FUNCTIONAL AND SEMANTIC FEATURES OF APOLOGY SPEECH ACT (BASED ON THE ENGLISH FICTIONAL DISCOURSE)

Abstract

The article presents the description of the functional and semantic features of apology speech act on the basis of the English fictional discourse. The authors analyse the speech act not only within the frames of Politeness Theory, but it focuses attention on the functional and semantic properties of apology speech act. The researchers attempt to study the functions of conventional phrases for speech realisation of apology as well as other communicative meanings of the same phrases. The article also provides the description of apology speech act’s status in taxonomies of illocutionary speech acts of different scientists (J. Austin, J. Searle, G. Leech, W. J. Edmonson). The results show that apology speech act can function as a behabitive, convivial or expressive in speech. This has allowed us to single out primary and secondary illocutionary aims of apology speech act. Besides, there is a detailed description of the pragmatic situation of realisation of apology speech act in the article. We classify apology speech act on the basis of sincerity criterion, according to which we distinguish sincere, phatic and official apology speech act. We also describe the communicative means that are used to express apology speech act. The article dwells on the apology formulae such as “Pardon me” or “Excuse me” which include the semantic component of “apology” but are never used as such. They serve to realise other pragmatic functions.

Keywords

• politeness
• speech act
• apology
• illocutionary aim
• illocutionary act behabitive
• expressive