Mea Culpa: Admissions of Guilt and Locus of Control
Megan Hutto
State University of New York at Buffalo
When a politician must go before an audience and read a statement of culpability, how do they word it? How do friends apologize to each other? How do individuals for whom the general locus of control varies handle these situations? And, perhaps most importantly to the present study, how are utterances which fall outside the cultural norm received? Apologies are an important domain of cross-cultural pragmatics; what English speakers consider appropriate may be just on the wrong side of offensive to a Russian speaker. This study aims to further explicate these cross-cultural differences.
Russian and American English have been chosen since they are generally regarded as representing individuals with opposed loci of control. The locus of control is an individual’s belief in their ability to control their own life (Rotter, 1966). Speakers of American English tend to fall on the internal end and Russians on the external (Smith, Trompenaars, & Dugan, 1995). For this study, data in the form of apologies is gathered from two corpora of modern speech; COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English) and CRL (National Corpus of the Russian Language; Национальный корпус русского языка). This data is comprised of transcribed conversations, political press releases, news articles, and other public declarations. These apologies represent varying levels of prototypicality for each language as defined in papers such as Johnson & Ensslin (2007). Once samples of apologies are gathered, they are compared to each other and to the acceptable syntactic and discourse constructions of their respective languages in order to assign each with a numerical score of acceptability.
Having established a baseline score for each utterance, participants are then asked to rate their willingness to accept the apology on a seven-point Likert scale (Likert, 1932). These ratings include perceived remorse, willingness to change, and personal responsibility. The participants are comprised of native speakers of Russian and American English. The participants’ personal locus of control is established in a preliminary survey. The average score for each utterance is then compared to the previously determined acceptability ratings based upon previous literature.
Every human being errs and gives apologies which are necessarily rooted in our own culture. If individuals do not share that context, cross-cultural misunderstandings may arise. This study hopes to shine light on one domain of these misunderstandings.
References
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Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Bringham Young University, corpus.byu.edu/coca/.
Russian National Corpus (RNC). Institute of Russian Language, Russian Academy of Sciences, 29 Apr. 2004, ruscorpora.ru/search-murco.html.