Perović, Slavica (2016). Apologising and the Montenegrin cultural script. Logos et Littera, 1(3), pp. 1-24. PDF (open access)
The paper deals with the representation of the speech act of apology through cultural scripts. The research has been done on a corpus of students’ responses gathered through an interview of the Discourse Completion Task (DCT) type. The speech act of apology is analysed within the politeness theory originated by Brown and Levinson (1987) and the category of ‘face’. The complexity and specificity of this speech act in Montenegrin leads us to establish six semantic components of apologizing for which we devise cultural scripts. Furthermore, two broad categories of apologies are identified: non-verbal and verbal. These are labelled ‘to do is to say’ and ‘to say is to do’, respectively, and give rise to do master scripts. The analysis in this paper relies on the idea of cultural scripts developed by Anna Wierzbicka and Cliff Goddard, executed through the semantic primes of Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM).
Crude application of NSM principles carried out without prior training by an experienced NSM practitioner
