Responsibility and Culpability in Apologies: Distinctive Uses of Sorry versus I'm Sorry in Apologizing

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1 Discourse Processes ISSN: X (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: Responsibility and Culpability in Apologies: Distinctive Uses of Sorry versus I'm Sorry in Apologizing Marilena Fatigante, Federica Biassoni, Francesca Marazzini & Pierangela Diadori To cite this article: Marilena Fatigante, Federica Biassoni, Francesca Marazzini & Pierangela Diadori (2015): Responsibility and Culpability in Apologies: Distinctive Uses of Sorry versus I'm Sorry in Apologizing, Discourse Processes, DOI: / X To link to this article: Accepted online: 17 Jun 2015.Published online: 17 Jun Submit your article to this journal Article views: 33 View related articles View Crossmark data Citing articles: 1 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at Download by: [marilena fatigante] Date: 21 September 2015, At: 12:29

2 Discourse Processes, 00:1 21, 2015 Copyright q Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: X print/ online DOI: / X Responsibility and Culpability in Apologies: Distinctive Uses of Sorry versus I m Sorry in Apologizing Marilena Fatigante Dipartimento di Psicologia dei Processi di Sviluppo e Socializzazione Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy Federica Biassoni Dipartimento di Psicologia Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy Francesca Marazzini Italian Studies Università di Bologna, Italy Pierangela Diadori Ditals Università per Stranieri, Siena, Italy INTRODUCTION People identify apologies as unique types of actions as compared with kin-related moves, which remedy troubles or offenses, such as excuses and justifications (Goffman, 1971; Owen, 1983; Olshtain & Cohen, 1983; Sbisà, 1999). A feature of these apologies is the speaker s acknowledgment of personal responsibility for having caused trouble or offense (i.e., the guilt) (Goffman, 1971) and a demand to Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Marilena Fatigante, Dipartimento di Psicologia dei Processi di Sviluppo e Socializzazione, Sapienza Università di Roma, via dei Marsi, Roma, Italy. marilena.fatigante@uniroma1.it 1

3 2 BIASSONI, DIADORI, FATIGANTE, MARAZZINI the recipient to be absolved, that is, to either have the offense considered as nonharmful or so minimal it makes the apology irrelevant (Robinson, 2004). It appears that the two common formats for apologizing are sorry and I m sorry. According to Robinson (2004), who collects them into a single category (sorry-based units), they both overtly do the work of accepting moral responsibility for offensive behaviour and initiate the process of negotiating absolution (Robinson, 2004, p. 292). Heritage and Raymond (this issue) distinguish between the two formats of the sorry component, highlighting how local offenses (available to both speakers, indigenous to the interaction) are usually supported by sorry, and more distal and face-threatening virtual offenses are more often supported by I m sorry. Elaborating Robinson s argument, and following the discussion opened by Heritage and Raymond (this issue), this article extends the analysis of the sorryinitiated and I m sorry- initiated apologies. Particularly, we investigate to what extent the adoption of one (or the other) of the two formats by the apologizer indexes a different degree of moral responsibility for the offense and to what extent the differences if any in the use and sequential management of the two formats relate to how absolution is pursued and accomplished. As for all the articles in this special issue, an account of the data corpus and our overall theoretical and methodological perspective is given in the editors introduction. SORRY AND I M SORRY: TWO FORMATS FOR APOLOGIZING Sorry and I m sorry appear to perform analogous actions in several environments, such as in the context of repair;as pre-facing apologies to (virtual) offenses; and as post-facing apologies to offenses. In the following, a few examples for each case are provided. Repair In (1), Carol does not recognize Leslie on the phone (line 2, Who s that? ).

4 SORRY VS. I M SORRY 3 Sorry is used by Carol to apologize for having asked for the caller s (Leslie s) identity; in other words, she is apologizing for not having recognized the voice of her friend and thereby not having identified her. In this respect her nonrecognition, displayed in her repair initiation (Heritage, 2007; Schegloff, 1992) constitutes a wrongdoing. 1 As Robinson (2004) explains, this kind of apology does not make relevant an apology response but, rather, the action of apologizing is subordinate to pursuing the continuation of the activity. A comparable incident is managed by the speaker through the use of I m sorry: Analogously to the sorry, here the I m sorry formula indexes the speaker s responsibility for the mistake in the recipient s identification, specifically for 1 In standard cases of repair sequence (Schegloff, Jefferson, & Sacks, 1977), the provision of the repair move would be sufficient to push the conversation foreword; still, we may note that in both instances examined the repair move is followed by a pause. This signals that the speaker had trouble in acknowledging and validating the repair move. The oh-prefaced response (Heritage, 1998) would convey, at this point, the call-taker s marked shift of attention (p. 294) for having eventually apprehended the repair (i.e., acknowledging who is talking).

5 4 BIASSONI, DIADORI, FATIGANTE, MARAZZINI mistakenly identifying the person she has called as male (line 3). Again, it does not open a dedicated space for the acceptance of the apology; rather, once the misunderstanding is cleared up and the apologizer has claimed responsibility for the offense, participants proceed onto the next task. Pre-Facing Apologies Sorry and I m sorry do not appear to differ also when they anticipate that some kind of trouble affecting the recipient is underway. A distinctive property of these examples is the fact that both the sorry and the I m sorry are here used as a way to ask permission to pursue some activity, which may cause (or at least it is projected as such) some impingement on the recipient. By explicitly naming the virtual offense (see also Heritage & Raymond, this issue), the speaker exhibits her or his awareness of the cost that the action she or he is undertaking implies for the recipient, and clearly claims a personal responsibility for this. At the same time, the requester/teller shows an orientation to progress onto another activity, to which apologizing is subordinate (see Galatolo, Ursi, & Bongelli, this issue). See in this regard how Leslie in (3) responds with a validation of Randall s move (a kind of green light for him to bother) rather than treating the apology as requiring a relevant response per se.

6 SORRY VS. I M SORRY 5 Post-Faced Apologies to Offenses In the following cases, the two formulas are similarly used to retrospectively cast as offenses some events that have just happened. In contrast to the previous excerpts, here apologizing is managed as the primary activity:

7 6 BIASSONI, DIADORI, FATIGANTE, MARAZZINI In each of these excerpts the recipient absolves the speaker from responsibility for the offense. This is done by respectively formulating an oh þ disagreement with the need to apologize (excerpt 5) and reassuring that no damage resulted from the speaker s action; mitigating the damaging effect of the offense (the unwelcomed news in excerpt 6), by volunteering an explanation, which makes it reasonable and tolerable; and again in (7) by denying the apologizer s claim of having undertaken an offensive action. This overview examination of cases illustrated that there is no systematic rule for which speakers select I m sorry versus sorry to construct an apology or that the recipient interprets and responds to them in a distinctive manner. Still, as Heritage and Raymond show in this issue, the sorry formula appears to be used to apologize for problems indigenous to the ongoing interaction (i.e., transgressions such as those related to understanding talk) or other cases in which the wrongdoing is produced in the course of the talk and is thus immediately available to both speaker

8 SORRY VS. I M SORRY 7 and recipient. Thus, the sorry as an apologetic format in the context of repair appears to be a far more suitable resource than the I m sorry, with instances such as excerpt 2 occurring only rarely. On the contrary, I m sorry is a format mostly used for transgressions that have been committed outside (usually before) the interaction. We now examine particular uses and sequential environments in which the two formulas appear to better consider the hypothesis of a distinction between the two. DISTINCTIVE USES OF SORRY FORMULAS: A PREFERENCE FOR PROGRESSIVITY VS. APOLOGETIC-DEDICATED SEQUENCES Sorry also appears more frequently than I m sorry as apologizing for selfcorrection.

9 8 BIASSONI, DIADORI, FATIGANTE, MARAZZINI Given its use in the context of repair, the sorry format appears to be used as an economic tool for the recovery of the smooth management in terms of coherence and continuity of the conversation. Participants orient forward, either progressing right onto the next activity or closing. In encounters that do not develop into full apology sequences, in the corpus examined we only found sorry, not I m sorry, such as when the speaker expresses regret but does not open a space for the recipient to respond to his or her move as an apology. Dana embeds her sorry apology in the production of a turn, moving immediately onto a proposal of action. The use of sorry warrants Dana to acknowledge responsibility for having failed to return the book to the caller; still, the sequence does not develop as an apology but rapidly fades into an offer, favored as a next (practical) accomplishment, and resulting in a repair of the wrongdoing caused upon her recipient. Leslie found herself responding to Dana s proposal without the opportunity or necessity to acknowledge Dana s admission of wrongdoing (keeping the book so long; lines 10 and 11) and absolving her of responsibility for the wrongdoing. We hypothesize, then, that sorry-initiated apologies might serve a principle of progressivity better than I m sorry and index participants orientation even when they honor the need to repair offenses toward a rapid clearance of the wrongdoing. Remedying the offense would then be a distinctive action, which sorry primarily addresses. Let us now look at the specific environments where I m sorry only has been found.

10 SORRY VS. I M SORRY 9 I M SORRY FORMULAS IN APOLOGETIC-DEDICATED ENVIRONMENTS We found that I m sorry is chosen to initiate an apology when there is subsequently an expansion of the often quite extended apology sequence. There are a few elements, which are distinctive of such elaborated apologetic episodes, initiated and scaffolded by I m sorry: the presence of detailed explanations for the offense, the presence of modifiers, and the possibility for the apology to be recycled several times. Detailed Explanations Explanations, treated in conversation analysis under the general rubric of accounts, are socially standard, institutionalized features of those actions, which depart from the expected course of behavior (Heritage, 1988, p. 138). In the case of failure they make the person s conduct still reasonable and understood. There may be many ways to account for a failure, although common explanations are those that have a no-fault quality, that is, those that declare the speaker s inability to carry out the proposed /expected action. In each of the following excerpts, initiated by I m sorry, the speaker not only accounts (thus providing a rational ground) for her fault, declaring the event that caused the failure but, further, engages in a series of explanations that help constitute her as unable to prevent that causal event:

11 10 BIASSONI, DIADORI, FATIGANTE, MARAZZINI

12 SORRY VS. I M SORRY 11 In (11) Mrs. Richards explains that she slept in late because she had a fever, something that is naturally understood as rendering her as having been unable to call the school. In (12), Leslie explains that she was putting something on the cooktop, because this something was causing an effect that could have provoked long-lasting damage to her cooker, if not remedied immediately. In (13), Leslie s explanation makes clear to Philip that she was not aware, until late in the day, of the breakdown of the phone line, which resulted in her failure to call yesterday (lines 8 and 10). Her lack of awareness of the (technical) circumstances made her unable to prevent the offense. In (14) Myrna gives an extended account to make clear she is unable to come to the meeting, due to the absence of her husband and her mother s prior commitment and therefore her having to look after her daughter by herself. Summing up the structure of these kind of I m sorry initiated apologies, we might draw the format shown in Table 1. In all instances of 11 14, the explanations invoke the speaker s inability to forecast, monitor, or avoid the offense to occur, resulting in a claim of no fault action. Some independent, external causes are called on to make the offender s/apologizer s behavior as reasonable and comprehensible as possible. This is also the case in excerpt (15) below, in which a series of explanations prefaces the delivery of the I m sorry initiated apology by Bea, who is ultimately rejecting a job offer. TABLE 1 Formats of I m Sorry Initiated Apologies I m Sorry Reference to Wrongdoing Account No-Fault Explanation I m sorry I didn call becuz uh: I slept in late I haven t been feeling I m sorry tuh keep you, I ve jus been stickin:g because the top fell off I m sorry I couldn t ring yesterday I trie:d be " cuz (...) I found out I m terribly sorry I w z gun to ring/i ve had a phone call (Ben) he s not gun to get back t night

13 12 BIASSONI, DIADORI, FATIGANTE, MARAZZINI Here, Rose portrays to Bea the factors (i.e., the negative effects that accepting the job offer would cause on her life) that make the choice of not accepting the offer (which stands as the offensive action) an understandable and reasonable option. In the corpus of apologies we have analyzed, this kind of elaborated justifications only appears in I m sorry initiated apologies. In all instances the series of explanations provides a detailed description of the events, events that caused the apologizer to engage in the transgressive behavior. This is most obviously the case in in distal offenses (Heritage & Raymond, this issue) in which the recipient did not have available the context to perceive and acknowledge the wrongdoing. We add that by providing increasingly detailed explanations for the behavior, the speaker/apologizer offers the recipient a chance to be exposed to the same experiential, problematic scenario that she or he underwent. In all cases, the recipient accepts the account but does not respond to the apology itself. Additional resources are then needed to pursue absolution, the preferred response to apologies (Robinson, 2004). Modifiers In contrast to the sorry apologies, I m sorry constructions in the corpus may be accompanied by adverbs that modify, usually amplifying, the extent to which the speaker declares his regret by apologizing.

14 SORRY VS. I M SORRY 13

15 14 BIASSONI, DIADORI, FATIGANTE, MARAZZINI In excerpt (16) Myrna constructs her apology through repeating in three different turns the I m sorry unit, associated with different modifiers ( terribly in line 12; dreadfully in lines 21 and 32). Notably, the second one (dreadfully) aggravates the speaker s claim of regret, portraying her as utmost suffering for having engaged in the offense, this despite the fact that she has already told the recipient the reasons why she had to and despite that she had already encountered the recipient s acknowledgement. Also in (8), Miss Davids increases the magnitude of her apology (I m verry sorry, line 10). The addition of the modifiers and the redundant production (see next paragraph) of the I m sorry apology appear to serve otherattentive purposes, insofar as they increase the speaker s expression of affiliation with the recipient for the effects that the offense has impinged upon her or him and decrease the consideration shown toward oneself by self-pitying (Goffman, 1959). Recycling A third aspect that is associated with I m sorry apologies, and not with a simple sorry, in the lengthy and elaborated sequences we have been considering is that the apology can be resumed, namely recycled, several times. We examine an extended version of excerpt 14 again:

16 SORRY VS. I M SORRY 15

17 16 BIASSONI, DIADORI, FATIGANTE, MARAZZINI Over this excerpt, Myrna utters (with various degrees of emphasis) the expression I m sorry five times. Leslie s first response to her apology (line 15) is an acknowledgement. Her fuller understanding of the circumstances preventing Myrna from coming to the meeting is apparent in line 20, where she exhibits her independent access to the information on which Myrna is building her account. It appears, though, that for Myrna this is not sufficient she pursues a fuller acceptance and perhaps validation from Leslie. Myrna begins another round of apologies, which she utters with heightened intensifiers (from terribly to dreadfully ). This obtains, in turn, absolution from Leslie (line 22). That is, recycling an apology serves here to pursue a preferred response to the apology. Each repetition of Myrna s apology (lines 21, 32, 39, 50) is met by preferred responses (Robinson, 2004): absolution (line 22), an Oh- prefaced response (line 29), by which Leslie affiliates with the speaker s experience, and denial of the need to apologize (lines 33 and 38). These responses, however, do not have the

18 SORRY VS. I M SORRY 17 same value. In terms of the extent to which they clear and forgive the offense, denying the speaker s need to apologize is stronger than absolving the speaker: Whereas by the expression That s alright the recipient mitigates the damaging effect of the offense that she herself has experienced (as if stating: nothing [serious] has really happened [to me] ), by saying no not to worry the recipient mitigates the damage the offense may cause to the offender/apologizer herself, that of self- contempt. By the second option, then, expression of mutual approval and solidarity is utmost increased. The length and complexity of the moral work that both the speaker and the recipient accomplish in the example just examined stand in quite a striking contrast with the bare sorry apology delivered by a different speaker, in an exceptionally similar encounter. In excerpt (16) Joyce disappoints Leslie s expectation about her presence to a meeting. As compared with excerpt (14) (where she asked Myrna whether she would come to the meeting), Leslie s turn in this sequence figures not as a proper invitation but, rather, a question and did not make relevant an apology by Joyce

19 18 BIASSONI, DIADORI, FATIGANTE, MARAZZINI (cf. for this example also Margutti, Pugliese, & Traverso, this issue). Still, what develops next signals that an elaboration of Joyce s turn is relevantly missing (cf. Drew & Hepburn, this issue). Joyce eventually apologizes after a considerable delay. Yet, she chooses sorry, and not I m sorry, to do that. We hypothesize that this choice is not irrelevant to the fact that Joyce did not acknowledge her negative response as an offense (cf. Margutti et al., this issue) and did not engage then in the kind of moral work that Myrna engaged in example (16): the extensive, redundant, and emotionally laden process of admission of personal responsibility for having committed the offense, complemented by several justifications. I m sorry was a more sufficient and appropriate framing for her apology, in order to manage such moral work, marking the speaker s orientation toward not only repairing the interlocutor s offense (in Goffman s terms) but also toward a rehabilitation of the moral self. DISCUSSION Culpability, Affiliation, and the Construction of the Moral Self We return now to our initial research questions, whether we can draw some distinctions between two different forms of sorry-based apologies and whether we can find some recurrent patterns in the adoption of the two formulas. Heritage and Raymond (this issue) propose that different formats of apologizing (e.g., bare vs. expanded) may appear proportionally to certain dimensions of the offensive event, such as whether it is minimal and proximate to the participants or such (as in distal offenses) to require more elaboration from the apologizer. Our analyses align with Heritage and Raymond s; however, we are proposing that along with culpability and absolution, there is an additional dimension, that of forgiveness. Robinson (2004) identifies forgiveness as a distinctive dimension from absolution, thus not to be included in his discussion on apologies. However, he mentions that the dimension would be worthy of examination in future studies. Forgiveness is a broad concept, difficult to operationalize in observable aspects of talk, although studies that it correlates with relational closeness, positive affect, and empathy between individuals (McCullough, Rachal, Sandage, Worthington, Brown, & Hight, 1998; Takaku, 2001). In our examples, as in those examined by Robinson, speakers never explicitly refer to or demand forgiveness. Nevertheless, the highly elaborate and recursive apologetic sequences in which they engage suggest that speakers seek not only some absolution for their responsibility for the wrongdoing but also seek the recipient s/offended person s affiliation and a sympathizing attitude. In sequences of this sort,

20 SORRY VS. I M SORRY Accounts are mostly formatted as no-fault explanations and are highly detailed and elaborate to provide the recipient with the chance to comprehend and affiliate with the speaker s unfortunate reasons for why he or she committed the offense. 2. Modifiers most likely intensify the degree of the speaker s personal regret ( feeling sorry) for the effects of the wrongdoing upon the recipient, thus enhancing a sympathizing attitude toward the recipient and making reciprocating the affiliation relevant. 3. Apologies may be recycled several times, even after an absolution is delivered, so that each time the apologizer re-enacts his or her claim of culpability. By volunteering and over-emphasizing his or her responsibility in the offense, the apologizer also portrays a (critical) judgmental stance toward him- or herself and the action undertaken. This, in turn, would promote a recipient s response similar to the one triggered by self-critiques and expressions of self-contempt (Pomerantz, 1984): the recipient, by disagreeing with him on the need to apologize, supports the speaker, reassuring him that his morality is preserved and publicly acknowledged instead. In these long, recursive sequences, apologies are then so formatted as to proffer the agent (beside, the offense) as being exculpable, comprehended, attuned, forgiven. In this sense, I m sorry could be a more appropriate device for not only remedying the offense but also to maintain the offender s identity as moral and trustworthy, thus preventing retaliation from the offended party. It is also worth considering, in this respect, that in nonapologetic environments, I m sorry is used for expressing condolence to the recipient, that is, claiming that the speaker is able to share the same experience of sorrow with the recipient. Following this, we hypothesize that the copula I m, which differentiates sorry from I m sorry, can act as an indexical of the speaker s modulation of her experience of culpability. That is, the increase in agency that is grammatically encoded in the use of the pronoun (Heritage & Raymond, this issue) would apply not so much to the extent to which the apologizer claims responsibility for the guilt (which, as we have seen, does not systematically associate to one or the other of the two formulas) but rather to the extent to which the apologizer exhibits herself as subject of an experience, upon which she demands the recipient to attune. We turn now return briefly to the analysis of the sorry. Sorry formats maintain a certain preference for being used as a resource orienting toward progressivity of and closing 2 the apologetic encounter, and we never found those rounds and 2 In a different setting (i.e., collaborative word searching in conversations with an aphasic subject), Catrin Rhys also observed (2013) how participants may use sorry as a resource oriented to close the current activity and to move the conversation forward.

21 20 BIASSONI, DIADORI, FATIGANTE, MARAZZINI rehearsals of apology, which are instead supported by I m sorry formats. In nonapologetic environments (such as repair and self-correction), speakers find sorry, not I m sorry, as a ready-made resource serving the preference for continuation and coherence in conversation in short, its progressivity (Schegloff, Jefferson, & Sacks, 1977). This preference would cause the use of sorry, which would favor the transition to the closing of the apologetic sequence, in contexts where I m sorry (and dedicated sequence to apologies) is expected, to indeed generate misalignment between participants. In excerpt (16) the same type of encounter in the call between Leslie and Myrna had generated an extensive proffer of apologies and declarations of regret by Myrna, Joyce s use of sorry anticipates the noticeable absence of affiliation with Leslie, who is in fact left alone to imply and endure the (unfortunate) consequences of Joyce s failure to comply to her (implicit) request. In this sense, we may hypothesize that I m sorry formats anticipate and sustain (in apologetic-dedicated environments) the speaker s orientation to the relational aim of exhibiting affiliation than to the local aim of remedying to the offense and having responsibility absolved. In those specific, highly elaborated, and recursive sequences of the kind we have examined, we argue that participants use of I m sorry (instead of sorry) may be sensitive to the participants orientation to a morality that implies not only the human subject s ability to claim responsibility for action but also to understand the point of view of the others (Duranti, 2012). Interestingly, scholars working experimentally in the Theory of Mind paradigm (Gopnik & Schultz, 2004) claim that children only develop the ability to apologize between ages 4 and 5, when they advance in their ability to understand and adopt the other s point of view. This makes it possible for participants in social encounters to compensate for offenses and thereby attain the other s understanding/attunement in a way that is partially independent of the extent to which they were responsible for committing the offending event. To fully understand the work of maintenance of social solidarity pursued by apologies, then, we need to deepen the analysis of how social actors warrant affiliation and mutual sympathy, which may be implied as a distinctive aspect in apologizing. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The authors jointly designed and discussed the plan and different sections of the paper. Marilena Fatigante is mainly responsible for the first draft and the review of the analyses. Federica Biassoni is mainly responsible for the Introduction, the Analyses and Discussion section. Francesca Marazzini is mainly responsible for the parts: Sorry and I m Sorry: Two Formats for Apologizing and I m Sorry Formulas in Apologetic-dedicated Environments and the discussion section.

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