Chapter 6 introduces the concepts relevant to speech act theory and discusses difficulties in the study of speech acts, both limitations of the form-to-function approach and obstacles to the function-to-form approach; it then reviews the work-arounds suggested in the literature, including the use of illocutionary-force-indicative devices, of typical syntactic patterns for different speech acts, and of metacommunicative labels. After looking at several studies of performative verbs, the chapter then reviews historical studies of directive, commissive, and expressive speech acts in English. Directives in earlier English would seem to be more direct than we find today, but this can be attributed to the more fixed social structure, not to less politeness. Apologies, curses, greetings, and leave-takings represent expressives that have undergone change in the history of English, in respect to both their formal expression and their functional profile, that is, the very nature of the speech act itself. For example, promises of medieval times, which did not depend upon the sincerity condition of the speaker but were nevertheless “binding,” now rest fundamentally upon this condition.

This chapter explores the greater issue of moral responsibility for Mao-era injustices. Following a broader discussion that touches on intellectual debates beginning in the late 1980s, it focuses on a series of essays published in the semiofficial journal Yanhuang Chunqiu between 2008 and 2014 that provided a space for Chinese intellectuals to reconstruct alternative narratives of history. The term chanhui (“confess and repent”) provided a culturally significant and yet sufficiently flexible framework for a public discussion of individual guilt and atonement for acts of collective violence. The resulting Chanhuilu column represented a rare public forum accommodating both detailed narrations of events and public reflections on guilt, atonement, and justice. These authors not only took on the burden of individual guilt, but also shared historical knowledge that contextualized if not attenuated the perpetrators’ responsibility and sought the lenient judgment of later generations.

One very important kind of love in Plato is love of wisdom, or philosophy (philosophia). Philo-sophia is, literally, ‘friendship for wisdom’, not erōs, which is love in the sense of passionate desire, often with a sexual component. Nevertheless, I argue that philosophia in Plato often has close connections with erōs. For example, philosophia is portrayed as the object of erōs, or as a passionate desire to attain wisdom, or as the search for wisdom together with another person who is the object of erōs. Moreover, throughout the dialogues, Socrates the philosopher is characterized by his close association with both philosophia and erōs. Socrates says that he has erōs for two objects, Alcibiades and philosophia (Gorgias), and he is himself the object of erōs (Symposium, Alcibiades I). He claims to know nothing except erotic matters, and he resembles the daimōn Eros in desiring the wisdom he recognizes that he lacks (Symposium). He invents an ideal state in which the rulers are philosophers, those who have erōs for learning (Republic). In the Phaedrus, Socrates prays to Eros not to take away the erotic art that Eros has given him. Just before drinking the hemlock (Phaedo), Socrates, who has chosen to philosophize all his life, says that he does not regret that this practice has led to his execution, because after death philosophers hope to attain the wisdom that was the object of their erōs in life.

This chapter addresses Plato’s conception of philosophy by examining how the Apology of Socrates represents Socrates as a model lover of wisdom. This Socrates loves expertise about how to live well, and he does so in three ways: (i) by examining others to test them for this expertise and to confirm that only the gods possess it, (ii) by pursuing the expertise, nonetheless, to improve his beliefs about how to live well, and (iii) by exhorting others to examine themselves and to pursue wisdom. The chapter pays special attention to Socrates’ conceptions of knowledge, living well, and teaching, and it suggests briefly how Plato tweaks or transforms this Socratic model in other dialogues.

The construal of Apology 30b2–4 which in JHS 123 (2003) I attributed to John Bumet had appeared in print sixteen years before his edition of Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito. I now suggest that it probably originated in the mind of J. A. Smith, who was an undergraduate contemporary of Burnet’s at Balliol College, Oxford, and later Waynflete Professor of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy. The unexpected construal, transmitted by Balliol tradition, is typical of Smith’s cast of mind.

Contempt, cursing, and defamation all actively caused harm to others and threatened to destabilize social hierarchies of gentility. As politeness became the political language that enabled the exercise of power by elites and allowed them to recognize each other as the rightful possessors of public authority, criminal prosecutions of uncivil speech helped define political roles and relationships. Contempt prosecutions punished impolite speech from the lower orders, but the law also rewarded appropriately submissive speech (such as apologies) from them. The fact that these negotiations occurred exclusively among men reflects how both the politeness regime and the king’s peace itself were increasingly marginalizing women. The vast majority of those prosecuted for cursing were men of relatively low social status; this offense was understood to threaten the polite ethos and the civil order. Defamation became in the eighteenth century a crime of the lower orders, while polite gentlemen channeled their own defamatory impulses into a highly specific and legally protected written form: satire.

In Chapter 7, we discuss expressions, constituting the ‘lowest’ unit of analysis in our model. We here focus specifically on pragmatically salient conventionalised expressions indicating the interactants’ rights and obligations in a particular context. We propose an analytic procedure by means of which such expressions can be systematically compared by using large corpora. As a case study, we examine Chinese and British English expressions. We focus on expressions popularly associated with the speech acts Request and Apologise. We examine groups of expressions with an increasing degree of complexity.

Chapter 8 discusses how our framework can be operationalised in cross-cultural pragmatic research focusing on the analytic unit of speech act. We first propose a typology of speech acts. This typology is essentially different from others, in that it provides a system of speech acts based on their interactional and relational functions. We argue that in using any typology of speech acts, it is fundamental for the cross-cultural pragmatician to avoid unnecessarily proliferating speech act categories. After outlining our model typology of speech acts, we provide a coding scheme by means of which speech acts can be systematically described in data analysis.

Chapter 13 provides a case study for cross-cultural discourse analysis, by studying war crime apologies performed by representatives of the Japanese and German states. The term ‘war crime Apologise’ (or simply ‘war apology’) refers to a public ritual speech centering on the speech act Apologise, realised by a ratified person (Goffman, 1967) – usually a representative of the state or a state minister – following crimes which were perpetrated during a wartime situation. War Apologise discourse represents a form of political rather than interpersonal Apologise, which can bring about reconciliation, but not necessarily so.Along with illustrating how the unit of discourse can be systematically compared across linguacultures, the chapter also illustrates that cross-cultural pragmatics provides a highly innovative way of engaging in the study of language and politics because it allows us to consider controversial and emotively loaded political phenomena, such as war crime apologies, from a non-ideologised angle.

In Australia, the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous mental health and well-being is a major human rights issue, and escalating suicide rates represent a national emergency. This chapter describes the Australian human rights context and developments within the discipline and profession of psychology to address these inequities, with the reconciliation action plan developed by the Australian Psychological Society (APS) as one commitment to change. The focus on respectful relationships, cultural safety, and promoting self-determination is part of the background leading to the APS apology to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The apology highlighted the importance of a commitment by all psychologists to reconciliation and to modifying their attitudes and work practices to ensure a culturally appropriate, responsive, and safe workforce. The Australian Indigenous Psychology Education Project (AIPEP) represents a focus on the education and employment of the psychology workforce and illustrates collaboration with key stakeholders in psychology education to provide frameworks and guidelines for embedding cultural awareness, responsiveness, and competence throughout all psychology education.

The complexity of its themes and concerns suggests that Augustine anticipated multiple audiences for the “Confessions,” including his critics within the Catholic and Donatist churches of North Africa and his former compatriots among the Manichaean community. For the former, it served as an apology, demonstrating the authenticity of his spiritual development away from his Manichaean past. For the latter, it served both as a polemic, cleverly criticizing Manichaeism in the guise of self-condemnation, and as a protreptic, offering himself as an exemplar of a path to conversion commensurable with those spiritual values he could appreciate in the Manichaeans, despite their heresy.