المستخلص: |
Apology is an act of verbally expressing regret and acknowledging something the speaker has done that might have harmed or at least bothered the hearer. Moreover, the speech act of apology presupposes an imbalance in the relationship between the speaker and the hearer, so it acts as a social strategy which aims at maintaining harmony and restoring social equilibrium between the speaker and the hearer. This study investigates apology in both English and Arabic, for the sake of presenting and discussing this act whether explicit or implicit in both languages. The present study tries to achieve the following aims: 1) investigating the use of the act of apology and how it is linguistically realized in both languages; 2) showing the relationship between apology and politeness; 3) comparing the act of apology in both languages. The study has been conducted on the bases of the following hypotheses: 1) the act of apology is a problematic act in Arabic; 2) the act of apology can be applied to some literary works; 3) English tends to use more explicit forms than Arabic, and 4) there is a strong relationship between apology and politeness. To investigate the validity of these hypotheses, theoretical and practical analyses have been adopted; the theoretical part deals mainly with investigating the pragmatic aspect of apology in addition to the semantic and syntactic aspects. The practical part presents a pragmatic analysis of some novelistic texts in English and Arabic.The findings of the investigation prove the validity of all hypotheses. In addition, it has been found that, in Arabic, apology is used in serious offences, in contrast to English, where apology is practised as a normal act in daily communication
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