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In:Multimodal Im/politeness: Signed, spoken, written
Edited by Andreas H. Jucker, Iris Hübscher and Lucien Brown
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 333] 2023
► pp. 327–351

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Chapter 12
“He offered an apologetic smile”

The politeness of apologetic gestures

ORCiD logo with link | University of Zurich
Published online: 21 February 2023
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.333.12juc
Abstract
This contribution focuses on the multimodal aspects of apologies. In terms of politeness and face management, apologies are ambivalent. They are redressive and indicate a concern for the hearer, but they also include a certain amount of self-blame and thus threaten the speaker’s own positive face. Narrative descriptions of apologetic gestures were retrieved from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) through the collocation profiles of apology expressions. Such gestures may occur in isolation without a spoken apology, or they may occur together with a more or less explicit apology. In many cases, the apologetic gesture helps to discursively negotiate the severity of an event that may have been perceived as an offence and the speaker’s responsibility for it.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous literature
  • 3.Data and method
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Register profiles of apologies
    • 4.2Collocational patterns of apologies and gestures
    • 4.3The politeness of apology gestures
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Corpora
  • References
References (51)
Corpora
Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): [URL]
Corpus of Historical American English (COHA): [URL]
British National Corpus (BNC): [URL]
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Cited by one other publication

Jucker, Andreas H.
2024. Speech Acts, DOI logo

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