Did Becky really need to apologise? Intercultural evaluations of politeness

Authors

  • Emi Okano Emory University
  • Lucien Brown Monash University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/eap.35178

Keywords:

politeness, public apology, national identity, gender, computer-mediated communication (cmc)

Abstract

This study analyses a public apology made in 2016 by Becky, an Anglo-Japanese tarento ‘celebrity’, for her romantic involvement with a married man, musician Enon Kawatani. Adopting an integrative pragmatics perspective, we analyse the pragmatic acts Becky used to perform her apology, including culture-specific nonverbal behaviours indexing deference. We then look at how the apology was dynamically evaluated in naturally occurring discourse in Japanese and British computer-mediated communication (CMC). The analysis shows that culture-specific moral orders rendered Becky’s apology necessary in the Japanese context, but that these norms were not shared by the British audience. The Japanese and British CMC participants utilised national identity as resources for negotiating their contrasting moral orders. We show how CMC participants assign significance to the (im)politeness-related behaviour to which they were exposed and how they performed (im)politeness through threatening national identities.

Author Biographies

  • Emi Okano, Emory University

    Emi Okano is a Japanese language instructor at Emory College. She received her M.A. from University of Oregon. She did her M.A. project on multiliteracies as a pedagogy by developing, implementing, and evaluating a multliteracies lesson within the theme of gender. Her research interest extends to Japanese language pedagogy as well as sociocultural/sociopragmatic aspects of Japanese language.

  • Lucien Brown, Monash University

    Lucien Brown is Senior Lecturer of Korean Studies at Monash University. His research focusses on multimodal politeness in first and second language contexts. His book Korean Honorifics and Politeness in Second Language Learning is published by John Benjamins and his articles appear in journals such as Journal of PragmaticsJournal of Politeness Research, and Language, Culture and Curriculum.

References

Bataineh, R. F., & Bataineh, R. F. (2008). A cross-cultural comparison of apologies by native speakers of American English and Jordanian Arabic. Journal of Pragmatics, 40(4), 792–821. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2008.01.003

Battistella, E. L. (2014). Sorry about that: The language of public apology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Brown, L., & Winter, B. (forthcoming). Multimodal indexicality in Korean: ‘Doing deference’ and ‘performing intimacy’ through nonverbal behavior. Journal of Politeness Research.

Burgoon, J. K., & Dunbar, N. E. (2006). Nonverbal expressions of dominance and power in human relationships. In V. Manusov & M. L. Patterson (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Nonverbal Communication (pp. 279–298). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781412976152.n15

Carney, D. R., Hall, J. A., & LeBeau, L. S. (2005). Beliefs about the nonverbal expression of social power. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 29(2), 105–123. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-005-2743-z

Chamani, F., & Zareipur, P. (2010). A cross-cultural study of apologies in British English and Persian. Concentric: Studies in Linguistics, 36(1), 133–153.

Chang, W.-L. M., & Haugh, M. (2011). Evaluations of im/politeness of an intercultural apology. Intercultural Pragmatics, 8(3), 411–442. https://doi.org/10.1515/iprg.2011.019

Cohen, A. D. (1995). Speech acts. In S. McKay & N. Hornberger (Eds.), Sociolinguistics and Language Teaching (pp. 383–420). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Culpeper, J., & Haugh, M. (2014). Pragmatics and the English language. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Dunn, C. D. (2011). Formal forms or verbal strategies? Politeness theory and Japanese business etiquette training. Journal of Pragmatics, 43(15), 3643–3654. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2011.06.003

Efe, I., & Forchtner, B. (2015). ‘Saying sorry’ in Turkey: The Dersim massacre of the 1930s in 2011. Journal of Language and Politics, 14(2), 233–257. https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.14.2.03efe

Eslami, Z. (2016, November). Perceived (im)politeness in corporate apologies: An analysis of the Netflix apology of 2011 and customers’ reactions. Paper presented at American Pragmatics Conference, Bloomington, IN.

Heider, F. (1958). The psychology of interpersonal relations. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1037/10628-000

Grainger, K., & Harris, S. (2007). Special issue: Apologies: Introduction. Journal of Politeness Research. Language, Behaviour, Culture, 3(1), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1515/PR.2007.001

Haugh, M. (2010). When is an email really offensive? Argumentativity and variability in evaluations of impoliteness. Journal of Politeness Research, 6(1), 7–31. https://doi.org/10.1515/jplr.2010.002

Haugh, M., Chang, W.-L. M., & Kádár, D. Z. (2015). ‘Doing Deference’: Identities and relational practices in Chinese online discussion boards. Pragmatics, 25(1), 73–98. https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.25.1.04hau

Kádár, D. Z., & Haugh, M. (2013). Understanding politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139382717

Kádár, D. Z., Haugh, M., & Chang, W.-L. M. (2013). Aggression and perceived national face threats in Mainland Chinese and Taiwanese CMC discussion boards. Multilingua: Journal of Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Communication, 32(3), 343–372. https://doi.org/10.1515/multi-2013-0016

Kamada, L. D. (2009). Mixed-ethnic girls and boys as similarly powerless and powerful: Embodiment of attractiveness and grotesqueness. Discourse Studies, 11(3), 329–352. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445609102447

Kampf, Z. (2009). Public (non-) apologies: The discourse of minimizing responsibility. Journal of Pragmatics, 41(11), 2257–2270. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2008.11.007

Kishimoto, K. (2004). Apologies for atrocities: commemorating the 50th anniversary of World War II’s end in the United States and Japan. American Studies International, 42(2/3), 17–50.

Lantolf, J., & Pavlenko, A. (2001). Second language activity theory: Understanding second language learners as people. In M. Breen (Ed.), Learner contributions to language learning: New directions in research (pp. 141-158). Harlow: Longman.

Lazare, A. (2005). On apology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

McCurry, J. (2016, February 8). Downfall of Japanese TV’s girl next door highlights wider industry sexism. The Guardian. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/08/downfall-japan-tv-becky-industry-sexism

Mills, S. (2003). Gender and politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511615238

Mitchell, N., & Haugh, M. (2015). Agency, accountability and evaluations of impoliteness. Journal of Politeness Research, 11(2), 207–238. https://doi.org/10.1515/pr-2015-0009

Mok, J., & Tokunaga, M. (2009). A cross cultural apology episode of a diplomatic repair. Journal of Language and Politics, 8(1), 72–96. https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.8.1.05mok

Mori, J. (1993). Some observations in humble expressions in Japanese: Distribution of o- V(stem) suru and ’V(causative) itadaku. In S. Choi (Ed.), Japanese Korean Linguistics (3) (pp. 67–83). Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information Stanford University.

O’Driscoll, J. (2013). Situational transformations: The offensive-izing of an email message and the public-ization of offensiveness. Pragmatics and Society, 4(3), 369–387. https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.4.3.05odr

Page, R. (2014). Saying ‘sorry’: Corporate apologies posted on Twitter. Journal of Pragmatics, 62, 30–45. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2013.12.003

Robinson, J. (2004). The sequential organization of ‘explicit’ apologies in naturally occurring English. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 37(3), 291–330. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327973rlsi3703_2

Star News. (2016). Becky kaiken ‘Gesu no Kiwami Otome’ no bokaru Kawatani tono furin hodo no shazai (Becky’s press conference to apologise for her alleged affair with Kawatani, a vocalist of a band ‘Gesu no Kiwami Otome’). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=85&v=tigdxQKJxsc (accessed 14 March 2016).

Sugimoto, N. (1997). A Japan-U.S. comparison of apology styles. Communication Research, 24(4), 349–369. https://doi.org/10.1177/009365097024004002

Walfisch, T., Van Dijk, D., & Kark, R. (2013). Do you really expect me to apologize? The impact of status and gender on the effectiveness of an apology in the workplace. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 43(7), 1446–1458. https://doi.org/10.1111/jasp.12101

West, M. D. (2006). Secrets, sex, and spectacle: The rules of scandal in Japan and the United States. London: University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226894119.001.0001

Yoshida, S. (2014). Being Hafu (biethnic Japanese) in Japan: Through the eyes of the Japanese media, Japanese university students, and Hafu themselves (Master of Arts thesis). University of Utah.

Published

2018-08-31

Issue

Section

Articles

How to Cite

Okano, E., & Brown, L. (2018). Did Becky really need to apologise? Intercultural evaluations of politeness. East Asian Pragmatics, 3(2), 151-178. https://doi.org/10.1558/eap.35178