The Pragmatics of Apology Speech Act Behaviour in Iraqi Arabic and English

This study is concerned with examining the speech act of apology by Iraqi Arabic native speakers (IANs) and Iraqi English foreign language learners (EFLL). It aims at examining the strategies and functions of apologies produced by two groups of participating speakers as well as their perceptions of apology. This study is significant and necessary for the field of pragmatics and politeness theories. It represents a new cultural study that has not been previously examined. From pragmatic and politeness perspectives, all previous research has focused on the realization of apologies rather than how they are perceived. To fill this gap, the current study is believed to be the first that examines both producing and perceiving apology in terms of politeness1 (producing actual speech acts) and politeness2 (perceiving them). The apologies elicited in this study were represented by written and spoken responses. The former was elicited by a Discourse Completing Task followed by a Scale Response Task while the latter was stimulated by an Open Role Play followed by a Semi-Structured Interview. In both cases, the situations designed for eliciting apologies were systematically different and varied according to the social status, gender, age and social distance and the severity of offence. The main results showed that the choice of apology strategies was highly influenced by the collectivistic nature of Iraqi culture as well as the socio-religious conceptualization of apology. The results also showed that, unlike the Iraqi Arabic native speakers, the Iraqi EFL learners were less aware of pragmatic competence than of grammatical competence. The perception of apologies achieved by the Semi-structured interview revealed the participants’ conceptualization of apologies in different contexts. Thus, from a functional perspective, we found that the functions of apologies performed in L1 (Iraqi Arabic) were different from the function of apologies performed in L2 (English). Further, the Iraqi Arabic native speakers tended to use extended apologies for certain offences while the Iraqi EFLL employed a single apology strategy or a non- apology strategy.