Davari, Maedeh

A Corpus-Based Study of Apology Responses in Spoken English: A British vs. American Comparison

Corpus-based studies have become the cutting edge of linguistic research. Therefore, this thesis made an effort to employ a corpus-based analysis to explore apology responses in Spoken American English vs. British English. Understanding how apologies are structured and responded to in these dialects can enhance communicative competence and avoid cross-cultural miscommunication specially for language learners. This study employed a large-scale corpus, based on the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), modifying a corpus using American movies subtitles from year 2019. The corpus was used to analyze naturally occurring apology interactions in American English using AntConc (4.0). All the 3491 instances of apology keywords retrieved by AntConc were manually examined and as a result, 1209 apology response sequences were found. Findings revealed distinct patterns in the structure of apologies and the types of responses were elicited in spoken American English. The results of present study were compared to those of a study conducted by An et al. (2022) on British English. The variation was mainly found in use of ‘Lack of response’ and ‘Evasion’ as an apology response. The differences are discussed in terms of their implications for teaching English as a foreign language and understanding intercultural communication nuances. The study contributes to the field of applied linguistics by mapping the variations in apology response strategies between American and British English, providing insights that are crucial for learners and educators in an increasingly globalized world.