Speech acts or speech act sets: apologies and compliments

The present paper arises from wider research (Válková, 2004, 2012) aimed at various manifestations of politeness theory, namely at the processes of apologising and complimenting and their results, i.e. overt language entities of different sizes and various structural configurations that can be perceived (or negotiated) as apologies and compliments. These are treated within the framework of a modified model of speech act set theory, with corpus‑based samples discussed to verify the validity of the theoretical findings. The results show that rather than single speech acts, apologies and compliments should be treated as speech act sets opening up space for identifying more delicate, partly universal and partly language specific scenarios, by means of which cross‑cultural similarities and differences can be considered. The consequences for SLA are also obvious: the lack of pragmatic competence in producing appropriate speech reactions diminishes the possibility of accomplishing the intended communicative goals.