MEANS OF EXPRESSION OF APOLOGY IN THE MIDDLE ENGLISH ROMANCES OF THE XII–XV CENTURIES

Abstract

The article seeks to highlight the characteristics of the speech act of apology in the Middle English romances. Apology is defined as a SA uniting two equivalent components of illocution of apology: emotional – the expression of the psychologic state of guilt and shame and incentive – request for apology. The subject of our investigation embraces pragmatic conditions of apology realization in the Middle English romances within which the desired perlocutionary effect is achieved. Apology can restrain aggression, it is aimed at restoring harmonious relations. To this day, the attention of linguists is drawn to apology formulas which perform a number of important social functions aimed at maintaining harmonious interpersonal relations between interlocutors and avoiding conflicts. We consider apology as an important socio-psycholinguistic phenomenon since the realization of its means depends to a large extent on such factors as the social status of the participants in the speech act, their age, occupation and personal relations, degree of affinity, education, character, tastes, etc. Apology is also one of the central units of speech etiquette. In our opinion, a comprehensive analysis of apology units from linguistic pragmatics’ point of view allowed us to describe more thoroughly the nature of apologies in the Middle English. However, to find out the prerequisites, mechanism and methods of its functioning, it is necessary to use linguistic paradigms of research with appropriate methods of scientific analysis. It is important to pay attention to the fact that not all lingual forms of apology have its semantics as there are the ones that express sorrow, compassion, sympathy. A comprehensive approach to the study of apology as an etiquette unit has made it possible to establish the dialectical unity of the nominative-meaningful side of apology with its pragmatic and stylistic function.