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Pré-Publication, Document De Travail Année : 2022

A corpus-assisted approach to conventionalised apologies in Japanese and English computer-mediated discourse

Résumé

This study provides a corpus-assisted contrastive investigation of the apology-like expressions su(m)imasen ‘(I’m) sorry’ in Japanese and sorry in English. The two expressions are investigated in computer-mediated discourse, as represented in the web corpora JaTenTen11 and EnTenTen20, which are provided by Sketch Engine and are seen as comparable. Using collocational analysis and close reading of the extended concordance lines, quantitative (statistical) and qualitative analysis are combined. In this understanding, speech acts are investigated not as single units detached from the context, but as part of longer stretches of text, in an effort to go beyond the merely linguistic level of analysis to access the social and interactional dimension of communication. The analysis revealed that both su(m)imasen and sorry are recurrent and conventional practices that frequently co-occurs with two types of items, namely elements referring to the object of regret (i.e., the reason for apologising) and intensifiers. However, while su(m)imasen is often accompanied by visual elements and metalinguistic descriptors (henji ‘answer’, shitsumon ‘question’, etc.), sorry is frequently observed in conjunction with verbs of perception (feel, hear). Sorry also exhibits more diversified patternings in terms of semantic collocates, a finding suggesting that apologies in CMD may be semantically more conventionalised in Japanese than in English. The close reading of the extended concordance lines also showed that su(m)imasen and sorry exhibit different pragmatic functions. The findings have both methodological and theoretical implications for the ways in which we attempt to understand how interactional practices differ (or not) across lingua-cultures.
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Dates et versions

hal-04172047 , version 1 (28-07-2023)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04172047 , version 1

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Eugenia Diegoli. A corpus-assisted approach to conventionalised apologies in Japanese and English computer-mediated discourse. 2022. ⟨hal-04172047⟩
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