International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature

E-ISSN: 2200-3452 & P-ISSN: 2200-3592

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Social Functions of Conditional Apologies in Business Communication

Xing Zhang*
College of Foreign Studies, Jinan University, China
Corresponding Author: Dr. Xing Zhang, E-mail: [email protected]

ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT

Article history The objective of this study is to investigate what social functions conditional apologies perform.
Received: March 04, 2018 To this end, naturally occurring conditional apologies were identified in an authentic business
Accepted: May 05, 2018 corpus, the Cambridge Business English Corpus (CBEC). From the perspective of speakers’
Published: September 01, 2018 face needs, two research questions were discussed. The first question asks what the functions are
Volume: 7 Issue: 5 that conditional apologies are employed to fulfil when used by speakers. The second question is
Advance access: July 2018 whether conditional apologies are oriented towards the speaker’s positive needs. In the spoken
and written corpora of the CBEC, occurrences of sorry-based expressions (sorry and I’m sorry)
collocating with if are extracted, and the ratios of occurrences of conditional apologies to
Conflicts of interest: None all apologies of sorry-based expression are compared. Our findings indicate that in business
Funding: This paper is communication, the conditional apology could be used as a downgrading strategy for the purpose
supported by the of denying full responsibility and decreasing face-threat to the speakers. The conditional apology
Fundamental Research could also be used by speakers to distance themselves from the offense, question the offensiveness
Funds for the Central of the event and to deny the speaker’s knowledge of it or involvement in it. Furthermore, through
Universities (grant no. analysis of real examples, conditional apologies are determined to be driven by a desire to satisfy
the speaker’s positive face needs in these contexts. In addition, our observation reveals that there
15JNYH007) –
is a tendency for the conditional apology to be used with a coordinating conjunction but to add
Constructing a Semantic
a contrast statement in order to add detailed explanation regarding the causes of those offenses.
Knowledge Network of
English Words: A Key words: Conditional Apology, Social Functions, Positive Needs
Multimodal Perspective.

INTRODUCTION Levinson (1987) described negative face as the want that

one’s actions be unimpeded by others, while positive face
Face and Apology
is the desire for one’s wants to be desirable to others (62).
The notion of face is defined as the “positive social value a Ogiermann (2009) agreed that S’s positive face is the desire
person effectively claims for himself by the line others as- to be liked by and share wants with others (p. 52).
sume he has taken during a particular contact” (Goffman,
1955: p.5). In social interactions, it is natural for partici-
Conditional Apology
pants to maintain and protect face in interactions, and acts
that violate or fail to satisfy face needs are considered to be Conditional apology was defined by Kitao S. and Kitao K.
face-threatening acts (Brown &Levinson, 1987). In addition, (2013) as an apology that makes use of a conditional form,
an apology is one of these important facework strategies e.g., “I’m sorry if you were offended”. Research regarding
used to repair damages caused by face-threatening acts in conditional apologies is quite limited (Miller, 2014), even
various types of interactions. though apology has been studied intensively in numerous
Multiple definitions of apology have been proposed from studies. There has also been disagreement regarding its func-
different perspectives, such as “social acts conveying affec- tion in the context of adopting apologies in the conditional
tive meaning” (Holmes, 1990: p.155), or “compensatory form. Shuman (1999) alleged that the conditional apology was
action to an offence in the doing of which the S (speaker) not an apology at all, as “couching an offer to apologize in
was causally involved and which is costly to the H (hearer)” conditional terms” called its sincerity into question (p. 186).
(Kasper & Blum-Kulka, 1993: p.82). Holmes (1990) defines In addition, Eisinger (2011) also claimed that the condition-
apology as a speech act addressed to B’s face-needs and in- al apology is one of the more common types of non-apology
tended to remedy an offence for which A takes responsibility (p. 137). Friedman (2006) noted that since a conditional apol-
and thus to restore equilibrium between A and B (where A ogy does not usually indicate remorse, it cannot be counted
is the apologizer, and B is the person offended). Brown and as effective apology. Ogiermann (2009) mentioned that in

Published by Australian International Academic Centre PTY.LTD.

Copyright (c) the author(s). This is an open access article under CC BY license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
http://dx.doi.org/10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.7n.5p.96
Social Functions of Conditional Apologies in Business Communication 97

her material, there was only one instance of sorry combined as “effects which a speaker intends to cause by performing
with a conditional clause introduced by if, and she believed its such acts” (p. 280). According to Norrick, the social func-
function “briefly takes up the offence while indirectly ques- tions of apologies include serving “to evince good manners,
tioning its existence”. However, Miller (2014) supported the to assuage the addressee’s wrath, or simply to get off the
claim that conditional apologies can be meaningful and genu- hook and be on one’s way” (1978: 280). This researcher also
ine, as such apologies could be “non-deceptive and appropri- listed possible reasons for why we apologize, such as “to
ately genuine” (p. 406). This researcher also acknowledged appease people we have injured, to avoid accusations and/or
that conditional apologies have been largely understudied, reprisals, to implicate contrition, and, of course, to elicit acts
thereby calling for a more “nuanced account of being genu- of forgiving and be freed from guilt (Norrick, 1978: 280). On
ine” (p. 406) to access the degree of genuineness of an apolo- a similar note, Fraser (1981) described how the offender may
gy, e.g., being absolutely genuine or being relatively genuine. try to make things right, “thereby relieving himself of some
In line with the abovementioned issues, the current re- if not all of the associated moral responsibility” (p.259). Ed-
search intends to investigate what interactional functions mondson (1981) recognized the illocutionary force of apolo-
conditional apology can perform when incorporated into the gy as an attempt to restore social harmony, claiming its most
framework of face theory as proposed by Brown and Levin- predictable function as an attempt on the part of S to cause H
son (1987). This study seeks an answer to the following two to “withdraw a preceding complaint” (p. 280).
questions: the first question is what interactional functions
the conditional apology can accomplish in real business in- Speaker’s Face Orientation
teractions. The second question is to determine whether a
conditional apology is actually oriented towards the speak- As noted by Ogiermann (2009), there has been considerable
er’s positive needs. controversy regarding whether it is the speaker (S)’s or the
hearer (H)’s face that apologies redress. A number of studies
considered the apologies to be acts oriented towards the H’s
LITERATURE REVIEW face needs (Brown & Levinson, 1978; Holmes 1989, 1995).
Apologies in Business Settings For example, Brown and Levinson (1987:68) asserted that
apologies threaten S’s positive face because they directly dam-
There has been a growing body of literature on apologies in age S’s positive face wants (that S’s actions to be approved
business settings (e.g., Bisel & Messersmith, 2012; Hoffman, and liked). Edmondson and House (1981) stated that the act
1988, Levi, 1997; Trosborg & Shaw, 1998; Čubajevaitė & [of apology] was “highly hearer-supportive and often self-de-
Ruzaitė, 2007). As early as twenty years ago, Hoffman (1998) meaning” (p. 45), as it could “placate the hearer” and “restore
examined apologies used in employment termination cases one’s own social status” (p. 153). Holmes defended apologies
to discuss why an effective apology could resolve disputes as being “addressed to H’s face needs and intended to remedy
and what constitutes an effective apology, as well as its legal an offense for which S takes responsibility (1995: 155). Ol-
consequences. Under the context of workplace relationships, shtain (1989) believed apologies were “face-saving for the H
Davila (2004) proposed a theoretical model to combine “three and face-threatening for the S” (p.156), as they were used by S
of the hypothesized antecedents of forgiveness: offense se- to restore H’s face which was damaged by the offense, which
verity, the content of the apology and the perceived sincerity is costly to H’s own face, whereas Meier (1992) argued that
of the offender’s sincerity” (p. 795). Čubajevaitė and Ruzaitė the apology was remedial work used as a face-saving device
(2007) investigated the routine of apologizing in the spoken “as regards S (not H)” (p. 31), with an intention to repair S’s
business corpus of the British National Corpus. They claimed image or save S’s face. She then claimed that “concern for H’s
that apologies were of special importance as they could in- face is only a by-product” of such an intention (p. 31). Ogier-
crease respect and stabilize relationships between colleagues mann (2009) supported this view that apologies could restore
in business communication. Additionally, they classified the the speaker’s positive face, namely, “the desire to be liked by
faults of these apologies into linguistic malfunctioning and and share wants with others” (p. 52), thereby motivating apol-
non-linguistic malfunctioning reasons. ogy, instead of being damaged by it. Her reason is that S’s pos-
itive face is central to all apologies because we would have no
Social Functions of Apologies reason to humiliate ourselves by attempting to set things right
if we did not care about our image in others’ eyes.
Focusing on remedial exchange, Goffman (1971) described This school of views seems to highlight the importance
the social functions of the apology as compensatory actions of the speaker’s face needs in affecting ways in which con-
for restoring and maintaining social harmony. This research- ditional apologies are adopted. Therefore, this paper tends to
er noted that those acts of remedial work allow “the partici- explore these naturally occurring conditional apologies from
pants to go on their way, if not with satisfaction that matters the perspective of the speaker’s positive needs by adopting
are closed, then at least with the right to act as if they feel Brown and Levinson’s Face Theory.
that matters are closed and that ritual equilibrium has been
restored” (p. 140).
When Norrick (1978) extended the discussion of illocu- METHODOLOGY
tionary acts of apology originally classified as expressive in Previous empirical research on apologies has relied heavi-
Searle (1976), he defined the social functions of speech acts ly on data elicited via discourse completion tasks, a meth-
98 IJALEL 7(5):96-101

od originally developed by Blum-Kulka and Olshtain apologies. In comparison, the ratio of occurrences of con-
(1984), which has been adopted by other scholars, as well ditional apology to all apologies of sorry-based expressions
(e.g. Kasper, 1989; Nureddeen, 2008; Ogiermann, 2008, in the written sub-corpus is nearly twice that in the spoken
2009; Jebahi, 2011). However, it is undeniable that natural- sub-corpus. As shown in Table 2, The Mutual Information
istic apologies cannot be produced when elicited by business score expresses the extent to which sorry co-occurs with
communication (Filimonova, 2016), as a compromise exists if compared to the number of times they appear separate-
between authenticity of language and the control of multiple ly. The T-score expresses the certainty with which we can
situational factors (cf. Kasper, 2000; Félix-Brasdefer, 2010). evaluate how strong the association between sorry and if is,
Considering this possibility, the present study is conduct- i.e. to conclude their co-occurrence is not random, at least.
ed on a naturalistic corpus, Cambridge Business English Cor- In Table 2, the T-score of sorry and if is more than twice that
pus (CBEC) from Cambridge International Corpus. CBEC is of the written sub-corpus. Considering that very frequent
a huge collection of British and American business materi- word combinations tend to reach a high T-score value even
als in different aspects, such as reports, documents, books, they are not significant as collocations, this result shows the
and the business sections in newspapers. The Cambridge association between sorry and if in the written sub-corpus is
Business English Corpus also includes the Cambridge and stronger than that in the spoken sub-corpus.
Nottingham Spoken Business English Corpus (CANBEC), a
joint project between Cambridge University Press and Not-
Excerpt 1
tingham University which contains recordings of formal and
informal meetings, presentations, telephone conversations Speaker 1: I’m sorry if my statement misled the sergeant.
and lunchtime conversations from companies of all sizes. Speaker 1: My nerves are on edge.
Speaker 2: You should consult a qualified psychiatrist.
The speaker expressed his apology, but he adopted a con-
DATA ANALYSIS ditional clause to question the offensiveness of this event.
This study utilizes CANBEC as the spoken sub-corpus, and This attempt to mitigate the severity of this offense is reflect-
CBEC as the written sub-corpus. The statistics of these two ed in using “if my statement misled the sergeant”, rather than
sub-corpora are shown in Table 1. “that my statement misled the sergeant”. The speaker also
In Table 1, the number of tokens in the written sub-cor- added an explanation to his action. The hearer did not accept
pus is more than 5 times more than those in spoken sub-cor- this apology, but responded with a remedial suggestion to
pus, and the number of words is also nearly 5 times more imply that the speaker’s action did have bad influence even
than those in spoken sub-corpus. though he was not willing to face the severity of its con-
Table 2 shows the co-occurrence counts of sorry and if sequences. However, the speaker initiated this conditional
in spoken sub-corpus and written sub-corpus. The colloca- apology because he was driven by his desire to be liked by
tions of sorry found in CANBEC and CBEC provide some the hearer or be considered as responsible by the hearer.
preliminary observations as to the distribution of conditional
apologies in both sub-corpora. Co-occurrence count is the
Excerpt 2
number of cases when sorry (or a sorry-based expression)
collocates with if, which is considered to be a conditional Speaker 1: Oh, sorry if I was being a bit off this morning, but
apology in this study. The candidate count is the number of I had about enough.
occurrence of if in this sub-corpus. Ratio refers to the occur- Speaker 2: Well I gathered. I gathered.
rences of conditional apologies to all apologies in the form Speaker 1: Paul phoned.
of sorry-based expressions. Speaker 2: Hey?
In CANBEC, we extract 16 occurrences of sorry-based In this case, the speaker apologized with a conditional
expression (sorry or I’m sorry) collocating with if, while the clause to maintain his image for the sake of meeting a social
number of sorry-based expressions is 1,188 cases. In CBEC, norm, i.e. to be liked by others when he was not sure whether
there are 71 occurrences out of 3,472 cases of sorry-based his earlier action damaged his image. Moreover, his apology
was followed by an explanation to justify his behaviour in
order to get the hearer’s understanding. As such, this con-
Table 1. Statistics of spoken and written sub‑corpus ditional apology was driven by the hope of satisfying the
Sub‑corpora Tokens Words speaker’s positive face needs and for the purpose of denying
his awareness of this offense or even question the offensive-
Spoken 4,925,395 4,122,428
ness of it. The implication by this conditional apology is that
Written 254,968,571 213,402,094 the speaker himself may not be off at all.

Table 2. Ratio of conditional apology to all apologies in spoken and written sub‑corpus
Sub‑corpus Co‑occurrence Count of sorry‑based Ratio Candidate count T‑score MI
count of sorry and if expressions
Spoken 16 1,188 0.01 12,910 3.997 10.959
Written 76 3,472 0.02 276,206 8.366 7.143
Social Functions of Conditional Apologies in Business Communication 99

Excerpt 3 of this interruption. Even though he has already asked for

Speaker 1: I did update these. I don’t know if you’ve been permission with a polite question, this conditional apology
updating them. Erm Circuit erm obviously this is was orientated towards his need to sound considerate to-
Thursday. No update. wards other participants in the conversation. His concern re-
ceived positive feedback when the hearer replied “go on” to
Speaker 1: S orry if you can’t see this. Couple of Sara-Jane’s.
indicate that the hearer did not mind the topic being shifted,
Er on that’s today isn’t it.
which also implicitly showed that this apology was received
Speaker 2: Right. Right. Right.
as more of a request.
Speaker 1: Erm guess I’ll do that. You’ve written a fairly
good P R S again.
In this conversation, the speaker apologized if the hear- Excerpt 6
er did not get the updates. His unwillingness to accept full I’m sorry if this appears to be looking a gift horse in the
responsibility is reflected in this conditional apology, which mouth but these things do occur.
sounds more similar to a means to distance himself from the This apologizer made a formal apology by the use of a
offense that the hearer failed to get an update. The hearer did rather formal expression—”I’m sorry” instead of the short
not respond to his apology at the next turn, so the speaker form “sorry”, then an if-introduced clause to show conces-
kept on explaining until the hearer uttered Right as a sign of sion in this apology and to imply that this possibly would not
uptake. This conditional apology is an attempt to excuse the be looking a gift horse in the mouth. This can be considered
speaker’s involvement in the offence, which is motivated to as an act to question whether this event is actually offensive
satisfy his own face’s needs, since he provided many expla- as far as the apologizer is concerned. Nevertheless, the apol-
nation before his apology. ogizer still expressed his apology, an act that is driven by his
positive face needs to be liked by the hearer.
Excerpt 4
Speaker 1: So sorry if I’m harping on and whatever, but it’s FINDINGS AND CONCLUSIONS
my job to harp on when the figures are down. As noted above, the originality of this research lies in its
Speaker 2: Stage where we start looking at the likes of Post empirical analysis of natural examples of conditional apol-
Office and erm A V A. However, A V A are getting ogies in the form of combinations of sorry and sorry-based
unhappy with me at the moment because we were expressions with if from the perspectives of speakers’ face
to see them on the twenty-fifth of September, and needs. This study discusses how conditional apologies per-
we still don’t have anything to show them. form various social functions in authentic business corpora
Speaker 2: And there’s a lot of product there for us. adopting the concept of face from Brown and Levinson’s
In this conversation, the speaker used a conditional (1987) politeness theory. After extracting and examining all
clause to apologize, saying “if” he was harping on, rather of the collocates of sorry (sorry-based expression) and if in
than “sorry” that he’s harping on, in order to downgrade the Cambridge Business English Corpus, we find that condition-
severity of the offense. This attempt enabled the speaker to al apologies are generally used to accept partial responsibili-
create a distance from the offense, serving the purpose of ty for offenses caused by the speaker so the face-threat to the
denying full responsibility. Thus, this apology decreases the speaker would be downgraded in interactions. For instance,
face-threat to the speaker, for his willingness to apologize in certain contexts, they could be used by speakers to mit-
indicates that he cares for his image or face even though he igate the severity of an offense or to avoid being involved
does not take full responsibility. His apology did not get ex- with the offense by distancing themselves from the offense.
cused or rejected as generally apologetic terms from other More often than not, the doubts regarding whether the event
participants in the meeting, but it was responded to with an is offensive or not or whether the speakers have knowledge
explanation about what their difficulties were and why they of this offence could also be reflected in conditional apol-
were in the current situation, which implies that the other ogies. Most importantly, it is found that these conditional
hearers were aware that the drive for the speaker’s apology apologies could be oriented towards satisfying speakers’
is mainly to maintain his own face. positive face needs, as they are motivated by the speaker’s
desires to be liked by other participants in the conversation,
despite their unwillingness to accept full responsibility for
Excerpt 5
these offenses.
Speaker 1: However, he just never does anything about it. In addition, our observation also reveals that there is a
However, anyway. Right. tendency for conditional apologies to be used with a coordi-
Speaker 2: Can I just raise something on Sorry if I may nating conjunction, but, to add a contrast statement. Among
Ralph. the 16 cases of conditional apology, 4 are used with but to
Speaker 2: Go on. give information contrasting the previous statement, while
In this interaction, this speaker added an apology after there are 13 cases in written corpora when conditional apolo-
he asked for permission to change the subject to another is- gies are used with those but-introduced conjunctions. Specif-
sue. His apology, a combination of sorry and a conditional ically, these conjunctions are used to add further explanation
clause, was used to show his awareness of the offensiveness as to the causes of those offences. This phenomenon could
100 IJALEL 7(5):96-101

be interpreted as a concession made by the apologizer to take Fraser, B. (1981). On apologizing. Conversational routine,
partial responsibility in the act of apologizing, but the apol- 259-271.
ogizer also wants to give some justification or explanation Friedman, H. H. (2006). The power of remorse and apology.
for the purpose of avoiding full admission of responsibility. Journal of College and Character, 7(1).
Notably, the ratio of occurrences of conditional apolo- Goffman, E. (1955). On face-work: An analysis of ritu-
gies to all apologies of sorry-based expressions in written al elements in social interaction. Psychiatry, 18(3),
sub-corpus is nearly twice that found in spoken corpora, 213-231.
which could be contributed to the style features of written Goffman, E. (1971). The structure of remedial interchange.
communication, where people tend to be more tentative and Relation in public. New York: Basic Books.
elaborate than in spoken communication in order to be more Hoffman, D. A. (2002). The use of apology and employment
cautious and polite. This observation could be further inves- cases. Employee Rights Quarterly, 2(3), 21-30.
tigated in the future to discuss the possible roles that regis- Holmes, J. (1990). Apologies in New Zealand English 1.
ter variations could play in affecting the uses of conditional Language in Society, 19(2), 155-199.
apologies. Jebahi, K. (2011). Tunisian university students’ choice of
apology strategies in a discourse completion task. Jour-
FUNDING nal of Pragmatics, 43(2), 648-662.
Kasper, G. (1988). Variation in interlanguage speech act re-
This paper is supported by the Fundamental Research Funds alization. University of Hawai’i Working Papers in En-
for the Central Universities (grant no. 15JNYH007) – Con- glish as a Second Language 7 (2).
structing a Semantic Knowledge Network of English Words: Kasper, G. (2000). Data collection in pragmatics research.
A Multimodal Perspective. Culturally speaking: Managing rapport through talk
across cultures, 316341.
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Social Functions of Conditional Apologies in Business Communication 101

APPENDIX 1 4. I’m sorry if this appears to be looking a gift horse in the

Collocates of sorry and if followed by but-introduced con- mouth but these things do occur.
junction in the spoken corpus. 5. Mr Duncan, in contrast, struck a more measured tone.
1. I’m sorry if it’s one of your bad days, but things will get ‘We are sorry if there are many job losses but it is not
better. quite as bad as people feared,’ he said.
2. I’m sorry if my behaviour last night caused your wife 6. I am sorry if Ken Livingstone has not understood this
anxiety, but I have a burning desire to sleep with every but I have explained it to him.
woman I meet. 7. Sorry if this sounds familiar. However, the message
3. Oh sorry if I was being a bit off this morning, but I had bears repeating, again and again.
about enough. 8. It’s always a takeaway, which costs around GBP 15 for
4. So sorry if I’m harping on and whatever, but it’s my job two. Sorry if that doesn’t sound very millionaire-ish, but
to harp on when the figures are down. I’m just a normal guy.
9. I am sorry if this whole episode has caused her hurt but
APPENDIX 2 to be honest it is not about Penny - it’s about business.
10. Naturally, he is sorry if some people were offended, but
Collocates of sorry and if followed by but-introduced con-
they should know by now that with Gordon there nor-
junction in written corpus.
mally comes some pretty choice language.
1. Deborah Jeane Palfrey told reporters that she is “genu-
11. We are very sorry if this situation happen, but it was
inely sorry “ if people are hurt when identified as clients
only a single incident among plenty of documents we
of her elite escort service - but she has no choice but
to call them to prove that her escorts provided only the are handling every week.
fantasy of sex. 12. Sorry if that sounded strange but so far my approver was
2. This food is created. I’m as good as anyone. I can eat my boss! Thank you for this explanation!
this as well, and I’m sorry if you feel guilty about me 13. I’m sorry if it sounds as though I’m advocating that you
eating it, but this is a meal to be had and I’m going for it. blow the whistle on your brother. However, he has had
3. After reviewing Dugan’s letter, LaTourette said he was “ use of the income and should be in a position to pay the
sorry if I touched a nerve, but my concern is not for Mr. tax, whereas your father may not have the money should
Dugan’s feelings but instead for the thousands of people the taxman chase him, not only for back taxes but also
in Northeast Ohio whose jobs are at risk and the many possible penalties for late payment. The pension bomb-
shareholders of National City Bank shell should be reviewed.
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