Apologies in Akan discourse

Journal of Pragmatics

Volumn 31, Issue 5, 1999, Pages 709-734

  Obeng, Samuel Gyasi ^a  

^a INDIANA UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Apology; Circumlocution; Down toners; Face works; Politeness; Social distance; Social power; Speech act

Indexed keywords

EID: 0033130589     PISSN: 03782166     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1016/s0378-2166(98)00089-7     Document Type: Article

References (53)

1. Austin, Paddy, 1990. Politeness revisited: The dark side. In: Allan Bell and Janet Holmes, eds., New Zealand Ways of Speaking English, 276-295. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
2. Blum-Kulka, Shoshana and Elite Olshtain, 1984. Requests and apologies: A cross-cultural study of speech act realization patterns. Applied Linguistics 5: 196-213.
3. Blum-Kulka, Shoshana, Elite Olshtain, Brenda Danet and Gherson Rimona, 1985. The language of requesting in israeli society. In: Joseph Forgas, ed., Language and Social Situations, 113-139. New York: Springer.
4. Brown, Penelope and Stephen Levinson, 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
5. Cohen, Andrew and Elite Olshtain, 1981. Developing a measure of socio-cultural competence: The case of apology. Language Learning 31: 113-134.
6. Coulthard, Malcom, 1977. An introduction to discourse analysis. London: Longman. de Kadt, Elizabeth, 1998. The concept of face and its applicability to the Zulu language. Journal of Pragmatics 29: 173-191.
7. Duranti, Alessandro, 1981. The samoan FONO: A sociolinguistic study. Pacific Linguistics, Series B, vol. 80. Canberra: Department of Linguistics, R.S. Pac. S. Australian National University.
8. Duranti, Alessandro, 1994. From Grammar to Politics: Linguistic Anthropology in A Western Samoan Village. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
9. Edmondson, W.J., 1981. On saying youre sorry. In: Florian Coulmas, ed., Conversational Routine, 273-288. The Hague: Mouton.
10. Faerch, Claus and Gabriele Kasper, 1989. Internal and external modification in interlanguage request realization. In: S. Blum-Kulka, J. House and G. Kasper, eds., Cross-cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies, 221-247. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
11. Fraser, Bruce, 1981. On apologizing. In: Florian Coulmas, ed., Conversational Routine, 259-271. The Hague: Mouton.
12. Fraser, Bruce, 1990. Perspectives of politeness. Journal of Pragmatics 14: 237-257.
13. Goffman, Erving, 1967. Interactional Rituals: Essays in Face-to-face Behavior. New York: Anchor Books.
14. Goffman, Erving, 1971. Relations in Public. New York: Basic Books.
15. Goffman, Erving, 1972. On face work: On analysis of ritual elements in social interaction. In: J. Laver and S. Hutcheson, eds., Communication in Face to Face Interaction, 319-346. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
16. Grice, Paul H., 1975. Logic and conversation In: P. Cole and J.L. Morgan, eds., Syntax and Semantics, Vol. 3, 41-58. New York: Academic Press.
17. Hartford, Beverly S. and Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig, 1996. At your earliest convenience: A study of student requests to faculty. Pragmatics and Language Learning Monograph Series 7: 55-70.
18. Holmes, Janet, 1990. Apologies in new zealand english. Language in Society 19(2): 155-199.
19. Holmes, Janet, 1995. Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.
20. Hymes, Dell, 1972. Models of the interaction of language and social life. In: J. Gumperz and D. Hymes, eds., Directions in Sociolinguistics, 35-71. New York: Holt.
21. Hymes, Dell, 1974. Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
22. Ide, Sachiko, 1989. Formal forms of discernment: Two neglected aspects of universals of linguistic politeness. Multilingua 8: 223-248.
23. Irvine, Judith, 1974. Strategies of status manipulation in wolof greeting. In: R. Bauman and J. Sherzer, eds., Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking, 167-191. New York: Cambridge University Press.
24. Kasper, Gabriele, 1990. Linguistic politeness: Current issues. Journal of Pragmatics 14: 193-218.
25. Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Cathrine, 1994. Les Interactions Verbales, Vol. 3. Paris: Colin.
26. Lakoff, Robin, 1977. What you can do with words: Politeness, pragmatics and performatives. In: Andy Rogers, Bob Wall and John Murphy, eds., Proceedings of Texas Conference on Performatives, Presuppositions and Implicatures, 79-106. Arlington, VA: Center for Applied Linguistics.
27. Leech, Geoffrey, 1983. Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longmans.
28. Levinson, Stephen, 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
29. Matsumoto, Yoshiko, 1988. Re-examination of the universality of face: Politeness phenomena in japanese. Journal of Pragmatics 12(4): 403-426.
30. Matsumoto, Yoshiko, 1989. Politeness and conversational universals: Observations from japan. Multilingua 8: 207-221.
31. Nwoye, Onuigbo, 1992. Linguistic politeness and socio-cultural variation of the notion of face. Journal of Pragmatics 18: 309-328.
32. Obeng, Samuel Gyasi, 1994. Verbal indirection in akan informal discourse. Journal of Pragmatics 21: 37-65.
33. Obeng, Samuel Gyasi, 1996. The proverb as a mitigating and politeness strategy in akan discourse. Anthropological Linguistics 38: 521-549.
34. Obeng, Samuel Gyasi, 1997a. Communicational strategies: Persuasion and politeness in akan judicial discourse. Text 17: 25-51.
35. Obeng, Samuel Gyasi, 1997b. Language and politics: Indirectness in political discourse. Discourse and Society 8: 49-83.
36. Obeng, Samuel Gyasi, 1997c. From morphophonology to sociolinguistics: Akan hypocoristic day-names. Multilingua: Journal of Cross-cultural and Inter-language Communication 16: 39-56.
37. Obeng, Samuel Gyasi, in press. In Future if I buy a dog, III call it okyeman-is-ungrateful. Indirect Response to Potentially Difficult Communicative Situations Through the Pseudo-epicenter: The Case of Some Akan Dog Names. International Journal of the Sociology of Language.
38. Ochs Keenan, Elinor, 1975. the universality of conversational implicature. In: Ralph Fasold and Roger Shuy, eds., Analyzing Variation in Language, 255-268. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
39. Olshtain, Elite, 1989. Apologies across languages. In: S. Blum-Kulka, J. House and G. Kasper, eds., Cross-cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies, 155-173. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
40. Olshtain, Elite and Andrew Cohen, 1983. Apology: A speech act set. In: Nessa Wolfson and Elliot Judd, eds., Sociolinguistics and Language Acquisition, 18-35. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.
41. Owen, Marion, 1983. Apologies and Remedial Interchanges: A Study of Language Use in Social Interaction. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
42. Phillips, Susan U., 1986. Some functions of spatial positioning and alignment in the organization of courtroom discourse. In: S. Fisher and A. Dundes, eds.. Discourse and institutional authority: Medicine, education, and law, 223-233. Advances in Discourse Processes, Vol. 19. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
43. Rintell, Ellen M. and Candace J. Mitchell, 1989. Studying requests and apologies: An inquiry into method. In: S. Blum-Kulka, J. House and G. Kasper, eds., Cross-cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies, 248-272. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
44. Sherzer, J. 1974. Namakke, summakke, kormakke: Three types of cuna speech events. In: R. Bauman and J. Sherzer, eds., Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking, 263-282. New York: Cambridge University Press.
45. Trosborg, A., 1987. Apology strategies in natives/non-natives. Journal of Pragmatics 11: 147-167.
46. Vollmer, Helmut J. and Elite Olshtain, 1989. The language of apologies in german. In: S. Blum-Kulka, J. House and G. Kasper, eds., Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies, 197-220. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
47. Watts, Richard, Sachiko Ide and Konrad Ehlich, 1992. Politeness in Language: Studies in Its History, Theory, and Practice. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
48. Weizman, Elda, 1989. Requestive hints. In: S. Blum-Kulka, J. House and G. Kasper, eds., Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies, 71-95. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
49. Werkhofer, Konrad T., 1992. Traditional and modern views: The social constitution and the power of politeness. In: Richard Watts, Sachiko Ide and Konrad Ehlich, eds., Politeness in Language: Studies in Its History, Theory, and Practice, 155-202. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
50. Wierzbicka, Anna, 1985. Different cultures, different languages, different speech acts. Journal of Pragmatics 9: 145-178.
51. Yankah, Kwesi, 1991. Oratory in akan society. Discourse and Society 2: 47-64.
52. Yankah, Kwesi, 1995. Speaking for the chief. Okyeame and the Politics of Akan Royal Oratory. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
53. Samuel Gyasi Obeng is a faculty in the Linguistics Department in Indiana University, Bloomington. Prior to joining the IUB faculty, he was a senior lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Ghana. His research interests are in the pragmatics of prosody, general and ethno-pragmatics and sociolinguistics (especially verbal indirectness, juridical and political discourse). He has published two books (a third is under review) and several papers in such refereed journals as Journal of Language and Social Psychology, Anthropological Linguistics, Journal of Pragmatics, Text, Multilingua, Journal of African Languages and Cultures, and Discourse and Society.