greek of these items was of the noun ¿uroXoyux: a defence, or a speech in defence, which in turn was derived from coro (away, off) + - Xoyioc (speaking). The first use in English recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary is to be found in the title of a work written by Sir Thomas More in 1533: Apologie of Syr Thomas More, Knyght; made by him, after he had geuen over the office of Lord Chancellor of Englande; the dictionary glosses this usage as "the pleading off from a charge or imputation . . . . defence of a person, or vindication of an institution, etc., from accusation or aspertion". Shakespeare makes use of the noun in some interesting ways. The earliest instance is to be found in Richard III (1591), in which Richard uses the word to Buckingham in a scene of hypocritical obsequiousness: Buckingham : Famous Plantagenet, most gracious prince, Lend favourable eares to our requests, And pardon us the interruption Of thy devotion and right Christian zeale. Gloucester : My Lord, there needs no such apologie, I rather do beseech you pardon me. (III. 7.100-105)

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Remedial moves as illocutionary acts

OED interprets this usage as "An explanation offered to a person affected by one's action that no offence was intended, coupled with the expression of regret for any that may have been given; or a frank acknowledgement of the offence with expression of regret for it, by way of reparation". We can see no evidence for reading Buckingham's speech as more than a request for forgiveness; what is more interesting is that Shakespeare uses the work 'apology' to describe such a request, uncoupled with any 'explanation'. It would seem that only sixty years after the word first appears in English it is already being used in a different sense from the original one. However, the learned, even pedantic quality the word still retained as a relatively recent borrowing from a classical language is exhibited by Shakespeare's character of Holofernes in Love's Labour's Lost (c. 1594). In the entertainment which Holofernes presents for the nobles, a boy is required to play Hercules, and is therefore introduced with the words Holofernes

: Great Hercules is presented by this Impe, Whose clubb kil'de Cerberus that three headed Canus, And when he was a babe, a childe, a shrimpe, Thus did he strange serpents, in his Manus. Quoniam, he seemeth in minoritie, Ergo, I come with this Appologie. (V.2.581-586)

Holofernes' use of 'apology' here appears in keeping with his pedant's use of Latin words intermixed with English. All the instances so far given of 'apology' use it as a noun. It is possible, however, that George Herbert uses it as a verb, in the following extract from a letter (to Nicholas Ferrar, March 1631/2, from The Works of George Herbert, edited by F.E. Hutchinson (1941)): And now my gratious Lord God, is pleased to give me you for the Man, I desired, for Wch I humbly thank him, & am so far from giving you cause, to apology, about your counselling me herein: that I take it exceeding kindly of you.

If the word is a verb here, however, Herbert certainly also uses it in the usual way, as a noun, in the postscript to the same letter: . . . . by moving the Duches's heart, to an exceeding cheerfulness, in signing 100 lib. with her own hands . . . with some little Apology that she had done nothing in it . . . hitherto.

Apologise had first appeared in 1597 (OED), derived from 'apology' and thus used as a verb prefacing, or reporting a "justification, explanation, or palliation of a fault, failure, or anything that may

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cause dissatisfaction". It seems that it was possible at this stage to use the verb in a different syntactic/semantic 'frame' from the one it now occurs in: Henry More, in the Preface to Ids Antidote against Atheism (1653) writes: "I can justly apologise for myself that Necessity has no law", in which the complementiser is 'that' and the complement sentence provides the justification in the form of a still familiar proverb. (Note that many performative verbs still requiring a complement sentence also take 'that' as complementiser e.g. request, assert.) This contrasts with the later use of apologise, and its current use, in which the complementiser is 'for' and the complement states the offence. Unfortunately, however, we know of no other instances of the verb being used in this frame ans so cannot tell if this usage was normal at the time. Returning to the development of apology as a noun, we find Milton using the word in Paradise Lost (1667) apparently in the sense of excuse (or so Johnson thought, as we shall see); Eve returns to Adam after her fall, and Milton describes her expression as a preface to her verbal account: in her face excuse Came Prologue, and Apologie to prompt. (VIII.853-854)

Johnson gave the following definition of apology in his Dictionary (1755): Defence, execute. Apology generally signifies rather excuse than vindication, and tends rather to extenuate the fault, than prove innocence. This is, however, sometimes unregarded by writers,

and he goes on to cite Milton's usage (above) as an instance of this lamentable practice. Congreve had used the word similarly in The Way of the World (1700): Witwoud : . . . but prithee excuse me, — my Memory is such a Memory. Mirabell : Have a care of such apologies, Witwoud; — for I never knew a Fool but he affected to complain, either of his Spleen or his Memory. (1.1.273-7)

As for the verb, Johnson defines it thus: "to plead in favour of any person or thing" and gives as an instance the following, from Pope's (1712) Preface to his translation of The First Book of Statius his Thebais (1703): "The translator hopes he need not apologise for his Choice of this Piece, which was made almost in his Childhood". The last clause of this sentence is either merely a non-restrictive relative clause giving an additional piece of information, or itself (in the older sense) the 'apology' or justification, which Pope has just said that he 'hopes he need not' provide.

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Instances so far located of usage in the eighteenth century cannot be used to establish the sense in which 'apology' was used. William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, for example, wrote in a letter (1754): "If you are forced to desire further information . . . . do it with proper apologies for the trouble you give". Similarly Blake uses the verb in a letter to George Cumberland (1800): "I have been too little among friends which I fear they will not Excuse and I know not how to apologize for". In the mid-nineteenth century apologise could be used — at least in the informal context of a personal letter — in the total absence of any apology in the sense ;of a vindication, or even any excuse: D.G. Rossetti writes, in a letter to William Allingham in 1855 (Letters of D.G. Rossetti edited by Doughty, O. and Wahl, J.R. (1965)): She [Miss Siddal] means to do another and better [design] for you . . . and meanwhile apologises with me for the mistake.

Only when apologise had acquired this sense could it be used in this way; with the meaning 'provide a vindication' to use the verb performatively but without any such vindication would be nonsense, equivalent to saying 'I assert' or 'I request'. At the time Rossetti wrote the above, however, apology could still be used in its original sense, as it is by William Prescott (1855): To furnish an apology for his close confinement, a story was got up of an attempt to escape. (Philip II:III.vi.l03)

By the time of the 1914 edition of Chambers' English Dictionary, apologise could be defined as "to make excuse; to express regret for a fault"; the original meaning shows more clearly in the entry for apology, "something spoken to ward off an attack: a defence or justification; frank acknowledgement of an offence". This is substantially no different from the definition given in the current edition of Chambers' Dictionary, quoted above. We can thus trace the development of the meaning of apology and apologise from the time of their first appearance in English, to the present day. At first, the verb was at least half-descriptive, in Austin's terms; if it could be used performatively, it belonged to the class to which assert, state, and request now belong, in that the complement sentence (a) (b) (c)

is introduced by 'that', may not be deleted, and conveys the proposition that is asserted, or stated, or the state of affairs that the speaker wishes the hearer to bring about.

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(of course, there are other grounds for putting request into a different class from assert and state, but these do not concern us here.) Furthermore, if apologise was performative in the sixteenth century, the illocutionary act performed in the utterance of 'I apologise that S' was not that performed by the utterance of the same sentence-format today. Indeed, it may be more appropriate to describe apologising, in its original usage, as a perlocutionary act, parallel to convince and persuade. If this were the case, an utterance of 'I apologise that S' could be countered with, for example, "That's no justification', or 'No you don't, I don't accept that'. All such reconstructions are, however, impossible to verify; we can at least say that in the sixteenth century the sentence 'I apologise' would have been ill-formed. Not long after the introduction of the words into English, it became possible to describe acts other than the providing of a vindication, or even an excuse, as apologies, as Shakespeare does in Richard III, for example. Asking forgiveness or expressing regret, for instance, could be so described. Once this change had taken place, the verb apologise would have been interpretable as including the meaning of any of these acts. This change of meaning then permitted the syntactic change allowing the verb to be used without a complement sentence at all, which seems to have been possible at least from the mid-nineteenth century. It appears to be the case, therefore, that if we accept that apologise is a performative verb, and that the act it performs is one of apologising, the English language, or English society (or both) either (a) acquired an entirely new illocutionary act, i.e. it became possible to 'do something with words' that could not be done before, or (which is much more likely) (b) new means became available for achieving explicitly with a pure performative an act that previously could only be achieved uncertainly, imprecisely and inexplicity.

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4.3. Austinian Speech Acts Revisited

Austin apparently viewed the relationship between 'I am sorry' and 'I apologise' as follows: (a) I'm sorry' is a primary utterance, or, primary performative, i.e. it can be used to perform the speech act of apologising, but may on other occasions of its use be 'merely' a report. (b) 'I apologise' is the explicit performative, i.e. it performs explicitly the act of apologising which can also be achieved by the utterance of 'I am sorry', but the conversion to the explicit performative (or as Austin calls it, the 'normal form') is not made 'without loss'; the occasional benefits of inexplicitness are lost (1962:66). Clearly, however, these two utterances are not related in exactly the same way as other primary/explicit pairs, such as (la) (lb) (2a) (2b)

I shall be there I promise that I shall be there/I promise to be there The cat is on the mat I state that the cat is on the mat.

We cannot postulate, for example, a rule of deletion such as might be used to derive (la) from (lb) and (2a) from (2b) that would also derive 'I am sorry' from 'I apologise'. Nor would it agree with the facts of usage to relate (3a) I stepped on your foot to (3b) I apologise for stepping on your foot

since in English (cf. Ch. 6) (3a) is not taken to be an apology. If we could so relate (3a) and (3b), we would have a primary/explicit pair analogous to the pairs (1) and (2), but in any case this is not the pair of expressions whose relationship to each other must be accounted for. In fact Austin's account does nothing to explain the relationship of 'I am sorry' to 'I apologise', since if the former is a primary performative it is only by convention that it performs the act of apologising. Even if we follow Lewis (1969) in allowing conventions to have rational sources and thus to be, in some aspects at least, non-arbitrary, to state that utterance S performs act A by convention is only to state that a relationship exists, and not to explin it. Historically, at least, we can explain the connection by postulating a perceived equivalence of interactional function

Apologies in Searle s theory of speech acts

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between the two utterances, to the extent that 'I apologise' is now interpretable as an expression of regret. This historical evidence should warn us against setting up apologies as illocutionary acts in their own right, with expressions of regret, requests for forgiveness, and so on, regarded as 'indirect', i.e. in some sense subsidiary and derived, ways of performing the same act.

4.4

Apologies in Searle's Theory of Speech Acts

For Searle, as for Austin, apologise is "an English verb denoting an illocutionary act" (1969:23). A crucial element in Searle's theory of speech acts is the 'expressibility principle' (1969:19-21) which says that for any meaning X and any speaker S whenever S means (intends to convey, wishes to communicate in an utterance, etc.) X then it is possible that there is some expression E such that E is an exact expression of or formulation of X. Symbolically, (S) (X) (S means X -> P ( 3 E) (E is an exact expression of X)). (1969:20)

Gazdar (1981:77-79) has shown that there are problems and counter-examples to this claim other than those covered by the qualification 'it is possible that'. But the important consequence of the expressibility principle, for Searle and for us, is that it enables us to equate rules for performing speech acts with rules for uttering certain linguistic elements, since for any possible speech act there is a possible linguistic element the meaning of which (given the context of the utterance) is sufficient to determine that its literal utterance is a performance of precisely that speech act. To study the speech acts of promising or apologising we need only study sentences whose literal and correct utterance would constitute making a promise or issuing an apology. (1969:21, our emphasis)

For the particular case with which we are concerned, this means that the way to study the speech act of apologising is through the study of the sentence 'I apologise' and the conditions that must be fulfilled for an utterance of that sentence to be a successful performance of the act of apologising. As Searle puts it for his study of promising:

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In order to give an analysis of the illocutionary act of promising I shall ask what conditions are necessary and sufficient for the act of promising to have been successfully and non-defectively performed in the utterance of a given sentence. (1969:54)

Searle then proceeds to extract from these conditions 'a set of rules for the use of the illocutionary force indicating device' (ifid), where, for the act of apologising, the ifid is, presumably, the verb 'apologise' in the present indicative active, with a first person singular subject, and not, for example, sentences containing the word 'sorry', or indeed, the greater part of the data presented in Ch. 3. This serves to remind us that Searle is engaged in philosophical enquiry and not conversation analysis, though, as we shall see, his later work is more broadly based. It is the expressibility principle that enables Searle to make this idealisation to what he calls "the centre of the concept of promising" (1969:55). Apologising is not one of the types of illocutionary act to which Searle turns after the detailed analysis of 'promise', and it is therefor necessary to construct the set of rules for the use of the appropriate ifid by analogy with the acts that Searle does deal with. We begin with the propositional content rule. As we have seen it is not essential, as it is with, say, state or deny, that the propositional content be explicitly expressed. Nevertheless, if it is expressed, what are the constraints upon it? First, it must concern an act, rather than a state of affairs, though the context may allow a state of affairs to be expressed where that state has come about through an act of the speaker, and this fact is known by both the speaker and the addressee. Thus, for example, we can envisage (4)

I apologise for the lateness of the dinner

but not, except jokingly, (5)

I apologise for the appalling weather.

Second, the act described in the propositional content must be an act of the speaker. It would appear that while we can report the apologies of others, we do not thereby apologise, though it is questionable whether the originator of the reported utterance thereby does so: is it possible for speaker X to achieve the performance of an illocutionary act in the utterance of certain words by speaker Y? This seems unlikely, though it must be recalled we are talking strictly in terms of illocutionary acts, not about the

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wider concept of remedial moves. It is certainly possible for X to engage in remedial activity by proxy, in particular, through the utterances of Y. The only context in which a speaker may apologise for an act that was not his is that in which he is held responsible for the actions of the offender i.e. where the offender is a child or an animal in the speaker's charge. Here, however, we would say that the speaker apologised for another's act, not that the dog (or child) apologised through the speaker's utterance. Third, it would seem at first glance that the act of S expressed in the propositional content must be a past act, since we cannot apologise for something we have not yet done, any more than we can promise to do something we have already done (assuming that the addressee knows we have already done it). Searle's propositional content rule for thanking is that the act must be a past act done by the addressee, but it is surely possible to thank someone for something he has not yet done but that we (speaker and addressee) know that he will do, or have good grounds (such as a promise) for believing that he will do. Similarly, it is possible to apologise for acts that the speaker is in the course of doing or has not yet done, again, if both speaker and addressee know that the act will be done. Provided there is a degree of certainty concerning the doing of the act (such as is guaranteed by pastness), then it can be apologised for. We can sum up these three aspects of the propositional content rule as follows: PROPOSITIONAL CONTENT RULE

An act 1 A of the speaker S (or a state of affairs resulting from an act of S) which is either a past act, or an act that S is engaged in at the time of speaking, or a future act whose occurrence is assured.

We turn next to the preparatory rules, which for Searle seem to be distinguished from the propositional content rule by being to some extent questionable or negotiable. In thanking, the propositional content rule is "Past act A done by H" and the preparatory rule "A benefits S and S believes A benefits S" (1969:67). These rules are thus concerned with features, often evaluative and to a large extent culture-specific, assignable to the act specified in the propositional content rule. By analogy, therefore, it is sufficient to specify the preparatory rule for apologising as follows: PREPARATORY RULE (1)

The act A specified in the propositional content is an offence against the addressee H.

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Alternative formulations would analyse the concept of an offence and also enable a closer comparison to be made with other acts: PREPARATORY RULE (2) PREPARATORY RULE (3)

H would have preferred S's not doing A to S's doing A and S believes H would have preferred S's not doing A to his doing A. 2 A does not benefit H and S believes A does not benefit H. 3

The various possibilities for comparison with other acts are the only grounds relevant to speech act theory itself for choosing between these formulations; the interpretation of acts as offences is not part of a theory of language use as such, although language use is of course sensitive to such decisions. Searle justifies his formulation of the preparatory rule for promising (as given above) partly on the grounds that it serves to distinguish promises from threats. There appears to be no illocutionary act which would form this type of 'minimal pair' with apologising and enable us to choose between different formulations of the rule, or even to justify the rule itself, but on other empirical grounds a rule along these lines is clearly required, to indicate that one does not apologise for acts that are not (interpretable as) offences. The sincerity rule and the essential rule will be discussed together for the following reasons: we cannot tell from Searie's Speech Acts (1969) alone what he envisaged the sincerity rule for apologies to be, but it is clear from his later work (1975, 1976) that he took it to be SINCERITY RULE S regrets (is sorry for) having done A (1) (SEARLE)

and that the essential rule is to be derived from this and is thus ESSENTIAL RULE Counts as an expression of regret by S for having done (1) (SEARLE) A.

Our comments on the essential rule therefore depend on what we take to be the validity of the sincerity rule. The problem with raising the sincerity rule to this status is that the complete performance of the act of apologising (as with any other illocutionary act for which the essential rule is that it counts as an expression of the state of mind specified in its sincerity rule) is made to rely too much on the 'sincerity' of the speaker. With thanking, for example, if the sincerity rule is that the speaker feels gratitude to the addressee for some act of the addressee, then most of the utterances of thanking expressions we make every day must

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be classed as 'insincere'; similarly with apologies. This seems counter-intuitive, and yet there is a distinction to be captured between 'heartfelt' apologies or thanks, and 'routine' ones. We have already seen that Austin was aware of this difficulty, but he offers no solution to it. Searle's solution (for promises) runs thus; given that insincere promises are promises nonetheless — in that the speaker will be held to have committed himself to do A — "we need only to revise our conditions to state that the speaker takes responsibility for having the intention to do A rather than stating that he actually has it" (Searle 1969:62). What would be the counterpart for apologies to this revised condition for promises? Presumably, that the speaker takes responsibility for expressing regret; this seems bizarre, in that expressing our feelings is not something we can sensibly talk of 'taking responsibility for', and yet there is a sense in which the utterer of an apology will be held responsible for it in the future (at least in the immediate future). That is to say, he will be expected to behave in a consistent fashion and not immediately to repeat the act for which he has just apologised. In this respect apologies seem to take on a 'commissive' aspect and to relate to future acts, not just past ones. However, this revision of the sincerity rule will not serve as a substitute for the original one. Indeed, Searle does not adopt his own revision for promises, since he reverts to the original type of condition for the classification given on pages 66-67 (of Speech Acts, 1969), and in later work. This of course is in line with his stated intention to analyse only 'full-blown', explicit and sincere illocutionary acts. An alternative solution to the 'sincerity problem' is offered by Schiffer (1972). He is concerned primarily with thanking, the meaning of which he gives as follows: In uttering x S was thanking [primary sense] A for doing such-and-such if and only if in uttering x S was telling A that S was grateful to A for doing such-and-such (or appreciative of A's doing such-and-such). (1972: 102)

However, Schiffer provides an apparent counter-example to this: if a waiter 'thanks' a customer after serving him, he does not (necessarily) mean that he is appreciative of the privilege of serving him, nor, says Schiffer, is there anything else that the waiter means by uttering 'thank you'. He suggests (ibid.) that (1) Such cases are cases of thanking only in a 'secondary' or

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'inverted commas' sense of 'thank', and so are not counter-examples to the above definition: (2) In such cases the waiter is not performing an illocutionary act, and (3) Points of the same sort as the preceding two are applicable to most of the speech acts Austin called 'behabitives'. Finally, Schiffer claims that, as Austin had observed, the fact that there are social conventions that require us on occasions to 'go through the motions' of thanking, apologising, or congratulating, explains the 'secondary' uses of these terms. Such a solution would not, I take it, be acceptable to Searle, who in claiming that the speech act is the basic unit of human communication (1976:1) is presumably committed to the view that all utterances are illocutionary acts of some sort; the waiter's utterance, for example, must perform an illocutionary act, even if it is not one of thanking. In any case, Schiffer's wording of his definition of thanking may not require a secondary meaning or use to be established, because of his inclusion of the phrase 'S was telling A that S was grateful'; the waiter can thus be telling the customer that he is grateful for the privilege of serving him while not actually feeling grateful. The waiter is then performing another speech act, that of telling or asserting, which need not be judged 'insincere' if the waiter does not feel grateful, (the proposition p that is asserted being 'the speaker (= the waiter) feels grateful') but only if the speaker does not believe that p. This seems to lead us to suggest that an individual may believe that he has feelings that he does not have, and while this may indeed be the case, it does not solve the present problem, since we do not wish to claim that thanks, apologies and the like, when performed without the 'requisite feeling' are only sincere because of the speaker's erroneous beliefs about his own state of mind. Norrick's (1978) solution to the sincerity problem is to distinguish 'illocutionary point' from 'social function', and both of these from intended perlocutionary effect: The illocutionary point of apologising is to express regret, the intended perlocutionary effect is to get the addressee to believe that one is contrite, but the social function may be to evince good manners, to assuage the addressee's wrath, or simply to get off the hook and be on one's way. (1978:280)

Norrick allows, however, that "the illocutionary point of these

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acts determines . . . their social functions to some extent" (ibid.). This treatment of apologies will be discussed more fully below. Alternative formulations of the sincerity and essential rules could, of course, avoid this problem altogether. For example, we suggested above a possible preparatory rule that would enable us to draw a comparison with promises: 'H would have preferred S's not doing A to S's doing A and S believes H would have preferred S's not doing A to his doing A'. We might then postulate a sincerity rule along similar lines, as follows: SINCERITY RULE S would prefer not to have done A (2)

where preference should be interpreted less as an emotion or feeling (or it would be hard to distinguish from regret) and more as a judgement or opinion. 4 In order to draw the distinction between 'heartfelt' and 'routine' apologies discussed above, we could adopt a two-level sincerity condition, in which both the above alternative and the 'traditional' condition (cf. p. 118) were incorporated. In addition to these modifications, the sincerity problem could be solved by devising an essential rule that was less dependent on the fulfilment of the sincerity condition, such as ESSENTIAL RULE Counts as the primary move in a remedial interchange. (2)

Any such formulation, however, depends not on an independently established sincerity rule but on an independently established notion of 'remedial interchange' instead, and would come close to infringing Searle's requirement that the rules should not utilise in any way the concepts they are seeking to capture, otherwise circularity will result. The very ease with which these conditions can be constructed and varied, together with the lack of evidence that would enable us to choose between alternative formulations, must be taken as an indication of the weaknesses in speech act theory, or at least of its inadequacy as an explanation of apologies. The discussion below of elaborations of the theory as it applies to apologies will, we believe, support this judgement, but before we leave the work of Searle there are his own later developments of the theory to consider, in particular his work on indirect speech acts. This was first presented in the paper Indirect Speech Acts published in 1975. Indirect speech acts are those in which one illocutionary act is performed by means of another, as in

122 (6) (7)

Remedial moves as illocutionary acts Can you pass the salt? (question functioning as directive) I intend to come back tomorrow (assertion functioning as commissive)

and (the case that concerns us here), (8)

I am sorry (that) I was late (assertion functioning as apology).

Searle views indirect speech acts (ISAs) as a special case of indirection in language use; ISAs have a 'generality of FORM' (Searle 1975:64) that is lacking in the following example also given by Searle: (9a) Student X: Let's go to the movies tonight. (9b) Student Y: I have to study for an exam.'(1975:61)

Here Y's assertion functions as a rejection of X's proposal or invitation. Searle presents the argument that — if it were spelt out, which of course, as Searle says, it is not, in practice — would enable X to infer from Y's utterance that Y is rejecting his invitation. This argument requires, according to Searle, a theory of speech acts, certain general principles of cooperative conversation (some of which have been discussed by Grice), and mutually shared factual background information of the speaker and the hearer, together with an ability on the part of the hearer to make inferences. (1975:61)

All these components are equally necessary for deriving the indirect illocutionary force of an utterance from its direct force, the latter being already determined by its 'literal meaning'; it is therefore only the 'generality of form' that Searle claims most indirect speech acts share that distinguishes them from cases such as (9b). Searle develops at greatest length the analysis of indirect directives. He begins by giving a list of 'some sentences "conventionally" used in the performance of indirect directives' (1975:64). What is the generality of form, if any, that they share? Since Searle's list of sentences contains a wide range of syntactic structures, it seems unlikely that this is what he means by 'form'. Most, it is true, have as their prepositional content the act that the addressee is being asked to perform, e.g. (10) Can you pass the salt? (11) I'd be very much obliged if you would pay me the money back soon (12) It might help if you shut up.

Some examples, however, do not specify the requested lact, but instead ask whether a precondition is satisfied, e.g. (13) Can you reach the book on the top shelf? (14) Have you got change for a dollar?

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where these are interpretable as directives to pass the speaker the book and provide him with change for a dollar. We do not deny that (14), at least, can and regularly does function as a directive in such a way ((13) will be eliminated by Searle on the criterion of idiomaticity), but it cannot be said to have the same 'form', in any sense of the term, as any of the other examples. Others, notably Heringer (1972) have produced evidence to show that syntactic rules are sensitive to the ISA potential of sentences, and that therefore there is an identifiable class of ISAs. One of these arguments — the occurrence of 'please' with indirect directives — is mentioned by Searle. (It was, in fact, first noted by Gordon and Lakoff (1971) in the paper eventually published along with Searle (1975)). Our concern here, however, is with the hypothesis presented by Searle to account for the forms taken by ISAs; this is, put simply, that the form that an ISA can take is related to the particular set of felicity conditions for that speech act: There is a systematic relation between these [Searle's list of indirect directives] and directive illocutions in a way that there is no systematic relation between I have to study for an exam and rejecting proposals. (1975:68)

Searle argues that indirect illocutionary force cannot be assimilated to 'meaning', and that the sentences in his list are not ambiguous as to their illocutionary force. Further, he rejects any explanation in terms of 'idioms', adding, however, that "in order to be a plausible candidate for an utterance as an indirect speech act, a sentence has to be idiomatic to start with" (1975:76). It is not clear whether Searle envisages the sentences of a language as divided into idiomatic sentences and non-idiomatic sentences, or as lying somewhere on a scale of idiomaticity, though he does speak of "the class of idiomatic sentences' within which 'some forms tend to become entrenched as conventional devices for indirect speech acts" (1975:77). Searle proceeds by setting up (as in Speech Acts) lists of felicity conditions for two speech acts, directives and commissives. He then proposes the following generalisations: (1)

(2)

S can make an indirect request (or other directive) by either asking whether or stating that a preparatory condition concerning H's ability to do A obtains. S can make an indirect directive by either asking whether or stating that the propositional content condition obtains.

124 (3) (4)

Remedial moves as illocutionary acts S can make an indirect directive by stating that the sincerity condition obtains, but not by asking whether it obtains. S can make an indirect directive by either stating that or asking whether there are good or overriding reasons for doing A, except where the reason is that H wants or wishes, etc., to do A, in which case he can only ask whether H wants, wishes, etc., to do A. (1975: 72)

Searle stresses that these are generalisations, not rules; the rules of speech acts are their felicity conditions, whereas these observations are consequences of those rules 'together with certain other information, namely, the factual background information and the general principles of conversation', (ibid.) Searle here rejects the view of Gordon and Lakoff (1971) who had argued that conversational implicatures, and in particular, IS As, are a form of entailment. He concludes with an analysis of indirect commissives, but mentions in the course of this a broader generalisation: In general, one can perform any illocutionary act by asserting (though not by questioning) the satisfaction of the sincerity condition for that act. (1975:79)

citing as an example of this, (15) I am sorry I did it

which is thus an indirect apology. If we take Searle's claim to be that, given an independently established set of felicity conditions for any speech act, we can predict the class of sentences that can function as indirect performances of that act, then we should re-assemble our Searlian set of rules for apologising and see what set of sentences they provide us with. Let us suppose, therefore, that the conditions are as follows: (i) Propositional content condition:5 S predicates an act A of the speaker S (or a state of affairs resulting from an act of S) which is either a past act, or an act that S is engaged in at the time of speaking, or a future act whose occurrence is assured. (ii) Preparatory condition: The act A specified in the propositional content is an offence against the addressee H. (iii) Sincerity condition: S regrets having done A. (iv) Essential condition: Counts as an expression of regret by S for having done A. First of all, we can accept that Searle's broad generalisation

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(p. 124) concerning sincerity conditions applies to apologies (since it predicts (15)) with the following reservations: The status and exact formulation of the sincerity condition is problematic, as shown above (pp. 118-122). Our alternative formulation (p. 121) also predicts (16) I wish I hadn't done that

which in our terms may perform remedial work, but is not, strictly speaking, an apology. In any case, condition (iii), taken literally, predicts not (15) but (17) I regret having done A

which is certainly not an apology. Somehow we need the right condition, i.e. the condition that will predict (15) but not (17). Searle has provided us with a way round this problem; we can say that (15) is idiomatic, and thus will become conventionally established as the standard idiomatic form for apologies, while (17) is not. We question this, however; one of the reasons for (15) appearing more 'idiomatic' than (17) is surely just the fact that it is used regularly for apologising. If we turn to the other felicity conditions and construct a list of sentences that would be predicted by the appropriate generalisation, we find such examples as the following: (i) From the propositional content condition: (18) I stepped on your foot (19) I am interrupting you (20) I am about to hurt you (said, perhaps, by a dentist)

(ii) From the preparatory condition, we might get (21) It was wrong of me to do that

or, using the alternative preparatory conditions suggested: (22) (23) (24) (25)

Would you rather I hadn't done that? I believe you would rather I hadn't done that That didn't do you any good/benefit you I believe X harmed you

Of these examples, it is possible to imagine some as functioning as primary remedial moves in some cultures ((18)-(21)), though none of them is, we claim, reportable as an apology in English. Indeed, (20) looks more like a warning, though for Searle it would be an indirect warning, since 'literally' or 'directly' it is an assertion. The difficulties encountered in this enterprise can be summarised as follows: (1) The existence of a natural class of IS As is doubtful in the first place.

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(2) If there is such a class, its members cannot be predicted from felicity conditions on direct speech acts. Specifically: (a) (b)

for some speech acts, e.g. apologies, too many sentences are predicted, and for others, e.g. directives, not enough sentences are predicted, though of those that are, some have to be eliminated on the arbitrary grounds that they are not 'idiomatic'.

(3) We do not have, for each speech act, an independently established set of felicity conditions, and because of this, conditions tend to be derived from the form of ISAs, thus giving a circular argument. In particular, it seems likely that the only reason why the sincerity condition for apologies has been taken to be 'S regrets having done A' is the preponderance of the 'I'm sorry' (and other type (ii)) forms in everyday usage. Finally, (4) We do not even have a list of illocutionary acts (as opposed to a list of performative verbs) for which to set up such conditions. Only a few cases seem at all clear, such as directives and commissives. It is this last objection that Searle seeks to answer in A Classification of Illocutionary Acts (1976). For Searle, the attempt to classify illocutionary acts is not merely an exercise in taxonomy. Austin had suggested that the total number of illocutionary verbs in English was of the order of 103 (1962:150), and he classified some of them into five categories. The fourth group, behabitives, Austin admits are 'a miscellaneous group', but says that they all 'have to do with attitudes and social behaviour' (1962:152). Apologise is a member of this group, along with, for example, thanks, welcome, congratulate and commend. The list also includes verbs which, as has often been pointed out, are not performative at all, such as resent and favour (except, in the latter case, in some limited senses). Behabitives, says Austin, "include the notion of reaction to other people's behaviour and fortunes and of attitudes and expressions of attitudes to someone else's past conduct or imminent conduct" (1962:160). One of the problems with Austin's classification arises from the fact that it is a classification of performative verbs, rather than of illocutionary acts. The temptation is, as Searle points out (1976:2) to confuse the two and to suppose, for example, that "where we have two nonsynonymous illocutionary verbs they must necessarily mark two different kinds of illocutionary acts" (ibid.). Searle aims to keep the two

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notions strictly apart, though he does not always succeed in doing so, perhaps partly because, like most work in the field, his analyses are almost exclusively limited to one language (English), and are thus easily misled in this way. The distinction between verbs and acts is important to Searle, for while it may indeed be the case that, as Austin had said, there are a great many different illocutionary verbs, Searle wants to be able to claim — if the 'basic unit of human linguistic communication' is the illocutionary act (1976: 1) — that there are only a few 'ways of using language'; more precisely, that the ways of using language that there are differ along a limited number of dimensions, some more important than others. This is, for Searle, the most important conclusion to be drawn from his discussion, that "there are not, as Wittgenstein (on one possible interpretation) and many others have claimed, an infinite or indefinite number of language games or uses of language" (1976:22). Hymes (1974) has also observed that the terminology available in any particular language may be misleading as a basis for the classification of illocutionary acts, since "we should not expect any language, including English, to be a perfect metalanguage for itself, in this or any other respect" (1974:182). Searle's dimensions along which he claims illocutionary acts vary are these: (1) Differences in the point (or purpose) of the (type of) act. These differences correspond, Searle says (1976:3) to the essential conditions given in Speech Acts (1969). Thus the illocutionary point or purpose of an order "can be specified by saying that it is an attempt to get the hearer to do something" (1976:2). (2) Differences in the direction of fit between words and the world. "Some illocutions have as part of their illocutionary point to get the words (more strictly — their propositional content) to match the world, others to get the world to match the words. Assertions are in the former category, promises and requests are in the latter" (1976:3). (3) Differences in expressed psychological states. Searle observes that "in general, in the performance of any illocutionary act with a propositional content, the speaker expresses some attitude, state, etc. to that propositional content" (1976:4), and goes on to claim that the psychological state expressed in the performance of the

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illocutionary act is the sincerity condition of the act, as analysed in Speech Acts (ibid.). Searle specifies nine more ways in which illocutionary acts can differ, but his taxonomy only uses these three. Given, however, that no two groups differ on only one of these dimensions, it is easy to see that for the purposes of classification, at least, we do not need even three. In fact since (a) the feature of illocutionary point is an n-ary, not just a binary feature, and (b) features (2) and (3) can be predicted from (1) (given the illocutionary point, the direction of fit between words and world can only be in one direction (Searle 1976:4), and feature (3) can be derived from the felicity condition, which in turn can be predicted from the essential condition, as Searle himself pointed out (1969:69). Searle is really only setting up classes of illocutionary acts on an intuitive basis, just as Austin had done for performative verbs. Apologise is a member of Searle's group of 'expressives', the illocutionary point of which "is to express the psychological state specified in the sincerity condition about a state of affairs specified in the propositional content" (1976:12). Searle's only independent justification for his taxonomy is that the classes of acts have syntactic correlates; for expressives, this is that "the paradigm-expressive verbs in their performative occurrence will not take that clauses but require a gerundive nominalization transformation (or some other nominal)" (ibid.). He observes, therefore, that one cannot say (26)* I apologise that I stepped on your toe

or

(27)* I congratulate you that you won the race

but the correct forms are (28) I apologise for stepping on your toe

and

(29) I congratulate y o u on winning the race.

Searle's classification gains a rather indirect kind of support from the historical description given in 4.2. of the syntactic/semantic frame of apologise; when the verb was a member of the representative class, which we presume it would have been, it had the syntactic correlate of that class, i.e. (30) I apologise that necessity knows no law

was grammatical just as (31) I assert that necessity knows no law

was, and is. In present-day English Searle's generalisation appears

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to hold, but note that it is a generalisation about the syntactic frames of certain verbs; Searle precisely does not show that syntactic phenomena are sensitive to the act or type of act performed by an utterance. If this were the case, we might expect to find that indirect speech acts showed the syntactic features of the act they are performing, rather than those associated with their 'literal' illocutionary forms. To take the example we are particularly concerned with, 'I'm sorry' can actually occur with both types of complement: (32) I'm sorry for (33) I'm sorry (that) I'm so late.

(32) is rarely used as an apology in British English (no examples occur in our corpus), though intuitively it does not seem impossible; (33) is the common form, as we have seen, especially with the deleted complementiser. The syntactic frame in (32) is that found with Searle's 'paradigm-expressive' illocutionary verbs, whereas in (33) the frame is that of the class of representatives; Searle's account would be supported if we found that only (32) could be used as an apology, and (33) was interpreted as a representative, but this does not seem to be the case (though cf. Barrett (1974), discussed below). Sentences with non-finite complements (our type (ii)(p)) as in (34) I'm sorry to ring so early

are not mentioned by Searle as occurring with any of his classes of illocutionary acts; he only remarks that they cannot occur with expressive performative verbs, e.g. (35)* I apologise to behave badly.

Of course, Searle is not claiming that it is conveyed or indirect illocutionary force that determines the syntactic frame of a verb, but only that the illocutionary verb itself, when used performatively, occurs only in certain frames. He thus seems to be engaged in the same activity as Austin — the activity he aimed to avoid — that is, the classifying and analysing of illocutionary verbs.6 That it is verbs and not acts that Searle is classifying is shown at other points in his analysis. For example, another dimension on which illocutionary acts vary, Searle suggests, is that of 'difference in relations to the rest of the discourse', "Some performative expression serve to relate the utterance to the rest of the discourse (and also to the surrounding context)" (1976:5). He gives as examples

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some verbs which seem neither to be names of illocutionary acts nor even to be performative verbs: reply, deduce, conclude, and object (though the last is certainly performative in some law courts). The inclusion of reply in particular is reminiscent of the ethnomethodological terms used in Ch. 2 to identify some moves as second-pair-parts, such as answers, and responses to various acts such as compliments, requests, and, of course, apologies. Searle is apparently claiming, then, that replying is an illocutionary act, explicitly performed by uttering 'I reply'. This fails the tests for performativeness given by Austin: for example, we cannot say 'I hereby reply' except in the context 'I hereby reply by saying . . . which suggests that if we must make such a decision — and speech act theory requires us to do so — then replying is a perlocutionary act or effect rather than an illocutionary act. It is not any features of the utterance itself — or any set of felicity conditions — that make an utterance a successful reply, but its position with respect to other utterances. (This is to reiterate the point made by Sacks and Schegloff (1973:241-242) and quoted above (2.2). Searle's classification, then, does not achieve his own aim of defining a limited number of ways of using language; the dimensions of variation of illocutionary acts produce — in principle — a much larger set than Searle's five, even allowing for the fact that an act's specification on some of the dimensions is predictable from its position on others. For example, the direction of fit between words and world can be derived from the illocutionary point. Even if the classification were more successful, this would only place a limitation on the number of illocutionary acts on one level of analysis. What A Classification of Illocutionary Acts makes clear, however, is that Searle views apologies as acts whose purpose is simply to express a feeling, and that this feeling is regret (as already mentioned in Searle (1975)). However, we cannot interpret the functional equivalence in many contexts of utterances of 'I apologise' and certain expressions of regret as requiring their total synonymy. We turn now to a discussion of two treatments of apologies as illocutionary acts, both within a Searlian framework. Norrick's (1978) treatment of expressives includes much on apologies. First, he identifies two general conditions on all expressives, the factive condition and the role identification condition.

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The first of these requires that the state of affairs giving rise to the feeling being expressed must be true, or more particularly, presupposed to be true by the speaker. This is already captured by the prepositional content condition, or at least by a minor modification of it. The role identification condition specifies more explicitly that it must be possible to identify the agent and patient (or victim) of the act, and moreover that the speaker must be the agent and the addressee the patient. These roles, and their identification with S and H, are already captured in the preparatory condition (whichever version we finally adopt). Second, Norrick also specifies a 'value judgement condition' viz., that "the speaker make a value judgement with regard to the effect of the recognised state of affairs on the affected person, or patient" (Norrick 1978: 283). In the case of apologising, this value judgement is of course a negative one; the state must be judged by the speaker (= agent) to have adversely affected the patient. These modifications seem merely to spell out certain conditions already specified in the felicity conditions. Norrick's solution to what we have called the 'sincerity problem' is more of an innovation. To reiterate, he proposes that illocutionary acts have social functions distinct from both their illocutionary point and perlocutionary effects. Norrick glosses social function as the set of roles filled by an illocutionary act in a given society (1978:280). The social function of an expressive illocutionary act is derived from its illocutionary point (i.e. expressing an emotion), but it does not follow from this that "all expressed emotions are felt emotions" (1978:281). By distinguishing the conditions under which an illocutionary act is performed from "the beliefs which allow hearers to associate the act with a certain emotion on the part of the speaker" (ibid.) we can concede that while the illocutionary point of expressives is the expressing of some emotion, they may be appropriately uttered even when the speaker does not have the emotion and the hearer knows that he does not. As Norrick says, the more harmful (in a culturally defined sense) the act performed, the more justified the hearer is in inferring that the apologiser actually is contrite, or feeling regret; this he bases on two premises: (1)

The correct performance of an act of apologising requires that the speaker believe that he has done something which has had negative consequences for the addressee;

132 (2)

Remedial moves as illocutionary acts People who do something which harms another person . . . should be contrite, (ibid.)

The idea of social function is, however, too vague and catch-all to be useful; Norrick includes the following as the (possible) social functions of apologies: — — — — —

admitting responsibility for a state which affected someone in an adverse way (thereby implicating contrition) asking to be forgiven showing good manners assuaging the addressee's wrath getting off the hook.

With a little imagination — and a look back at some of the data in Ch. 3 — it is not hard to find more ways apologies are used. Norrick does not show how social functions are to be distinguished from intended perlocutionary effects, which all these effects would presumably be under an Austinian analysis. Nevertheless, Norrick's paper is unusual in recognising that "more is at stake in, say, an act of apologising than expressing regret; a speaker usually apologises, expresses regret, to some end. In particular, apologies are made with the hope of being forgiven or that the addressee will dismiss the matter" (1978:280). Barrett (1974) explicitly deals with apologies as illocutionary acts, attempting "to define the intrinsic conditions which delineate the class of indirect apologies" (Barrett 1974:121). It should be noted at the outset that the latter is only a valid activity if independent evidence can be produced to show why a particular set of felicity conditions should be selected. If this is not done, it is all too easy to juggle the conditions until the right results emerge, thus emptying the process of any explanatory value; we can no longer say that the class of utterances that can indirectly perform a given illocutionary act has the members that it does because they are related in particular ways to the felicity conditions on that act, if we have set up the conditions expressly in order to 'predict' that class of utterances. Barrett first considers the possibilities of assimilating apologies to other types of illocutionary act, beginning with requests, specifically requests for forgiveness. She rejects Fillmore's (1971) analysis on the grounds that apologies cannot be replaced by requests for forgiveness in all contexts, and because "the role of the addressee differs in apologies and requests" (1974:125). By

Apologies in Searle's theory of speech acts

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this Barrett is referring to the part played by the addressee's perception of the speaker's 'sincerity' in uttering the apology; "the addressee's acceptance of an apology is contingent on his recognition of the apology as a sincere apology" (1974:122). Whereas "the addressee may acknowledge the sincerity of a request and still not grant it", if an addressee refuses to accept an apology "it is because he does not believe it is sincere or because he thinks that the gravity of the situation makes an apology inappropriate" (ibid.). It is not clear that we can accomodate all rejections of apologies into these two types of situation, but in any case Barrett's distinction does not force the conclusion that apologies are distinct from requests, since it is not the case that if an addressee believes an apology to be sincere, he must accept it. Challenging the sincerity of an apology is only one way of rejecting it. Nevertheless, we can accept Barrett's conclusion that apologies are not a type of request, since within speech act theory apologies cannot be defined as attempts by the speaker to get the addressee to do something; getting the addressee to accept the apology is only a perlocutionary effect (though it may be an intended one) and thus outside the scope of felicity conditions. Barrett then considers the possibility that apologies may be a kind of offer, but rejects this possibility too, on the grounds that offers themselves should be seen as a type of promise, i.e. committing the speaker to some future action, and since apologies do not do this, they cannot be considered as the same type of act: "There is no binding or promise of some future act involved in apologising" (1974:125). Barrett concludes that apologies are a unique type of illocutionary act, and offers the following initial representation: (36) Apologise (Speaker, Hearer (Do ( p a s t ) (Speaker, A))) (ibid.)

adding that "the speaker's desire for the hearer to accept his apology must also be accounted for" (ibid.) and that this can be done by adopting Heringer's (1972) intrinsic condition concerning speaker intention when performing an illocutionary act. Barrett has already accepted the three intrinsic conditions on apologies proposed by Fasold (1973): a. b. c.

The speaker regrets the act for which he is apologising The speaker acknowledges responsibility for the act The hearer was injured or offened by the act

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Remedial moves as illocutionary acts

and finds it necessary to add a fourth: d.

The act was unjustified under the circumstances

to rule out apologies as inappropriate where conditions a — c hold, but the act was in some way justified. She goes on to examine Heringer's conditions on illocutionary acts, to see if they 'predict' the 'right' class of sentences as potential indirect apologies. One problem with assessing her argument is that intuitions differ in this area; for example, we find (37) Have I already apologised for losing my temper?

hard to imagine as an apology, but (38) I want to apologise for losing my temper

quite feasible. (Barrett's intuitions are the reverse.) In a sense, such differences in assessment are unimportant, being similar to those encountered in all work done on this basis. In this case, however, judgements of the potential of sentences as indirect apologies form the only basis for extending and modifying the set of felicity conditions, and are therefore crucial. Barrett adds a further condition: e.

The speaker is obligated to apologise when the necessary conditions are met.

Adding this to the original set of four conditions (together with Heringer's general conditions) accounts, Barrett claims, for the right set of indirect apologies. Whether or not it successfully does this, however, the method of argument is (as has been suggested) an invalid one, since there is nothing to prevent the unsystematic proliferation of intrinsic conditions. Barrett includes, finally, a short discussion of what she terms the 'lexicalisation' or 'idiomatisation' of 'I'm sorry' phrases as indirect apologies. She suggests that only when used with the for—POSS + ing complement is 'I'm sorry' unambiguously an apology; with a that—S construction its force is ambiguous between a 'mere' statement of regret and an apology. This is so, she claims, because the complement of (39) I'm sorry for not calling

has the same form as that of the verb apologise, whereas the complement in (40) I'm sorry that I didn't call

does not. Barrett's claim is that (39) is an idiomatised apology — in the sense that it is always an apology — while (40) can only be an indirect apology. Her intuitions therefore support Searle's

Other remedial moves as illocutionary acts

135

analysis, discussed above. Our problem is, of course, that the reverse holds for our intuitions, as well as for the corpus presented in Ch. 3: as with examples (32) and (33), it is the sentences with that—S complements that are used as apologies. (The differences may be accountable for by differences between British and U.S. English.) We suggest, however, that Barrett's paper provides further support for the belief that one danger of speech act theory is its indeterminacy; the facility with which it is possible to multiply conditions on acts simply in order to produce the 'right results.

4.5. Other Remedial Moves as Illocutionary Acts

4.5.1. Primings In Ch. 3 we considered the moves occurring in the slots immediately before PRMs in terms of the relationships between those moves and the subsequent PRM. Such an account does not need to refer to the notion of intention which is central to the theory of illocutionary acts. We consider here some of the difficulties that arise if we attempt to treat primings as a class of utterances defined in terms of speaker intention. Goffman (cf. Ch. 1) suggests (1971:189) that priming moves are produced when remedial moves have not been made by the offender, and are designed "to call attention to the work that needs to be done". He also points out that since the speaker takes risks in priming, "priming moves tend to be made in various disguises" (1971:191). For this reason it is not a straightforward matter to examine the illocutionary nature of primings by an inspection of 'full-blown, explicit' performances, as Searle does for promises (1969). Indeed, there is no illocutionary verb for priming and no illocutionary force indicating device as such. However, if we imagine the most explicit way of priming we are likely to come up with the following sorts of sentences:

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Remedial moves as illocutionary acts

(41) Apologise! (42) I think you ought to apologise (43) I demand an apology

in which the speaker exploits the availability — in English — of an explicit performative verb, apologise, used in the performance of the act that the speaker sees as demanded by the offence. (We might consider what the most explicit ways of priming would be in languages that do not have such a verb.)7 (42) relates to the obligation to perform remedial activity that Barrett seeks to capture as a felicity condition on apologising, and its form would lead us to associate priming with representatives or expressives. (41) and (43), however are clearly directives, which indicates that the illocutionary point of primings is to get the addressee to apologise. (42) would then be an indirect way of priming, in the same way that (44) I think you ought to leave at once

is an indirect way of requesting, or directing you to leave at once. The most appropriate way to deal with primings in illocutionary terms, then, is to assimilate them into the class of directives; there is then nothing to stop us identifying primings as a specific type of directive, i.e. one that is performed when an apology should have been produced, and was not. In other words, we would be identifying the act A specified in the prepositional content as the particular one of apologising. We would not want to do this for all As, however, or we would arrive at an infinitely large set of sub-types of directives: one for each act (or type of act) it is possible to ask someone to do. What is different about (41), say, and a request to pass the salt, is that apologising is one of a class of acts that are expected to be performed without prompting. (41)-(43) thus have not only the usual preparatory conditions on requests, i.e. 1. 2.

H is able to do A. S believes H is able to do A. It is not obvious to both S and H that H will do A in the normal course of events of his own accord. (Searle 1969:66)

but — where the act is not only intended as a priming but is heard as such by H — a third pair of conditions: 3.

a. H believes he should have done A already b. S believes that H knows he should have done A already.

For utterances that are intended as primings but are not heard as such by the addressee, only 3.b. applies, and for utterances that were not intended as such but are so heard, only 3.a. applies. The

Other remedial moves as illocutionary acts

137

latter possibility hardly arises with forms as explicit as (41M43), where the addressee is either referred to or the act required is named, and it is hard to imagine (41M43) not being heard as primings. Under 'normal' circumstances, however, primings are performed very indirectly and it is perhaps more common for one or other of the special conditions to apply, but not both. Conditions of this kind, however, do blur the nature of the claims made by speech act theory; whereas in earlier formulations the model was one of utterances becoming acts by virtue of being uttered under certain conditions, i.e. it was a model for speakers, rather than for hearers, later versions shift the 'point-of-view' more in the hearer's direction. Thus Searle (1969:58) includes the following preparatory condition on promising, analogous to that presented above for priming: H would prefer S's doing A to his not doing A, and S believes H would prefer his doing A to his not doing A.

This allows for an utterance to have been issued by the speaker with the intention of promising, but to 'become' a threat if the first part of the condition is not fulfilled. As Searle puts it. "A promise is defective if the thing promised is something the promisee does not want done" (ibid.). The set of felicity conditions, then, will vary according to whether we take the speaker's or the hearer's point of view; speech act theory cannot take a neutral position on this question. Further serious problems with the description of primings in intentional terms were raised in 3.1., suggesting that such an account cannot be given. Since the only definition of primings that we have is formulated on the basis of speaker intention, we conclude that primings cannot be identified as a class of moves.

4.5.2. Remedial Responses

We are moving directly to a consideration of responses, since it is clear that accounts cannot be treated as illocutionary acts. In no sense does an utterance constitute an account by virtue of being uttered in accordance with a set of rules; accounts are highly

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Remedial moves as illocutionary acts

negotiable, that is, they can be challenged, modified, or altered until a consensus is reached between the parties. This is by contrast with explicit illocutionary acts, which once performed, are 'on-record'. At first sight it seems feasible to treat remedial responses as illocutionary acts, in fact as two kinds of act, corresponding to acceptances8 and rejections. Let us recall the purpose of analysing utterances as illocutionary acts: firstly, by establishing the conditions that must be fulfilled for the felicitous use of an illocutionary force indicating device (ifid) the nature ('meaning' in a broad sense) of the act can be elucidated. Secondly, it is claimed that the forms conventionally used to perform the act in question indirectly can be predicted from the set of felicity conditions, thus providing independent evidence that the postulated conditions are the 'correct' ones. It is difficult to follow the first of these lines of enquiry when there is apparently no explicit way of performing some illocutionary act that is not also a way of performing some other act(s). Where there is no unique performative verb or other ifid, we cannot say of utterances in isolation that any single act was unambiguously performed. Taking the second line, what we are attempting to do is to delineate the class of acceptances/rejections to PRMs; acts which, since no ifid exists for them, must always be achieved 'indirectly'. Any analysis we could produce would therefore have only one kind of evidence to support it, unless we could think of a second source to justify the analysis. The most likely solution seems to be the assimilation of remedial responses into some other class of speech act. Norrick, whose treatment of apologies we have already discussed, sees these acts as closely related to forgiving: Explicit uses of forgive, excuse and pardon are rare, except as responses to apologies. Commonly acts of forgiving in response to apologies take the form of dismissing the matter by denying its importance with phrases such as: It's nothing, No harm done, or a kind of request to consider it finished; Forget it. Never mind. These latter formulas are also used in response to acts of thanking. In both cases they have the social function of signalling the speaker's satisfaction that his interlocutor has acted in an acceptable manner and succintly ending the matter. Thus the general social function of acts of forgiving is to show that an apology has been accepted or is not expected and end the matter. (Norrick 1978:290)

Other remedial moves as illocutionary acts

139

Norrick is not, however, simply equating responses with forgiving, but his notion of social function allows him to state that an act (here, the act of forgiving) can be used with a particular social function (as given above). An alternative is to see ('favourable') apology responses as a sub-type of acceptances in general; that is, sharing all the felicity conditions of accepting9 with an additional specification that they occur in the slot subsequent to an apology and that when so placed, what they are accepting is the adequacy (from the victim's point of view) of the remedial work. The 'unfavourable' counterparts of acceptances are, of course, rejections, which could be dealt with in a parallel way. This analysis, however, leads to a problem: acceptances and rejections are — in adjacency pair terms — produced in second position to offers, (cf., for example, Schegloff and Sacks 1973: 238). Barrett (1974:125) considered, and rejected, the possibility of seeing apologies as a type of offer, taking the following sentences as the relevant data: (45) I offer you my apologies (46) Will you accept my apologies?

Barrett claims that such data would be 'explained' (we take it that what is to be explained is how such sentences can be used as apologies) by taking apologies to be a type of offer. A curious consequence of this would be that (45) would then be the explicit, 'Mark I' performative, and we would have to see 'I apologise' as a derived, or indirect, form. Barrett's own reason, however, for rejecting the assimilation of apologies is that offers are a type of promise, committing the speaker to some future action, and apologies do not do this. Such an argument would have been supported by different data, e.g. (47) I offer to apologise.

Offers such as this are indeed commissive, and we interpret (47) as committing the speaker to apologise, not as an apology in itself. Barrett also notes that forms like (45) and (46) can be used with other behabitives (she here adopts Austin's classification); the examples she gives are (48) (a) (b)

I offer you my condolences I offer you my congratulations

which are also behabitives, but we can add

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Remedial moves as illocutionary acts

(48) (c)

I offer you my resignation

though this is perhaps less unambiguously an act of resigning, whereas (48)(a) and (b) are undoubtedly acts of condoling and congratulating respectively. A further difference between (48) (a)-(b) and (48)(c) is that the nominal in the first two examples is normally plural, but in the third it is not. However, (49) (a) (b)

I offer you my apology I offer you my apologies

are both possible; thus though apology seems to belong semantically with (48)(a) and (b), it can also behave syntactically like (48)(c). While there appears to be a class, therefore, of performative verbs that can be nominalised and inserted in the slot 'I offer you my ', some in the singular and some in the plural form, it does not seem that these verbs form a natural semantic class; if they did, it would seem more reasonable to assimilate them all to the act of offering. Barrett's conclusion thus appears to be correct. Further support for the claim that the verbs that can appear in the nominalised form in sentences like (48) cannot all be treated as acts of the same type is provided by the fact that the forms used to 'accept' the 'offers' are different in each case. For example, while apologies are most commonly accepted with (50)

I it's 1 1 that's J

[OK 1 1 all right J

condolences and congratulations are normally accepted by acts of thanking. The simplest way out of this problem would of course be to relax the restriction that acceptances/rejections all follow offers of some kind. This, however, implies that there is a class of utterances, i.e. acceptances, that can occur in more than one environment. (after offers and some other illocutionary act types) but are nevertheless recognisable as the same type of utterance, presumably because of a similarity in form. Acceptances in different positions, however, do not all have the same form, as we have just observed. This solution does not, therefore, appear to be possible. We suspect that similar problems would arise in the attempt to devise an illocutionary act account of any move-type whose status is determined largely by its positioning with respect to other utterances, especially when the moves that precede it (and play a large part in determining its import) are of a variety of illocution-

Conclusions

141

ary act types. We conclude that acceptances cannot be described as illocutionary acts, but are best accounted for in structural terms, as in Ch. 3.

4.6.

Conclusions

Returning to one of the requirements for a speech act model of dialogue set up by Levinson (1978:6, cf. pp. 105-106 above), it is not particularly difficult in the case of RIs to segment the interchange into its component acts or moves, since in most cases a turn contains only one, and rarely more than two, moves. It should not then be impossible to assign each of these segments of talk to an illocutionary act. Why then does this appear so problematic, especially in the case of primings and responses? We suggest that in historical terms we can trace the origin of these problems to the beginnings of speech act theory as a movement within philosophy. For our purposes, the theory works, as it were, in the wrong 'direction'; because of Searle's axiomatic expressibility principle, the starting point of analysis is the explicit performative utterance, not actual stretches of conversation. Thus in spite of Searle's belief that "any utterance will consist in performing one or more illocutionary acts" (1976:14) it is by no means easy to take a piece of transcribed data — even when segmentation is not too much of a problem — and analyse it in speech act terms. As Turner has said (1975), speech act theory, to function as a theory of utterance production and understanding, should make this possible, but It is not apparent that the construction of a model of utterances as having 'illocutionary act potential' copes with the ways in which, e.g. utterance sequencing constitutes any intra-conversational unit as 'committing oneself to a course of action', 'requesting', etc. (Turner 1975:B2-B3)

In addition, it is of relevance to note that in attempting to apply speech act theory to the analysis of RIs we had by far the greatest success with apologies themselves. Given that the language we are at present concerned with is English, and that there happens to be

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Remedial moves as illocutionary acts

a performative verb apologise in English, it is at least possible to study the explicit performative, to attempt to draw up a list of the conditions that govern its use, and so on, in the true spirit of a Searlian analysis (e.g. 1969:Ch. 3). When we come to acts that are not performed explicitly, or for which there is no specific performative verb, we find ourselves working backwards: the expresibility principle is of no help if we are uncertain as to the form, say, of an 'explicit' priming. Speech act theory offers no techniques for beginning with the raw data and discovering what acts are being performed. Part of the difficulty arises from the general indeterminacy of the theory. Searle's attempts to classify illocutionary acts are only a small advance here; it is not even always easy to decide which of his five categories an act belongs to, and even when we can do this, there is still, of course, a great deal to be said, and from this point the analyst is on his own. Many rival sets of illocutionary acts can be postulated, and for each of these it is possible to argue for various sets of felicity conditions, with only an inadequate empirical basis for choosing between them. The only acts that are amenable to a speech act treatment, therefore, are those for which (in the language under study) there is a performative verb or other ifid that is sufficiently unambiguous for the mere utterance of the appropriate words to force the interpretation that that act, and no other, is being performed. The act of apologising is such a case, when performed explicitly: it is more or less true that any utterance of 'I apologise' will be interpreted as an apology wherever it occurs, so that the addressee, if unable immediately to identify the offence, will assume that the speaker has committed one, and will seek to 'locate' it. This is not to say that apologies cannot serve other interactional functions as well, and one of the problems for a speech act analysis is that it may be these implicated acts that are important for the subsequent development of the conversation. In cases like these, the theory has no way of telling us which of a number of acts performed by an utterance is 'sequentially implicative'. It remains true that for acts such as apologies speech act theory has a certain amount to contribute, though more as a provider of suggestions for further enquiry than as a model of RIs. At the other end of the scale, however, are those stretches of speech whose function in a particular conversation is determined by their

Conclusions

143

positioning. It will not help in such cases to know that the force of the utterance is that of asserting, or requesting, when its significance for the addressee might be that of an account or a move rejecting a remedial move such as an apology. The need to specify the position of an utterance requires reference to a unit larger than the utterance, thus necessitating the concept of functional units larger than the single illocutionary act, such as adjacency pans and interchanges; a point also made by Coulthard and Brazil (1979:9). Such larger units are created by more than one speaker; in the present context, the relevant unit is the RI, a functional unit created by two speakers, and it is hard to see how speech act theory could accomodate the description of such an entity.

5.

Remedial Interchanges and Other Aspects of Conversational Organisation

5.0.

Introduction

In this chapter we attempt in some specific ways to relate RIs to other aspects of conversation: first, a general principle — preference — of wide application to conversation in general, and second, some specific types of sequence showing some affinities with RIs: thanking and compliment sequences.

5.1. Preference Systems in Conversation1

On two occasions in the foregoing chapters (2.3., p. 43, and 3.3.3., p. 103) we have referred to systems of 'preference' operating in conversation. The term is used within ethnomethodological conversation analysis in a specific sense to refer not to motivations of the participants, but to sequence and turnorganisational features of conversation.' (Schegloff, Jefferson and Sacks 1977:362n)

A preference may apply to one of two or more possible moves in some particular enviornment (e.g. for agreement, rather than disagreement, following assessments (Pomerantz 1975a, 1977) or may operate to favour the performance of an action by one participant rather than another (Schegloff, Jefferson and Sacks 1977). Like so much in the empirical study of conversation, the notion of preference was first explored by Havey Sacks; he mentioned it several times in the lectures he gave at UCLA from 1969 to 1972. On occasions he seems to have in mind something rather more like

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Conversational

organisation

the everyday sense of the word, such as a preference for 'having a date on a Friday night' (March 4th, 1971). At around the same time, however, (April 23rd, 1971), Sacks was also using preference in a more technical sense that is in fact closely akin to Grice's Maxim of Quantity (Grice 1975:52). Sacks discusses the formulation of invitations such as 'come over for dinner' and 'come round and have a talk'; both of these, he points out, are partial descriptions of what will take place: in both circumstances, more will take place than 'having dinner' or 'talking'. Specifically, however, there is in operation what Sacks calls a preference for dinner invitations, i.e. if someone intends to invite you to dinner, they had better say so, because an invitation to 'come round and talk' 'says' (in Gricean terms, 'implicates') that dinner will not be served. We can compare this account with the example offered by Grice: A is writing a testimonial about a pupil who is a candidate for a philosophy job, and his letter reads as follows: 'Dear Sir, Mr. X's command of English is excellent, and his attendance at tutorials has been regular. Yours, etc.'.

Grice argues (1975:52) that since A is clearly giving less information than is asked for, he is flouting the Maxim of Quantity i.e. make your contribution as informative as is required (1975:45). Assuming that A is observing the general Maxim 'Be cooperative', we can account for this flout if we assume, in addition, that the information A fails to give is information that he is reluctant to give, viz. that Mr. X is no good at philosophy. It is this additional 'premise' in the logic of this particular 'conversation' that is thus implicated. The only difference between Grice's explanation and that given by Sacks (apart from differences of terminology) is that Grice claims to derive a specific implicature directly from a general principle, whereas Sacks talks of a preference for dinner invitations over invitations where a meal is not offered. In fact, however, even this difference dissolves when we realise that Grice does implicitly appeal to our knowledge of the kind of information that is expected (in Sacks' term, preferred) in testimonials: not merely information about the candidate's abilities for the job, but a favourable recommendation. It is therefore not merely the fact that A fails to give any information about Mr. X's abilities that generates the implicature, but specifically that he does not give any information favourable to Mr. X.

Preference systems in conversation

147

Later in the same year (October 22nd, 1971) Sacks demonstrated that a preference system could explain the occurrence of a particular sequence-type in conversation. He begins by distinguishing between two ways of referring to non-present individuals in a conversation: Type I identifications (e.g. names), which indicate to the recipient that he should try to locate the referent among people he knows. Type II identifications (e.g. a guy, someone), which indicate to the recipient that he should not try to identify the referent.

Sacks argues that there is a preference for type I identifications, and supports this claim with extracts such as the following: (1)

(2)

A : whereju get the filing box from? B : from uh:: that fellow who usetuh sit in back of you, who, who got fired. A : Jordan? B : Jordan, yeah. A : uh she asked me to stop by, she bought a chest of drawers from uhm (4.0) what's that gal's name? Just went back to Michigan? (2.0) Helen uhm B : oh I know who you mean. (1.0) Brady- Brady. A : yeah. Helen Brady. B : mm hm.

Without a preference for type I, Sacks argues, it would simply be open to speaker A in (1) and (2), being unable to remember the name, to use a type II identification. As it is, however, this would indicate to B that the referent is not someone she knows, and as we know from the development of both sequences, this is not the case. To avoid this implicature, A must try to get the name from B, and this she does successfully in each case. A recognisable, familiar sequence-type thus results from the operation of a preference system, though again we could consider (1) and (2) as organised so as to avoid a Gricean implicature arising from a flout of the Quantity Maxim. Where Sacks's account adds to that offered by Grice is in his proposal that what is implicated by the use of a type II identification is not necessarily that the speaker does not have access to a type I identification, but that the speaker believes that the addressee does not have such access. Further support for this analysis would come from data in which a type II identification was used, but later on in the conversation the recipient recognised the referent as known to him by name: a 'complaint', perhaps of the form 'But I didn't know you meant Joe; why didn't you were talking about Joe!' might then ensue.

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Conversational

organisation

It is in his analyses of the conversational consequences of preference systems (i.e. the generation of implicatures and the production of certain sequence-types) that Sacks's use of the notion of preference is most productive; the same may be said for later treatments, such as Pomerantz (1975a, 1977) and Atkinson and Drew (1979). Atkinson and Drew (1979) discuss the concept of preference with particular reference to the selection of alternative moves in blame-allocation sequences in court cases. Like Schegloff, Jefferson and Sacks, they stress that preference does not refer to a speaker's psychological predisposition: instead it describes the systematic features of the design of turns in which certain alternative but non-equivalent actions are taken, as well as aspects of the sequential organisation of such actions. (Atkinson and Drew 1979:59)

The ways in which turns are constructed so as to exhibit preference or dispreference have been studied closely by Pomerantz (esp. 1977); examples of the relevant features for the slots after assessment moves include the following: (1)

(2)

(3)

Agreements are produced immediately, even with overlap of the prior turn; disagreements are frequently preceded by a noticeable gap, or may even be delayed to some later turn. Agreements occupy the whole turn; disagreements are prefaced by filled pauses, particles such as 'well', or weak agreement tokens. Where these tokens are produced as prefaces to disagreements, however, the speaker is held only to have disagreed; in Pomerantz's terminology, it is disagreement that is 'sequentially implicative'. Absence of either agreement or disagreement (the relevant slot being occupied with silence, or some other move such as a request for clarification) is taken to implicate disagreement, i.e. the dispreferred alternative.

These phenomena, especially the first two, may be considered simply as 'markers', with the effect that wherever they are used — in any type of exchange — it should be possible to say that a dispreferred alternative is being produced, or is about to be produced, or is being implicated. It would then be possible to set up typologies of exchanges on the basis of the preference status of independently-identifiable move types. For example, Pomerantz (1975b) is able to identify one environment in which the usual preference for agreements following assessments does not apply; that is the slot after compliments, where because of the conflicting principle that self-praise is dispreferred, agreement is no longer

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the preferred alternative. Compliments can thus be distinguished from other assessments in terms of their preferred responses (cf. 5.2. below). We observed above that where a turn following an assessment has the structure [agreement token] + [disagreement]

the speaker will be taken to have disagreed with the assessment. We can express this more generally as [preferred activity token] + [dispreferred activity].

Atkinson and Drew (1979:59-60) claim that in blame allocation sequences the responses produced by the recipient of blame display the dispreferred status of actions that accept balme (such as apologies), and the preferred status of actions that reject blame (such as accounts or defences). In our data we have a number of examples of turns containing an apology and an account, usually in that order; are these examples treatable in terms of preference/ dispreference? We suggest that they are not, for the following reasons: (1) The apologies produced in such turns are frequently more than 'tokens' of the 'preferred activity'. For example: (1) (2)

. . . I'm ^sorry to -treat you -like a "number I but I 'have to 'write 'people's 'name down to re,member them || I'm '•sorry we -had to -put him "on to you I 'but um you know we 'just 'couldn't get "rid of -him I,basically II

(2) Apologies are not incompatible with accounts as agreements are with disagreements, or acceptances of offers with rejections. There is nothing inconsistent between accepting some blame and at the same time trying to reduce its extent. (3) If apologies occurring along with accounts were to be understood merely as tokens of the preferred activity, we would expect the producer of an apology + account to be held only to have offered an account, and not to have apologised; the implication of the turn as a whole would be that the speaker rejected any blame assigned to him. There is no evidence, however that the production of an account 'cancels' a prior apology in this way. (4) We do not find in our corpus any systematic use of 'dispreference markers' with either apologies or accounts. We must recall, however, that Atkinson and Drew (1979) are concerned only with blame-allocation sequences, especially those

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taking place in courtrooms. RIs, as we have seen, very rarely incorporate any overt blaming, and only infrequently do we find even blame-implicating moves on the part of the victim. It may be the case, therefore, that any preference system operating over different types of PRM in RIs will be different from that applying to blaming sequences. In specifying preferences among alternative responses to accusations, and also in the subsequent responses to those responses, Atkinson and Drew are obliged to state whose preference they are describing. The resulting turn-sequences can be represented as follows: 1. Speaker A

2. SpeakerB

3. Speaker A

Accusation of B

admission/ apology (preferred for A, dispreferred for B)

accept (pref. for A)

reject (dispref. for A)

denial/defence/ account (preferred for B, dispreferred for A)

accept (dispref. for A)

reject (pref. for A)

(Drawn from Atkinson and Drew (1979) 59-60,186)

Whereas the two speakers have opposite preferences for slot 2, this may not be the case for 3; if, for example, B has made a move admitting blame in slot 2, he may prefer to have his admission accepted, thus sharing A's preference for slot 3. It seems that in such contexts we cannot treat preference as a system operating independently of the point of view of the speaker or the addressee. For example, will B construct turns admitting blame so as to show them as preferred (which they are for A), or dispreferred (as they are for B himself)? The common sense answer is that a speaker will 'mark' those moves that are dispreferred by his co-participant; this would be compatible with the suggestion made in Ch. 2 that

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dispreferred moves are those that threaten the addressee's face. However, once we begin to talk of preference as 'on the part o f either participant, we are surely close to dealing with motivations, or wants, or some similar notion. Note also that the evidence produced by Atkinson and Drew for the dispreferred status (for the accuser) of defences is not one of the three types listed above (p. 148). Instead of observing the use of 'markers', for example, they state, amongst other observations, that One further point supporting the accuser's dispreference for accepting a defence is that to do so can initiate a sequence in which countercomplaints may be made by the party originally accused . . . which can put the original accuser in the subsequent position of doing defences and/or apologies. (Atkinson and Drew 1979:186)

The implication is that the accuser will not want to find himself in such a position, and will act so as to avoid it; it seems that here we are dealing with the kinds of acts speakers will rationally perform in order to achieve certain goals and avoid interactional pitfalls. Atkinson and Drew also appeal to frequency of occurrence in support of their claim for the preferred status of actions avoiding self-blame (1979:112); such evidence is fundamentally different from that based on the construction of turns, when no claims are made for the greater frequency of preferred alternatives; indeed, there is no reason why some preferred action should not in fact be very rarely performed, since we can still argue for its preferred status simply on the basis of the surface features of the turn in which it occurs. We suggest that it is possible to talk of an independent, nonpsychological 'preference system' only for those exchanges in which the participants have the same or compatible goals. This is clearly not the case in cross-examinations, in which the questioner and the accused (or witness, since witnesses frequently find themselves the recipients of accusations too) have opposing goals. RIs, on the other hand, are usually cooperative activities, not primarily concerned with the exact allocation of blame, but directed rather at paying proper attention to the face of both participants. Any activity performed by either speaker, produced in the appropriate slot, that serves the goal of the RI (which will be defined in the next chapter) will thus be 'preferred' by both participants. Since the evidence suggests that neither apologies nor accounts are

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treated as dispreferred, we conclude that both are (alternative) preferred responses to an offence. As stated above, however (p. 104), the evidence for the preference status of acceptances indicates that acceptances are prefered and rejections dispreferred, and since both offender and victim will usually share the same 'preference' in this context, it is unecessary to refer to either participant in such a description.

5.2. Remedial Interchanges and Other Sequences

5.2.1. Assessment Sequences, with Particular Reference to Compliment-Response Pairs

In this section we aim simply to point out some similarities between RIs and assessment sequences in terms of the response moves found in each type of exchange. Assessment sequences are treated at some length, from an ethnomethodological standpoint, by Pomerantz (1975a, 1975b, 1978). The analyses offered are characteristic of this approach to conversation, which seeks an account of the orderliness that can be shown to exist in natural conversation as the product of interacting sets of rules (see also, for example, Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson 1974). Pomerantz sees compliments as a particular type of assessment, and these, she notes, are produced in pairs: speaker A: assessment of X speaker B: assessment of X

in which the referent of A's assessment (X) is most commonly retained by B. She presents evidence for the operation of preference 2 in the organisation of agreements and disagreements as second assessments, showing that the preference is for agreements. In most circumstances, the 'optimal' agreement is one in which

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the speaker upgrades the evaluation provided by the first speaker as in the following extract: (3)

M : you must admit it was fun the night we we//nt down (Pomerantz 1977:11). J : it was great fun

Such responses are 'optimal' in the sense that it is this type of agreement that occurs in what can be called 'total agreement' responses; it does not occur in disagreement sequences, as do some other types of agreement. Furthermore, it is often produced, as in (3), in partial overlap with the previous speaker's utterance, a feature characteristic of such strongly preferred responses. Other forms of agreement are those in which agreement is merely asserted, and those in which it is downgraded; in the latter case less strongly favourable evaluations are given. These types are less than optimal; they also occur in disagreement sequences, and are produced in turns showing the characteristics of disagreements, that is, with delay, hesitation, and forms such as 'well' (cf. Ch. 2). Pomerantz then notes that in the slots following compliments, upgrades do not occur; instead, rejections prevail, though it is not the case that rejections are straightforwardly the preferred response. Pomerantz argues that two sets of constraints or rules are in operation immediately following compliments: (i) (ii)

the general preference for agreement, characteristic of all positions for second assessments, and a dispreference for self-praise, which Pomerantz supports from independent evidence (1978:88-92).

She then goes on to show that the forms of response typically produced after compliments represent solutions to these potentially incompatible sets of constraints (i.e. not disagreeing with the compliment, yet avoiding self-praise), and that these responses exhibit features of both agreements and disagreements. The responses that occur are of three major types: (i)

(ii) (iii)

appreciations ('thank you', etc.) and scaled-down agreements (used especially when the object of praise is not directly the recipient, but some activity, possession or achievement of his.) disagreements, in which the amount of credit to be assigned to the recipient is negotiated. referent shifts, which can be either shifts of credit to some other person or to the object of credit itself (e.g. 'I wasn't really clever to make this dress; it's a very easy pattern), or return compliments, where available.

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Conversational organisation

In compliment responses, therefore, there is evidence that two conflicting principles result in the avoidance of outright agreement or disagreement. In her thesis (1975a), Pomerantz also considers the responses given to self-deprecating assessments, which present the addressee with a parallel problem; observing the general preference for agreement would result in the respondent implying a negative assessment of his co-participant, and this, like self-praise, is to be avoided. It appears that in this case the dispreference for criticism of others is more powerful than the preference for agreement, since a preference for disagreement can be shown to operate. For example, in the following extract, R produces his move immediately on C's completion of a self-deprecating assessment, thus overlapping her apology: (4) C : soh | my ,god I you -must be loathing -me -down -here//1 I'm 'ever so .sorry II R : ,no it's 'quite 'all .right || C's turn here consists of [self-deprecation] + [apology]; the prompt production of R's disagreement and acceptance shows that it is a preferred, indeed an optimal response. In (5) and (6), instead of the self-deprecation appearing as a separate move accompanied by an apology, the format of apology used allows the offender to offer an evaluation of his action: (5) M : I'm ssorry to-ring-rather .early//||um P : "no it's'all .right | it's'not .early || (6) M : ssorry to -con.fuse //| -but um S : 'oh^noll In these cases, too, disagreement is produced immediately after the apology. This suggests that disagreement is at least one of the preferred responses following this type of apology. Not all apologies contain overt self-deprecation, however, though they do imply a negative assessment of an act of the speaker. Most responses avoid any direct reaction to the apology itself, since to approve it as such would be to ratify the offender's implied self-criticism. Instead, acceptances are concerned, as we have suggested, not with the adequacy of the apology as such, but with the participants' position with respect to each other (which we describe in Ch. 6 as a state of interactional imbalance that must be restored by the victim). The overall preference for agreement — more generally, for affiliation with the prior speaker's interpretation of some act or

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state of affairs — thus breaks down both in the case of compliments and in the case of apologies, the preferred responses to these being neither overt agreement nor overt disagreement. This suggests a balance or equivalence between the principles 'avoid self-praise' and 'avoid disparagement of others'. In the case of explicit self-deprecations, however, whether associated with apologies or not, the latter principle becomes dominant over the general preference for agreement, and disagreement is preferred.

5.2.2. Thanking Exchanges Our comparison of RIs and thanking exchanges will centre principally on the treatment given in Coulmas (1981), in which apologies and thanks are contrastively studied, using data from a variety of languages, particularly Japanese, Coulmas's aim is to show that these two speech acts3 are less dissimilar than they appear at first sight, and he supports this claim with three types of evidence. First, he observes that apologies and thanks both require to be positioned 'second' to some utterance or event; informally, we both thank and apologise for something. Coulmas describes them both as 'reactive' speech acts: "They are always preceded (or accompanied) by a certain intervention in the course of events calling for an acknowledgement" (1981:71). Such an intervention, however, need not 'actually' have taken place; rather the speaker, in producing apologies or thanks, shows that he interprets something that has gone before as calling for an apology or thanks. Second, Coulmas states that "thanks and apologies can be met by reactions that presuppose or explicitly express an opposing or concurrent assessment" (ibid.). Our view, as stated in the preceding section, is that preferred apology responses avoid explicit expressions of opposition or concurrence, except when the apology contains or is accompanied by overt self-deprecation. Coulmas goes on to note that, not only in English, many routine expressions can serve as responses to both apologies and thanks, and this, he suggests, indicates that the two acts have at least some

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Conversational organisation

features in common, (cf. Ch. 3, p. 98). Nevertheless, the existence of other routine responses that can be used either for apologies or thanks, but not both, suggests to Coulmas that while each act has a range of appropriateness, these ranges overlap to some extent but do not coincide completely. Coulmas links apologies and thanks through the concept of indebtedness. Noting that in both cases the acts are produced in response to something, he calls this 'something' the 'object of regret' in the case of apologies, and the 'object of gratitude' in the case of thanks. He then hypothesises that the group of responses that can be used for either speech act can be used to respond to sub-sets of both apologies and thanks in which the apologiser (or producer of thanks) "implicitly or explicitly admits (his) indebtedness" (1981:80). These responses include, in English, 'that's all right', 'not at all'; a response appropriate only for thanks is 'you're welcome', and an example of a response used exclusively for apologies is, according to Coulmas, 'never mind'. It is not clear, however, that any such sub-set of apologies exists in English. Coulmas claims that in saying "it was my fault, I'm terribly sorry", the speaker explicitly recognises his debt (1981:79). This is not obviously so; the recognition of having commited an offence and willingness to take the blame are expressed, but no reference to debt as such is made. However, we shall be proposing in Ch. 6 a more abstract concept than indebtedness, to which remedial moves in some cultures appear to be oriented. Third, Coulmas also notes that in a few contexts thanks or apologies, or a combination of both, are appropriate. Nevertheless, he stresses that what we are looking for is not so much a common denominator; rather the link between them will most likely prove to be an intersection of the ranges of the respective applications, where both are not incompatible. (Coulmas 1981:74)

We may note some additional similarities; for example, both thanks and apologies, in their commonest forms, are brief utterance identifiable on formal grounds, i.e. by the occurrence of particular brief phrases or single words: thanks/thank you and sorry. There is perhaps a more straightforward relation between form and function in the case of thanks, since the one-word formula is a part of the performative verb itself, whereas with apologies, 'sorry' serves to express the emotion that has come to be asso-

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ciated — as described in Ch. 4 — with the speech act of apologising. It is possible to express regret without thereby apologising,4 but (we suggest) it is not possible to utter 'thank you' or 'thanks' (except ironically) without thereby thanking the recipient. Thus, although a similar pairing holds in each case between a performative verb and the emotion associated with it, i.e. thank apologise

grateful sorry

the most commonly used formula for thanking is a part of the performative formula, whereas in the case of apologising with 'sorry', it is the word for the relevant emotion that is used. Another similarity not discussed directly by Coulmas is that apologies and thanks share the same 'sincerity problem' treated in Ch. 4 above, that is, they appear to be defined as expressions of certain emotions, and yet are more often than not uttered, quite validly, when the relevant emotion is not 'actually' felt. Indeed, if we examined the whole range of conversational contexts in which thanks are used, we would probably find that they are even more widely used than apologies in situations in which it is at least unlikely that the appropriate feeling is actually experienced. These contexts include the use of thanks in closing sections, a position in which apologies are also used, and the remainder of this section will be concerned particularly with this phenomenon. The example constructed by Schiffer (1972), quoted in Ch. 4, p. 119-120, is a good instance; thanks are extensively used to close such service encounters and goal-oriented interactions between strangers. For example, a telephone call in which the caller cannot speak to the intended recipient characteristically ends with thanks from the caller: (7)

R C R C R C

-8 1-0 1 ,7II is 'Chris "Fowler -there -please II er v no 1 I'm a'fraid he's 'down in ^London for the -weekened factually II '