APOLOGY STRATEGIES IN CAMEROON FRENCH

Abstract

This article discusses the results of a case study on strategies used by Cameroon French speakers to apologize in situations involving friends and superiors. The data of the study were collected by means of a Discourse completion Task Questionnaire that was administered to two groups of university students. The findings show that the participants used a wide range of direct and indirect apology strategies and that the apology utterances mostly occurred in speech act sets, which generally involved combinations of direct and indirect apologies and supportive acts. The results also reveal the use of nominal address terms, codeswitching and some indigenized patterns of French to modify the illocutionary force of apologies. Overall, the linguistic and pragmatic choices made by the respondents varied according to degree of familiarity and power distance between the interlocutors.  Article visualizations: