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Applied Linguistics 1989 10(2):194-213; doi:10.1093/applin/10.2.194
© 1989 by Oxford University Press
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Sex Differences and Apologies: One Aspect of Communicative Competence1

JANET HOLMES

Victoria University of Wellington

This paper examines sex differences in the distribution of apologies in order to illuminate the complexity of the language learner's task in acquiring communicative competence. Apologies express negative politeness. They signal the speaker's awareness of having impinged on the hearer's negative face and restricted her/his freedom of action in some way. A corpus of apologies permits an analysis of the range of strategies used by New Zealanders for expressing this aspect of negative politeness as well as the distributional patterns for women and men. The offences which elicit apologies and the strategies selected to realize them provide clues to the kind of speech acts the community regards as FTAs (face-threatening acts) and the relative seriousness of different FTAs. As with other speech acts, apologies can serve as illuminating sources of information on the sociocultural values of a speech community, including possible differences between female and male values. Learning how to produce, interpret, and respond to them appropriately requires a thorough familiarity with those values.


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