Cultural Differences In Speaking Style

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Introduction
Granted that people in every culture have employeda variety ofspeaking styles in their daily life, knowledge of the speaking styles of different cultures can facilitate people to grasp the essence of social cultural knowledge to communicate with other ones more effectively. As Brown (1994) describes,both language and culture are inseparated since they are both intricately interwoven together to retain the significance of either language or culture. Indeed, numerous studies on cultural difference confirmed that people deriving from different cultures have different speaking styles. Such differences in speaking styles are signs of differences in cultural value, therefore people who desire to communicate with others successfully …show more content…

Among these areas, speech acts which are the utterances that one person employs to express requests, apologies, suggestions, etc. (Olshtain & Cohen, 1991) have been vigorously delved into. Although politeness theories do not give much attention to apologies, in the field of cross-cultural pragmatics, they are, after requests, the second most frequently studied speech act. A possible rationale for the popularity of apologies is their crucial social functions of restoring harmony and enhancing the interpersonal relationship (Norrick, …show more content…

“I ‘m sorry”.
b. Giving explanations or account of causes explicitly or implicitly: eg: “I saw suddenly called to a meeting”.
c. Taking responsibility (specificied or unspecified compensations): e.g. “I haven’t graded it yet”.
d. Making an offer or repair: e.g. “I’ll pay for that damage”.
e. Promising forbearance: e.g.”It won’t happen again”.
Although the intensification would make the apology stronger, bringing more support to the hearers or more humiliation for the speakers (e.g. using intensifiers like very, really, extremely), Blum-Kulka and Olshtain (1984) treats intensifications as an element within an apology rather than a separate strategy.
As the categorization of apology strategies have been constantly revisted by scholars, the above strategies are described in the sequence which people frequently apply in normal lifes. The set of apologetic strategies also reflect the apologiser’s perception of the offence while illustrating requirements have to be enacted to satisfy the

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