How to apologize in French and Polish: pragma-semantic study Cover Image

Comment s’excuser en français et en polonais : étude pragma-sémantique
How to apologize in French and Polish: pragma-semantic study

Author(s): Francis Grossmann, Anna Krzyżanowska
Subject(s): History, Language and Literature Studies, Semiotics / Semiology, Theoretical Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Epistemology, Contemporary Philosophy, Analytic Philosophy, Philosophy of Language, Methodology and research technology
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego
Keywords: apology; discursive routines; politeness; discourse analysis; speech acts

Summary/Abstract: This paper focuses on discursive routines used to express apology in email exchange. We adopt a contrastive (French-Polish) and intercultural approach, integrating apology in the politeness theory. We start from the hypothesis of cognitive grammars (see e.g. L a nga cke r 2008a and 2008b) that apology, even if it includes a shared conceptual core in various languages, presents for each language an original configuration that specifically reorganizes semantic constituents. The results of the research previously conducted by Dz ia d k iew icz (2007) show that, in the case of apology, the extent of the polite scale in Polish is not the same as in French. The corpus is composed of interpersonal emails (about 200 mails per language) collected in both languages, in professional or private context.

  • Issue Year: 2018
  • Issue No: 30
  • Page Range: 89-108
  • Page Count: 20
  • Language: French