Introduction
Nowadays, going for a travel is not expensive as much as the early 80s. People tend to travel all over the world with different purpose. The world in which we live is such that people are increasingly coming into contact with those who are different from ourselves (Bristish & Cushner, 1996). We could see millions of people have the possibility of crossing the borders. Some of them go to overseas to further their studies while others work in an international companies. Besides that, among them are people who migrate and on their vacation. Thus, every day, people will surely meet people from different cultures or any other than their own cultures. These are only a few of many examples of sojourners.
Sojourner is a common term used to refer to people who comes traveling and settling at a strange place for a shorter. Paul C.P. Siu (July, 1952) stated in his book, The Sojourner, that "sojourner" is treated as a deviant type of the sociological form of the "stranger," one who clings to the cultural heritage of his own ethnic group and tends to live in isolation, hindering his assimilation to the society in which he resides, often for many years.
So, it will be a credit for those who can speak foreign language or other than their own language. It will be much easier to communicate with the local people in the country. Thus, the local will most probably be delighted with this advantage. Not to say there will be no trouble encounter but, the problem will become less. As according to Lustig & Koester (1993) intercultural communication is not always successful and often represents a stressful event. One of the major problems when traveling to other country is to understand the culture especially the speech act of apology. This is because apology plays an important role to maintain a certain amount of harmony and certainly be found in all societies. As Blum- Kulka and Olshtain and Cohen (1984) have shown that different cultures possess different rules of appropriateness.
According to Leech (1983:125), the speech act of apologizing is an important means of ‘‘restoring’’ the relationship between participants. The main objective was to compare the realization patterns of speech acts in apologies to find out the similarities and differences between those two languages. According to politeness strategies proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987:70), apologies are acts that express negative politeness: they signal the speaker’s awareness of having impinged on the hearer’s negative face, restricting H’s freedom of action in some way.
However, apologies are sometimes seems to be very difficult to practice because an apology speech act come along with humiliation and embarrassment and/or a need for compensation on the part of the speaker because it linked with power relation that deals with how different groups are able to interact with and control other group such as a manager and his employee and a soldier and an officer. The lower positions tend to follow orders by the higher position without argument. Every position has their own way to apology when they make mistake.
1. Apology
Apology is a communicative act in the production of which an apologiser has to act politely, both in the vernacular sense and in the more technical sense of paying attention to the addressee’s face wants (Brown and Levinson, 1978, 1987). Goffman (1971) views apologies as a remedial interchanges serving to re-establish social harmony after a real or virtual offence. As Marion Owen (1983) interprets remedial interchanges including apologies and accounts as those concerned specifically with repairing damage to face, where face preservation itself becomes the object of the conversation for a time, however short. It is an act of verbal redress, used when social norms have been violated by a real or potential offense (Olshtain and Cohen, 1983:20). Furthermore, Holmes (1998: 217) stated that “the apology is quintessentially a politeness strategy”.
In both public and private interaction, the function of an apology shows that something has gone wrong or there must be something that annoyed others. Therefore, it needs to be settle, improved, fixed or adjusted. In other words, apology is an expression of remorse or regret for having said or done something that hurt another. In an occurrence, the participants’ anticipation and belief about events, people, places and etc.., plays an important role in the performance and interpretation of linguistic utterances. An apology, similar to an account, is produced after the offense but it is different in that the offender is accepting responsibility for the offense and, by apologizing, expressing regret, which is not clear in accounts (Fatima Abdurahman Nureddeen, 2007).
Apologies are like other speech acts in that they are often performed through conventionalized or ritualized utterances. Once certain expressions are selected in preference to others to be used to perform certain acts, it becomes a necessity that they be used and interpreted as such. (Fatima Abdurahman Nureddeen, 2007). Several forms or structures are more common- used more often than others, such as ‘I’m sorry’ in English and the word ‘slixa’ in Hebrew which literally means ‘forgiveness’ (Blum- Kulka and Olshtain, 1984: 206).
According to Fatima Abdurahman Nureddeen (2007), the choice of linguistic expressions to convey certain communicative purposes is governed by social conventions and the individual’s assessment of situations. On top of that, Swan (1990:77) illustrates the importance of context for the interpretation of a communicative event by pointing out that it is the interaction of the structural and lexical meaning of an utterance with the situation in which it is used that gives it its precise value.
Based on politeness strategies proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987:70), apologies are acts that express negative politeness: they signal the speaker’s awareness of having impinged on the hearer’s negative face, restricting H’s freedom of action in some way. Generally, to apologize is to attempt to placate or maintain H’s face; therefore, it is an inherent face-saving act for H (Edmondson et al., 1984:121). In fact, Holmes (1995: 155) stated that apologizing, unlike face attacks such as insults, has a positive effect on the part of the hearer. In addition, an apology, for Goffman (1971:140), is one type of ‘remedy’ among others. On the contrary, for Holmes (1995:155) it is a speech act that is intended to remedy the offense for which the apologizer takes responsibility and, as a result, to rebalance social relations between interlocutors.
Frankly, to express or utter an apology implicates the speaker to recognize some comprehend social crime or infringement and the hearer receiving and dealing with this act. The apology places both speaker and hearer in an unstable relational position and require remedial “facework” (Goffman 1971), usually involving some form of linguistic management. Style refers to the meaningful deployment of language variation in written and spoken discourse, to the particular way that discourse is formed and structured and that it is interpreted by recipients as socially and interactionally relevant (Sandig & Selting 1997). More over the nature of the apology can be very important in resolving a variety of types of conflict, ranging from uncomfortable moments in conversation through serious breaches of social and/or cultural norms by an individual to incidents with national or international political significance (See Zhang 2001; Harris et al. forthcoming; Jeffries forthcoming).
1.2 Speech Act
Speech act and politeness studies have raised as researchers learn that setting up harmony in connection is crucial in human communication. As a result, apology studies appear and the increasing literatures in the field kick in to the introduction of a concept of apologizing. The speech act of apologizing is an important means of ‘‘restoring’’ the relationship between participants (Leech, 1983:125); it is also a difficult speech act to learn in a second language.
The term ‘speech act’ is usually used to refer only to the illocutionary force, consequently narrowing the scope of the term of speech act only to the intention of the speaker (Yule, 1996: 49; Levinson, 1983: 236)