Title: Social variation in the use of apology formulae in the British National Corpus
Abstract: This paper explores sociolinguistic variation in the act of apologising in the spoken part of the British National Corpus. The starting point for the investigation is the ‘apology formula’, as exemplified by the lexemes ‘afraid’, ‘apologise’, ‘apology’, ‘excuse’, ‘forgive’, ‘pardon’, ‘regret’ and ‘sorry’. The sub-corpus used for the study comprises a spoken text collection of about five million words and represents dialogue produced by more than 1,700 speakers in a number of different conversational settings. More than 3,000 examples of apologising form the basis for the analysis. In the BNC, young and middle-class speakers favoured the use of the apology form. Only minor gender differences in apologising were apparent. The study implies that formulaic politeness is an important linguistic marker of social class and also shows that corpus linguistic methodology can successfully be used in socio-pragmatic research.
Publication Year: 2006
Publication Date: 2006-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 5
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