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Apologising in British English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 April 2005

Gill Woodman
Gill Woodman
Affiliation:
Anglistik, Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich, D-80799 Munich, Germany, Gillwood@t-online.de
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Extract

Mats Deutschmann, Apologising in British English. Umeå, Sweden: Umeå University, 2003. Pp. 262.

One of the most significant problems in speech act research is doubtless the shortage of naturally occurring spoken language in the data under observation. Researchers have applied a battery of techniques to collect examples of speech acts, but the vast majority of the work has been characterized by elicited language, wherein the starting point for the research has been the function of the speech act itself and the aim has been to investigate ways in which it is realized linguistically. Mats Deutschmann's book marks a clear departure from this tradition. His research into apologizing in British English is based solely on data from the spoken section of the British National Corpus (BNC). As a result, his starting point is also different: the form (linguistic realization) of the speech act rather than its function. Furthermore, in addition to conducting a specific investigation of the speech act “apologizing,” he sets himself the more ambitious target of revealing “general characteristics of the use of politeness formulae in British English” (p. 13).

Type
REVIEWS
Information
Language in Society , Volume 34 , Issue 2 , April 2005 , pp. 314 - 317
Copyright
© 2005 Cambridge University Press

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References

REFERENCES

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Held, G. (1999). Submission strategies as an expression of the ideology of politeness: Reflections on the verbalization of social power relations. Pragmatics 9:5–20.Google Scholar
Janney, R. W., & Arndt, H. (1992). Intracultural tact versus intercultural tact. In R. J. Watts et al. (eds.), Politeness in language: Studies in its history, theory and practice, 21–41. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Searle, John, R. (1969). Speech acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.