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Intra-Lingual Pragmatic Variation in Mandarin Chinese Apologies: Influence of Region and Gender

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Intra-Lingual Pragmatic Variation in Mandarin Chinese Apologies: Influence of Region and Gender EAP (print) issn 2055-7752 EAST ASIAN EAP (online) issn 2055-7760 PRAGMATICS Article Intra-lingual pragmatic variation in Mandarin Chinese apologies: Influence of region and gender Yunwen Sua and Yufen Changb Abstract This study investigates regional and gender variations of apologies in Putonghua ‘Standard Mandarin’ and Guoyu ‘Taiwanese Mandarin’. Production data were elic- ited from 40 participants from northern Mainland China and 34 from Taipei using an oral discourse completion task. Results showed that speakers in both regions employed a similar sequence of strategies and demonstrated similar preferences for context-dependent strategies in their apologies, but Mainland speakers used a significantly greater number of strategies than Taiwan speakers. Gender differences were observed in the apologies produced by Taiwan speakers regarding their use of illocutionary force indicating devices. The study found an interaction effect of power relation and region, with Mainland speakers sounding more apologetic than Taiwan speakers, but no interaction effect of power relation and gender; the effect of severity of offence was not clear, which could be attributed to the gap between the predetermined level of severity and speakers’ actual perception of it in each scenario. keywords: chinese apologies; variational pragmatics; regional variation; gender difference; macro- and micro-social factors Affiliation aThe University of Utah bWestern Kentucky University email: [email protected] [email protected] eap vol 4.1 2019 59–86 https://doi.org/10.1558/eap.38215 ©2019, equinox publishing 60 east asian pragmatics 1. Introduction This study aims to investigate intra-lingual pragmatic variation in speech act pro- duction – in particular, the effects of region and gender on the use of pragmatic strategies. The study is primarily situated in variational pragmatics (Schneider & Barron, 2008; Barron & Schneider, 2009), which is the intersection of prag- matics with dialectology, and analyses the impact of social factors on language use in context. The framework distinguishes five macro-social factors, including region, social class, ethnicity, gender, and age, which cause pragmatic variation at various levels of analysis, including the formal, the actional, the interactional, the topical, and the organisational levels. The emerging line of variational prag- matics research, which has mostly focused on varieties of Indo-European lan- guages, has paid the most attention to region (e.g. English requests in Barron, 2008; Breuer & Geluykens, 2007; Spanish requests in Félix-Brasdefer, 2009; Placencia, 2008; French requests in Johns & Félix-Brasdefer, 2015; German requests in Warga, 2008; Spanish refusals in Félix-Brasdefer, 2008; Spanish invitations in García, 2008; French apologies in Schölmberger, 2008), and gender (e.g. English compliments in Herbert, 1990; Parisi & Wogan, 2006; Wolfson, 1984; English requests in Coates, 2004; Holmes, 1995; English apologies in Holmes, 1989; Spanish requests in Félix-Brasdefer, 2010; Persian apologies in Chamani, 2014). Very rarely have non-Indo-European languages like Chinese (e.g. compliments in Lin, Woodfield, & Ren, 2012; refusals in Ren, 2015; requests in Ren, 2018) and Japanese (e.g. apol- ogies in Okano & Brown, 2018) been studied. Previous research about the linguistic variation of Mandarin between Chi- nese-speaking communities, especially between Putonghua (Mandarin spoken in mainland China, henceforth Standard Mandarin) and Guoyu (Mandarin spoken in Taiwan, henceforth Taiwanese Mandarin), has mostly focused on the pho- nological (e.g. Kuo, 2005), syntactic (e.g. Cheng, 1985), and lexical (e.g. Kubler, 1985) aspects of the language. Very few studies (e.g. Lin et al., 2012; Kadar, Haugh, & Chang, 2013) have examined the pragmatic aspect of the regional variation between varieties of Chinese. The current study focuses on pragmatic variation at the actional level, that is, the level of illocutionary force, and examines how male and female university students in Mainland China and Taiwan perform acts of apologising when communicating in quasi-symmetrical situations, which require apologies from an apologiser assuming an equal social status for offences in daily life with various degrees of severity. The speech act of apology is within the broader category of what Goffman (1971) calls remedial work. An apology act is performed to remedy the offence for which the apologiser takes responsibility (Holmes, 1989), to express regret for the offence committed though not necessarily for the act itself (Fraser, 1981), or intra-lingual pragmatic variation in mandarin apologies 61 to re-establish social relation harmony after the offence is committed (Olshtain & Cohen, 1983; Bergman & Kasper, 1993). Following Fraser (1981), Cohen and Olshtain (1981) proposed a model of an apology as a speech act set, which can comprise one or more components, including an explicit apology (i.e. the illocu- tionary force indicating device, henceforth IFID), acknowledgment of respon- sibility, an offer to compensate, and a promise of forbearance or an explanation. This study adopts the idea of an apology as a speech act set and examines the com- ponents that constitute apologies in symmetrical situations of various degrees of social distance and severity of offence. 2. Literature review Th is paper examines sincere apologies as remedial work for offences for which apologisers take responsibility. Unlike requests, refusals, and compliments, apol- ogies have received less attention in terms of intra-lingual pragmatic variation in the literature. Schölmberger (2008) examined apologies in French French and Quebecois French and found divergences on the situational level and an overall rather homogeneous sequence of strategies ([Alerter/Preparator] [IFID] [Excuse/Justification] [Offer of Repair]) between the two groups. Using an eth- nographic approach, Holmes (1989) explored gender differences of apologies in New Zealand English. She found that women made and received more apolo- gies than men, and that apologies happened most frequently between females and rarely between males. She attributed the observed gender differences to the possibly different perception of apologies by the two genders – as self-oriented acts damaging the speaker’s face by males and as other-oriented acts facilitat- ing social harmony by females. Also using an ethnographic approach, Chamani (2014) observed no significant gender differences in the rate of apologies in Per- sian but a significant effect of gender on the use of some apology strategies. He also found that other social factors (power, social distance, and age) affected the use of the apologies by both genders significantly – both genders apologised most frequently to same-gender equals, males to male strangers but females to female friends. Chamani (2014) supported Holmes’s (1989) assumption about the differ- ent perception of apologies by the two genders by relating men’s apology behav- iour to social distance in Brown and Levinson’s (1987) model of politeness and women’s apology behaviour to Wolfson’s (1986) Bulge Theory, which claimed that equality of status encouraged negotiation. With regard to Mandarin Chinese, researchers have been exploring the reali- sation of apologies in different varieties of the language. However, they have not considered the issue from the perspective of variational pragmatics by consider- ing both macro- and micro-social factors. 62 east asian pragmatics 2.1 Apologies in Putonghua ‘Standard Mandarin’ Most studies on apologies in Standard Mandarin have focused on the three IFIDs: buhaoyisi 不好意思 ‘(I’m) embarrassed’, duibuqi 对不起 ‘(I’m) sorry’, and baoqian 抱歉 ‘(I) apologise’. Whereas duibuqi 对不起 and baoqian 抱歉 are con- ventional expressions (Bardovi-Harlig, 2009), or situational-bound utterances (SBU, Kecskes, 2016) that are tied to apologising situations in Chinese, buhaoyisi 不好意思 can be used to denote embarrassed emotion or as an alerter similar to ‘Excuse me’ in English in addition to as an apology expression. The convention- ality of buhaoyisi 不好意思 as an apology expression or SBU was established in Bardovi-Harlig and Su (2018), in which over 60% of their native speakers used the expression to start their apologies. Using a roleplay task, Fu (2010) found buhaoyisi 不好意思 to be the most fre- quently used IFID of apologies used by Standard Mandarin speakers, but Shi and Li (2015) did not find a significant difference between the frequencies of buhao­ yisi 不好意思 and duibuqi 对不起 in their written discourse completion task (DCT) data. Choice of IFIDs was found to be constrained by contextual factors such as power relation (Shi & Li, 2015) and severity of offence (Jin, 2012), with duibuqi 对不起 being used more frequently in apologies to interlocutors of a higher social status and for offences of higher severity, and buhaoyisi 不好意思 in apologies to peers and for offences of lower severity. Luo (2004) examined data elicited by a written DCT of 12 scenarios varying in power relation and social distance and found the combination of an IFID with one or more other strategies to be representative of apologies in Standard Manda- rin. He found IFIDs to be used more frequently with strangers and acquaintances than with family and friends. Both Luo (2004) and Qin (2015) found the choice of other apology strategies to be constrained by power relations. When at a lower status than the interlocutor, the apologiser tended to use Restatement of Offence and Explanation. At a higher status, the apologiser
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