APOLOGY STRATEGY IN AGATHA CHRISTIE’S BLACK COFFEE

Abstract

This research is based on pragmatics study. The aims of this research are to find out the kinds of apology strategy, the reason why those types of apology are performed by the characters, and the factors that influence those apology strategies uttered by the characters in the Black Coffee novel. The Descriptive-qualitative methods are applied in this research, in which the data are in form of utterances and don’t involve any numbers. The data are taken from the act of apologizing of the conversation performed by the characters in the Black Coffee novel. The researcher uses Trosborg’s (1994) theory of apology strategy in order to classify what type of apology strategy the data belong to. Trosborg (1994) stated that there are eight types of apology strategies; rejection, minimizing the degrees of offence, acknowledgement of responsibility, explanation or account, expression of apology, offer of repair, promise for forbearance and expressing concern to the hearer. In the analysis, the data show that there are only 5 apology strategies used by the characters in the novel, namely; rejection, acknowledgement of responsibility, explanation or account, expression of apology and offer of repair. Those five strategies are found in 29 apologizing utterances performed by the characters throughout the novel. The reason why these types of apologizing are performed by the characters are related to the offense, cultural background of the participants involves in the conversation, social distance and social status of the participants. Moreover this study uses Fraser (1981) theory that elaborates the factors influencing apology strategy; the nature of the infraction, the severity of the infraction, the situation in which the infraction occurs, the familiarity between the interactants and the sex of the interactants. The result shows that the characters tend to perform direct apology strategy. Those can be seen from the data which show that the characters mostly use the strategy of expression of apology in apologizing rather than the other four apology strategies found in the data in which the strategy of expression of apology mostly used by the characters in the novel are containing the verb words as the criteria of direct apology strategy.