Arabic Apology

“Apologies are defined as primarily social acts, carrying effective meaning” (Holmes, 1990, p. 1550). According to Brown and Levinson, 1987, apologies are politeness Strategies. An apology is primarily and essentially a social act. Reiter (2000: 44) further defines an apology as a “compensatory action for an offense committed by S (the speaker which has affected H (the hearer).” This study will examine the speech act of apology made by Saudi native Arabic speakers and British females. It investigates the differences of the apology strategies between these two groups. The study also investigates the role of culture in influencing the ways in which each group realise their apologies.

Research Aim

The aim of my study is to investigate whether

What apology strategies are employed by Saudi and British participants?

3. What characterizes the apology strategies used by Saudi and British participants?

Literature Review

Since the main focus of this study is on the speech act of apology by Saudi and British females, topics such as pragmatics, speech acts, the speech act of apology, cross-cultural studies on apologies, apologies in Arabic, studies on Arabic and apologies and gender will be reviewed in this chapter. It is important to mention here that the information in the review is mainly based on studies of Western culture, as the research on the speech act of apology in Arabic is small in comparison with the large corpus of research on Western apologies.

a. Pragmatics:

Pragmatics has recently become an important subfield of linguistics. Crystal (2004, p. 301), defines pragmatics as “the study of language from the point of view of users, especially of the choices they make, the constraints they encounter in using language in social interaction and the effects of their use of language has on other participants in the act of communication”.

b. Speech Act:

Speech acts, according to Austin (1962), are acts performed by utterances such as giving orders or making

Such studies aimed to indicate how their findings would support communication among people coming from a great variety of socio-cultural backgrounds. The most cited work on speech acts is the Cross-Cultural Study of Speech Act Realization Patterns (CCSARP). This work concerned the speech acts of requests and apologies; and its principle was to study how native speakers realize these acts and to discover any similarities and differences between native speakers and non-native speakers in their realization of these two acts (Blum-Kulka&Olshtain, 1984).

e. Apology in Arabic:

Although Arabic is now a widespread language in a great number of regions, it is notably that studies on apology by Saudi people in general, and particularly on females, is an area of research that is underexplored. However, there are a few studies that have investigated the use of the speech act of apology by speakers of different dialects of Arabic such as (Al-Zumor, 2011; Hussein &Hammouri, 1998; Soliman, 2003).

f. Apologies and