Workplace reasons for saying you're sorry: Discourse task management and apology in telephone interviews

Abstract

Abstract We propose a model of the speech act of apologizing that ranges apologies along a continuum from the most situational, on one end, to the most personal, on the other. We then analyze the 252 occurrences of I'm sorry, excuse me, and beg pardon and their variants in 62 telephone interviews conducted for a public‐opinion polling service. Very few of the apologies in the interviews are responses to particular personal offenses, intended to convey regret and apparently successful in doing so. Rather, because of the necessity for discourse task management in this genre, interviewers and respondents use apologies at the situational end of the continuum. Such apologies signal and remedy minor interactional difficulties and establish cooperative rapport. Situational apologies also serve as indirect ways of rejecting questions or answers or cajoling reluctant respondents. Situational apologies are routinized in origin and unelaborated in form; their function is to restore social equilibrium rather than to express genuine regret. They are responses to disruptions in the interview task rather than in the personal interaction between interviewer and respondent. We suggest that the continuum model of apology is useful in coming to a detailed understanding of the working of expressions like I'm sorry in discourse, and that discourse genre plays a role in the distribution and expression of speech acts.