On Apologising in Negative and Positive Politeness Cultures

On Apologising in Negative and Positive Politeness Cultures
Author: Eva Ogiermann
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2009-10-28
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027288895

This book investigates how speakers of English, Polish and Russian deal with offensive situations. It reveals culture-specific perceptions of what counts as an apology and what constitutes politeness. It offers a critical discussion of Brown and Levinson's theory and provides counterevidence to the correlation between indirectness and politeness underlying their theory. Their theory is applied to two languages that rely less heavily on indirectness in conveying politeness than does English, and to a speech act that does not become more polite through indirectness. An analysis of the face considerations involved in apologising shows that in contrast to disarming apologies, remedial apologies are mainly directed towards positive face needs, which are crucial for the restoration of social equilibrium and maintenance of relationships. The data show that while English apologies are characterised by a relatively strong focus on both interlocutors’ negative face, Polish apologies display a particular concern for positive face. For Russian speakers, in contrast, apologies seem to involve a lower degree of face threat than they do in the other two languages.

Shakedown

Shakedown
Author: Steven Malanga
Publisher: Ivan R. Dee
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2010-10-16
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1566639662

As their infatuation with President Obama fades, millions of Americans anxiously ask, Is this the change we were waiting for? The current administration represents change, for sure, Steven Malanga argues - a momentous transformation of the fundamental structure of American politics. A self-interested coalition of public-sector unions and government-financed community activists (like the young Barack Obama) has become our era''s characteristic political machine. In Shakedown, Mr. Malanga shows how this machine''s single-minded goal is always bigger government and more public spending. The bill, he says, is now coming due for the relentless rise of this new political powerhouse. He chronicles how public-sector unions and the corrupt political hacks beholden to them have all but bankrupted once-rich states like California and New Jersey. He details the campaigns to undermine the successful and popular 1990s welfare reform and to revitalize the failed, wasteful War on Poverty programs that funnel taxpayer money to the advocacy groups that are integral cogs in the new political machine. And he provides a comprehensive summary of how these same advocacy groups spent decades helping undermine mortgage standards in the name of helping the poor - in the process enriching themselves and enabling the housing meltdown. As Americans anxiously ponder the future direction of their government and their economy, Shakedown explores the questions of who got us in this mess and why we need change - constructive change - more than ever.

Chicana Without Apology

Chicana Without Apology
Author: Eden E. Torres
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2013-09-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1134726902

By approaching Chicana/o issues from the frames of feminism, social activism, and cultural studies, and by considering both lived experience and the latest research, Torres offers a more comprehensive understanding of current Chicana life. Through compelling prose, Torres masterfully weaves her own story as a first-generation Mexican American with interviews with activists and other Mexican-American women to document the present fight for social justice and the struggles of living between two worlds.

Mea Culpa

Mea Culpa
Author:
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 360
Release: 1993-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0804766738

Drawing upon the insights of several disciplines, this work focuses on the structural and experiential dynamics of interpersonal and collective apologetic discourse as means of tempering antagonisms and resolving conflicts in contemporary Western society.

The Effects of Sex and Culture on the Apology Performance of Native English Speakers and Learners

The Effects of Sex and Culture on the Apology Performance of Native English Speakers and Learners
Author: Elaheh Nosratirad
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 365
Release: 2023-04-18
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1527502031

This book is an original empirical study which contributes to the knowledge and scholarship in the fields of variational, interlanguage and cross-cultural pragmatics on a number of important levels. It highlights the potential influence of individual, regional and contextual variations, on the language use of native speakers and pragmatic performance of English as a Foreign Language learners, arguing that factors such as gender (operationalised via sex, e.g., female and male) and native culture should be considered in one single study. The book discusses the complexity of the influence of gender on language use, given that its influence may manifest in different ways in different cultures and contexts. Thus, researchers should focus on gender, culture and contextual variation when analysing language use conventions of native speakers and language learners with data highlighting the role of gender in learners’ first and second languages and cultures. The book also introduces findings which show the importance of cross-cultural comparison of Western Anglo-Saxon and Middle-Eastern Persian cultures in a single study and through a cross-culturally comparable data collection method.

The Apology

The Apology
Author: V (formerly Eve Ensler)
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 130
Release: 2019-05-14
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1635574390

From the bestselling author of The Vagina Monologues-a powerful, life-changing examination of abuse and atonement. “A triumph of artistry and empathy.” -Naomi Klein “A crucial step forward . . . This is an urgently needed book right now.” -Jane Fonda “Courageous, transformative, and yes-healing.” -Anne Lamott Like millions of women, Eve Ensler has been waiting much of her lifetime for an apology. Sexually and physically abused by her father, Eve has struggled her whole life from this betrayal, longing for an honest reckoning from a man who is long dead. After years of work as an anti-violence activist, she decided she would wait no longer; an apology could be imagined, by her, for her, to her. The Apology, written by Eve from her father's point of view in the words she longed to hear, attempts to transform the abuse she suffered with unflinching truthfulness, compassion, and an expansive vision for the future. Through The Apology Eve has set out to provide a new way for herself and a possible road for others, so that survivors of abuse may finally envision how to be free. She grapples with questions she has sought answers to since she first realized the impact of her father's abuse on her life: How do we offer a doorway rather than a locked cell? How do we move from humiliation to revelation, from curtailing behavior to changing it, from condemning perpetrators to calling them to reckoning? What will it take for abusers to genuinely apologize? Remarkable and original, The Apology is an acutely transformational look at how, from the wounds of sexual abuse, we can begin to re-emerge and heal. It is revolutionary, asking everything of each of us: courage, honesty, and forgiveness.

WHEREAS

WHEREAS
Author: Layli Long Soldier
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Total Pages: 121
Release: 2017-03-07
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1555979610

The astonishing, powerful debut by the winner of a 2016 Whiting Writers' Award WHEREAS her birth signaled the responsibility as mother to teach what it is to be Lakota therein the question: What did I know about being Lakota? Signaled panic, blood rush my embarrassment. What did I know of our language but pieces? Would I teach her to be pieces? Until a friend comforted, Don’t worry, you and your daughter will learn together. Today she stood sunlight on her shoulders lean and straight to share a song in Diné, her father’s language. To sing she motions simultaneously with her hands; I watch her be in multiple musics. —from “WHEREAS Statements” WHEREAS confronts the coercive language of the United States government in its responses, treaties, and apologies to Native American peoples and tribes, and reflects that language in its officiousness and duplicity back on its perpetrators. Through a virtuosic array of short lyrics, prose poems, longer narrative sequences, resolutions, and disclaimers, Layli Long Soldier has created a brilliantly innovative text to examine histories, landscapes, her own writing, and her predicament inside national affiliations. “I am,” she writes, “a citizen of the United States and an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, meaning I am a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation—and in this dual citizenship I must work, I must eat, I must art, I must mother, I must friend, I must listen, I must observe, constantly I must live.” This strident, plaintive book introduces a major new voice in contemporary literature.

When Sorry Isn't Enough

When Sorry Isn't Enough
Author: Roy L. Brooks
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 557
Release: 1999-06-01
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0814709044

Leading scholars, activists, and political leaders on being victim's of the world's worst atrocities "How much compensation ought to be paid to a woman who was raped 7,500 times? What would the members of the Commission want for their daughters if their daughters had been raped even once?"—Karen Parker, speaking before the U.N. Commission on Human Rights Seemingly every week, a new question arises relative to the current worldwide ferment over human injustices. Why does the U.S. offer $20,000 atonement money to Japanese Americans relocated to concentration camps during World War II, while not even apologizing to African Americans for 250 years of human bondage and another century of institutionalized discrimination? How can the U.S. and Canada best grapple with the genocidal campaigns against Native Americans on which their countries were founded? How should Japan make amends to Korean "comfort women" sexually enslaved during World War II? Why does South Africa deem it necessary to grant amnesty to whites who tortured and murdered blacks under apartheid? Is Germany's highly praised redress program, which has paid billions of dollars to Jews worldwide, a success, and, as such, an example for others?More generally, is compensation for a historical wrong dangerous "blood money" that allows a nation to wash its hands forever of its responsibility to those it has injured? A rich collection of essays from leading scholars, pundits, activists, and political leaders the world over, many written expressly for this volume, When Sorry Isn't Enough also includes the voices of the victims of some of the world's worst atrocities, thereby providing a panoramic perspective on an international controversy often marked more by heat than reason.

Taking Wrongs Seriously

Taking Wrongs Seriously
Author: Elazar Barkan
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2006
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780804752251

This multi-disciplinary collection examines the recent wave of political apologies for acts of past injustice.

Cross-Cultural Pragmatics

Cross-Cultural Pragmatics
Author: Juliane House
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2021-09-30
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1108845118

This book provides an engaging introduction to cross-cultural pragmatics. It is essential reading for both academics and students in pragmatics, applied linguistics, language teaching and translation studies. It offers a corpus-based and empirically-derived framework which allows language use to be systematically contrasted across linguacultures.