A Lexicogrammar Approach to Analyze Response Strategies to Apology in English Conversations

| ABSTRACT The acts of apologizing and responding to apology are common activities in communication since using only either of these two crucial speech acts cannot itself establish fully effective communication. This article aims to examine response strategies to apology that are used in English romance and family films and find out the lexico-grammatical realizations of response utterances in English conversations. This article was qualitatively designed with the support of the researchers’ observation of the films' scripts extracted from English films, subsequently the researchers’ description of the data collection into separate categories. The results of this study revealed that English film characters were more likely to accept than reject apologies. Direct positive comments were favoured by the English, with indirect positive responses coming in second.


Introduction
It could be widely understood that the act of apology responding occurs after the act of apologizing; therefore, these two speech acts play an important role in conversations and have inter-related relationships with each other. Many researchers have so far investigated a speech act of apologizing in the light of pragmatics, cross-cultural, intercultural, or sociopragmatics. Awedyk (2011) found out that Norwegian tended to employ direct strategies more often than other apology strategies. This result seems to be in accordance with Trang (2017), who investigated why students at the University of Foreign Language Studies -The University of Danang (UFLS-UD) apologized, and which apology strategies were employed. Regarding the latter, direct strategies were most frequently used, followed by a promise of forbearance and accounts, respectively. However, according to Huwari (2018), the apology strategies taken advantage of the most by Jordanian and Asian students were account and compensation, but not direct strategies. Different researchers have different viewpoints on apology strategies.
Compared to a number of previous studies on apology strategies, those related to response strategies in general and those to apologies, in particular, seem to be much fewer. Bennett and Dewberry (1994) discovered that the interlocutor often felt obligated to forgive an offender who apologized and therefore contributed to the relationship's survival. In reality, apologizees seldom reject apologies across cultures (Bennett and Earwaker, 2001). While there is etiquette advice and information for non-native English speakers on how to respond to apologies in English, there is relatively little research on how English speakers actually respond to apologies, and in particular, the types of responses and expressions interlocutors use in responding to apologies (Adrefiza and Jones, 2013). They discovered that acceptance strategies were utilized by a majority of people in both languages; however, rejections were more common. It was possible that in hypothetical settings, participants felt freer to reject apologies than they would in real-life partnerships, where rejecting an apology could have harmed the relationship.
There have been few studies on apology response strategies that were carried out to investigate the response strategies but not lexical, grammatical realizations of utterances contain response strategies. Therefore, the article "A Lexicogrammar Approach to Response Strategies to Apology in English" was pursued with the aims of figuring out strategies in response to apology and clarifying the lexicogrammar realizations of response utterances in English conversations. There are four research questions that should be explored to achieve the article's aims.

1.
What are response strategies to the apology which are taken advantage of in English conversations? 2. How often do response strategies to apology appear in English conversations? 3. What are lexical grammatical realizations of apology response utterances in English conversations? 4. How often do lexical grammatical realizations appear in English conversations?

Literature Review
Responses to apologies occur when the apologizees respond to the apologizers. Homes (1990Homes ( , 1995 categorized response strategies to apology into 4 separate groups at the macro level and 15 subcategories at the micro-level. They are acceptance (absolution, thanking, advice or suggestion, request, expression empathy, and expressing emotion), acknowledgment (absolution plus, warning or threatening, and evaluating), evasion (minimizing, deflecting, and shift on blame), and rejection (blaming and complaining, asking for compensation, and refusal).
According to Nguyễn Quang (2002), the function of the responding speech act is regarded as an illocutionary act of response utterances. Responses can be divided into positive responses and negative ones. Positive responses satisfy the purpose of the apologizing speech act and the needs of the apologizer in apology utterances. It is possible to view that the introductory dialogue and its positive response form a preferred adjacency pair. Whereas the negative response goes against the target of the introductory dialogue, which means it does not satisfy and does not meet the apologizer's apology. Together with the apology utterances, negative response creates a dispreferred adjacency pair. Many linguists consider grammar and lexis to be separate concepts; however, Halliday (2013) described lexicogrammar, also known as lexical grammar, as a word that emphasizes the interdependence of vocabulary or lexis and structure or grammar.
This article applied the taxonomy for apology response strategies (ARSs) developed by Holmes (1990Holmes ( , 1995 to examine response strategies to apology in English conversations. In order to find out the lexical, grammatical realizations of apology response utterances, the researchers applied the approach of lexicogrammar proposed and developed by Halliday (2013) and response patterns by Nguyễn Quang (2002).

Methodology
Anguera (2018) confirmed that qualitative research identifies and describes features of language usage and provides real occurrences of a particular phenomenon. By contrast, in quantitative analysis, linguistic features are classified and counted, and statistical models are constructed to explain the observed facts. This article is qualitative research with the support of the quantitative.

Data Collection
Subtitles and scripts of films in English were the two sources of data collection. Films have been produced since 2015, which means the data represent the most updated ways of responding to apology; and keeping up with the tendency of communication. These films were chosen because they have a number of everyday conversations among members of the family, friends, lovers, strangers, colleagues, and so on, with many examples of apologies and responses in different contexts. The conversations were extracted from scripts and subtitles in romance and family films. There were 557 conversations in English consisting of apology response utterances.

Data Analysis
After selecting 557 utterances of apology responses in English conversations, the researchers observed and analyzed each utterance to decide which subcategory of response strategies it belonged to thanks to the apology response strategy taxonomy by Homes (1990Homes ( , 1995, and then grouped the utterances to response patterns developed by Nguyễn Quang (2002), and then in order to clarify its lexicogrammatical realization based on the lexicogrammar approach which was explored by Halliday (2013).

Response Strategies to Apology in English Conversations
Regarding the response strategies, the researcher applied the ARS taxonomy proposed by Homes (1990Homes ( , 1995 to examine what ARSs the characters from romance and family film contexts often utilized when communicating in English. This ARS taxonomy comprises four groups such as acceptance, acknowledgment, evasion, and rejection. From the exchanges extracted from English conversations in film scripts and film subtitles, the researcher found out that in some situations, the apologizees did not say anything to make a response to the apologizers; by contrast, also in some different cases, the apologizees tended to take advantage of several ARSs to respond the apologizers. The researchers named the former no response and the latter mixed apology response strategy. Especially, no response was not added to Table 1 since this table illustrates the ARSs, and this paper investigated only the verbal responses. However, in the next section of investigating the sequence of pragmatic acts of apologizing and apology responding, the strategy of no response was considered. The mixed apology response strategy, therefore, appeared in Table 1 as a new type of ARS. A glimpse at Table 1 given below revealed the data about the frequency of ARSs in English conversations extracted from scripts and subtitles of romance and family film contexts. The characters tended to directly accept the apologies since acceptance was the most frequently used AR, illustrated by its highest percentage at 38.79% with 216 times; by contrast, mixed apology response strategy was the least one due to the total numbers observed at 1.8% with 10 times. There was a big differentiation of more than 20 times of the top as opposed to the bottom. The second highest belonged to rejection of 29.62%, with 165 times which was nearly 1.5 times lower than the first rank of acceptance. The other two left were acknowledgment and evasive, which comprised 20.11% (112 times) and 9.69% (54 times), respectively. The only missing apology strategy at the macro level was expressing emotion in acceptance in acknowledgment. The examples in the following section highlight the use of response strategies in English by the apologizees to the apologizers in some particular contexts, which satisfied the description in the scope of this thesis.

Acceptance
According to Margaret, Jennifer, and Joanna (2015: 87), acceptance is "the act of agreeing with something and approving of it." Accepting the act of apologizing in English conversations tended to cover 7 separate sub-categories such as absolution, thanking, advice/suggestion, request, expressing empathy, expressing emotion, and formal at a different rate of use. As can be clearly seen from Table 1, absolution ranked the top at 17.06% (95 times), which was more than twice as much as the second-highest of requests at 8.08% (45 times). The other two AR bns of thanking and advice/suggestion were in the region of 5% (4.67% and 5.21%, respectively). According to the ARS taxonomy by Homes (1990Homes ( , 1995, expressing emotion is one of the sub-categories in acceptance; however, the researcher had no record of this type. Apparently, formal was at the bottom with the least frequently used at 1.26% with 7 times, which was exactly twice lower than expressing empathy at 2.51% with 14 times. (Example 1). In the conversation above, Julie said thanks to Freddie when he apologized to her to show that she appreciated the willingness to say sorry to Freddie.

Acknowledgement
Turning to the acknowledgment strategy where the researcher recorded 4 types out of 7 in total. Standing at the peak of this type, absolution plus (10.95%) was 30 times, 5 times, and 1.5 times higher than the least of formal plus (1.26%), the second least of warning/threatening (2.15%), and the second-highest of evaluating (6.65%), respectively.

(Example 3). Erik: Sorry I didn't tell you about this.
Julie: It's OK, but remember to tell me later. I'm kind of busy right now.
In this strategy, together with the use of markers OK, okay, or alright, the apologizees also asked the apologizers to do something to repair the offense.

Mye: I am sorry that I didn't submit the assignments on time.
Teacher: Submit your assignments right now. If not, you will get bad marks.
This strategy was recorded when the apologizees required the apologizers to amend their mistakes or else there would be punishment or something that could be not as good as the apologizers expected.

Evasion
Evasion is "the act of avoiding somebody or of avoiding something that you are supposed to do" by Margaret, Jennifer, and Joanna (2015:315). This ARS comprises of three sub-categories where the shift of blame was reported to be used at 5.56% to be the most, followed by minimizing at 2.69% to be the second top and deflecting at 1.44% to be the least.
(Example 5 The apologizers caused the offense and tried to say sorry to the apologizees for offenses; however, the apologizees would prevent them from apologizing.

Rejection
Rejection is the fourth category of ARSs, including complaining, asking for compensation, and refusal. With 15.98%, asking for compensation had the largest proportion with 89 times of use. It had a big differentiation of more than 4.5 times higher than the least of complaining at 3.41%; whereas refusal at 10.23% was threefold in comparison with complaining.
(Example 7). Thomas: I did it again. So sorry.

Julie: How careless of you!
The apologizees made comments on the personalities of the apologizers, which could be the reason for the offense.
Thomas: I apologize for the damage. Julie: Yeah, you have to buy me another one.
The apologizees asked the apologizers to compensate for what they had done to the apologizees, which may cause serious damage.

Mixed Apology Response Strategy
The apologizees uttered expressions of several different ARSs regarded as a mixed apology response strategy to show their attitudes of either accepting, refusing, acknowledging, or evasing. The occurrence of this ARS accounted for 1.8% with 10 times. There were two trends in using this apology. The apogogizees could employ some ARSs in one turn or in several different turns, as illustrated below.
(Example 9). The Rider: Oops, Sorry, sorry, sorry. I didn't mean it at all. First Response: Excuse me! Look, there is a scratch on my motorcycle. Umm, I think you can help me to fix the scratch.
In this example, the appologizee decided to choose deflecting of evasion when he explained the consequence of the offense and then asked for compensation to fix the scratch. By contrast, there were two turns of the apologizees to respond to the apologizers in the next conversation among the passengers on the plane. He or she used advice or suggestion in the first response and then absolution in the final response.

Conclusion
This study found out that the English film characters had a tendency to accept the apologies more than to reject the apologies. The acknowledgment and evasive were much less frequently used. What's more, they did not prefer using a mixed apology response strategy. In terms of acceptance, absolution ranked at the top, which was followed by request, and formal stood at the bottom.
Regarding rejection, compensation was most frequently used, much higher than the least of complaining. Last but not least, the apologizees used a mixture of apologies response tactics to demonstrate their attitudes of accepting, refusing, acknowledging, or evading. This apology was used in two different ways. Some ARSs could be used by the apogogizees in one round or in numerous turns. The