Apologies in South Asian Varieties of English: A Corpus-Based Study on Indian and Sri Lankan English

Abstract

Despite notable recent exceptions (for instance Funke, 2020), corpus-based research into South Asian Englishes has so far concentrated on structural features. Thus, empirical pragmatic research in said varieties is still sparse, although there has been increasing interest in variational pragmatics in world Englishes (Schneider & Barron, 2008). For instance, requests have been examined in both native and non-native varieties of English. However, studies on apologies have largely focussed on first-language varieties of English (Deutschmann, 2003). Against this background, the present study investigates apology patterns in two South Asian second-language varieties of English, Indian and Sri Lankan English, and their historical input variety British English. With the help of the spoken parts of the respective components of the International Corpus of English, multifactorial analyses—including an improved form of random forests that explicitly takes interactions between several predictors into account—model the choice of sorry as opposed to other apology forms. Findings suggest quantitative differences in the use of sorry which are influenced by factors such as type of apology, topic and age or combinations of said factors. In sum, this study suggests that apology forms and frequencies are sensitive to the speakers’ regional background and sociobiographic factors as well as to structural and contextual parameters.

Politeness Levels of Thanking and Apologizing: A Corpus Linguistic Investigation Across Generations in the Movies

“…Furthermore, there are several relevant previous studies for this current study. In the first previous study, apologies in speakers of South Indian and Sri Lankan English were analyzed using a corpus engine (Degenhardt & Bernaisch, 2022). To get the data, they used the International Corpus of English (ICE).…”

“…It is important to recognize the constraints of our research and the particular context in which our findings should be interpreted. We have included pertinent literature to support our interpretations and arguments throughout this debate, including works by Degenhardt and Bernaisch (2022), Jaeger (2019), and Saengkaew (2016. In order to put our findings into context, these studies offer insightful information about the dynamics of politeness and the displays of thankfulness and regret.…”