25Oct 2017

JUSTIFICATION, EXCUSE AND EXPLANATION: A PRAGMATIC PERSPECTIVE.

  • University of Babylon, College of Education- Human Sciences, Dept. of English
Crossref Cited-by Linking logo
  • Abstract
  • References
  • Cite This Article as
  • Corresponding Author

Justification and excuse are interrelated speech acts which have much in common in the sense that their purposes often interfere and that only contextual clues make it possible to distinguish one from the other. Nevertheless, in justification, the speaker acknowledges that an offence has occurred and accepts some accountability for it, whereas in excuse, he does not deny his partaking in the offence, but free himself from the responsibility by mentioning external elements without which the offence would not have taken place. Additionally, justification bears a close resemblance to the speech act of explanation to the extent that it is termed as explanation?s close cousin. The latter?s function is to make clear or tell why a state of affairs exists. The present paper attempts to investigate the relationship between these three acts detecting their similarities and enhancing their differences.

  1. Austin, J. L. (1956). A Plea for Excuse. The Presidential Address. The Aristotelian Society, Vol. 57, pp. 1-30.
  2. (1962) How To Do Things With Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
  3. Al- Hindawi, F. (1999). Iraqi EFL Learners? Use of the Speech Acts of Command and Request. Unpublished Ph. D. Dissertation. University of Baghdad.
  4. Bach, K. and Harnish, R. (1978). Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
  5. Black, E. (2006) Pragmatic Stylistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
  6. Comparini, L. (2013). The Use of Justification in the Linguistic Construction of Agency and Social Connection in Latina Mother-Child Conflict. Journal of Pragmatics, 57, 57-67.
  7. Coulthard, Malcolm (1985). An Introduction to Discourse Analysis. London : Longman
  8. Edmondson, Willis (1981). Spoken discourse : A Model for Analysis. London: Longman.
  9. Ferrara, A. (1980). An extended theory of speech acts: appropriateness conditions for subordinate acts in sequence. Journal of Pragmatics (4). 233 ? 252 .
  10. Fraser, B. (1980). Conversational Mitigation. Journal of Pragmatics, 4, 341-350
  11. Goethals, Patrick. (2010). A Multi-Layered Approach to Speech Event: The Case of Spanish Justificational Conjunctions. Journal of Pragmatics, 42, 2204-2218.
  12. Goetz, P. J. (2010). The Development of Verbal Justifications in the Conversations of Preschool Children and Adults. First Language, (30), (3), 403-420.
  13. Henkemans, F. (2001). Argumentation, Explanation and Causality: An Explanation of Current Linguistic Approaches to Textual relations. In Sanders, T., Schilperoord, J. and Spooren, W. (Eds.) Text Representation: Linguistic and Psycholinguistic Aspects. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
  14. Hornby, A. S. (2010) Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  15. Houglund, J. (1986). Arguments and Explanations. In Van Eemeren, F., Grootendorst, R., Blair, J. and Williard, C. (Eds.) Argumentation: Across the Line of Discipline. Dordrecht: Foris Publication.
  16. Kasachkoff, T. (1988). Explaining and Justifying. Informal Logic, 1, 21-30.
  17. Levinson, S. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  18. Mey, Jacob (2001). Pragmatics: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell .
  19. Ogiermann, E. (2009). On Apologizing in Negative and Positive Politeness Cultures. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
  20. Scott, M. and Layman, M. (1968) Accounts. American Sociological Review, Vol. 33, No. 1, 46-62.
  21. Searle, J. (1979). Expression and Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  22. Sinnott-Armstrong, W. and Fogelin, R. (2015). Understanding Argument an Introduction to Informal Logic. Stamford: Cengage Learning.
  23. Van Dijk, Teun A. (1977a) Text and Context. London: Longman.
  24. ______________ (1977b). Pragmatic Macrostructures in Discourse and Cognition. University of Amsterdam, 99-113.
  25. ________________(1980) Macrostructures: An Interdisciplinary Study of Global Structures in Discourse, Interaction, and Cognition. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
  26. Van Eemeren, F., Grootendorst, R. and Henkemans, F. (2002). Argumentation, Evaluation, Presentation. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
  27. Verschueren, Jef (1999). Understanding Pragmatics. London: Arnold.
  28. Walton, D. (1996). Argument Structure: A Pragmatic Theory. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
  29. ________ (2005). Argumentation Methods for Artificial Intelligence in Law. Berlin: Springer.
  30. ____________ (2007a). The Speech Act of Clarification in a Dialogue Model. Studies in Communication Sciences, 7, 2, 165-197.
  31. ____________ (2007b). Dialogical Models of Explanation. Papers from the AAAI Workshop, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, Technical Report, AAAI Press, 1-9.

[Hameed Hassoon and Mariam D. Saffah. (2017); JUSTIFICATION, EXCUSE AND EXPLANATION: A PRAGMATIC PERSPECTIVE. Int. J. of Adv. Res. 5 (Oct). 1426-1433] (ISSN 2320-5407). www.journalijar.com

Mariam D. Saffah
University of Babylon College of Education- Human Sciences

DOI:

Article DOI: 10.21474/IJAR01/5662      
DOI URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.21474/IJAR01/5662

Download Full Paper

Download PDF No. of Downloads: 123 | No. of Views: 503