Nine Ways of Looking at ApologiesThe Necessity for Interdisciplinary Theory and Method in Discourse Analysis

Of all the aspects of language, discourse analysis is singularly interdisciplinary, a word with a somewhat speckled past. This chapter takes as an example of the interdisciplinary nature of discourse analysis a case that at first may seem overly simple, hardly a part of “discourse analysis” at all, more typically considered as an exercise in pragmatics or Conversation Analysis: the apology. But people have to understand apologies as contributions to a larger discourse, viewing them from a variety of perspectives, formal and functional, cognitive and interactive, individual and group, intralanguage and societal; to examine the apology from the perspective of phonology, syntax, lexical semantics, speech act pragmatics, conversational analysis, narratology, and sociolinguistics. Sociolinguistic analysis directly links the social group memberships of the pair involved in the apology and their options and expectations in the event.