“Sorry for your consideration”: The (in)adequacy of English speech act labels in describing ‘apologies’ and ‘thanks’ in Japanese

Abstract Despite speech act theory being very influential in pragmatics, the notion of what constitutes a speech act in languages other than English has not received the attention it deserves in the literature. After a brief outline of traditional speech act theory, this paper problematizes the use of English speech act labels by comparing English and Japanese conceptualizations of ‘apologies’ and ‘thanks’. The notion of indebtedness and the norm of reciprocity are then discussed, arguing that they can help revealing similarities between ‘apologies’ and ‘thanks’ in Japanese that are not observed in English. The second part of the paper is empirical in nature and adopts a corpus-assisted approach. The Japanese expression su(m)imasen [sorry], usually signaled as apologetic, is used as key word in two web corpora of written Japanese for retrieving metapragmatic comments and naturally occurring exchanges where su(m)imasen is framed as an expression of gratitude – a function English apologies do not serve. Finally, the paper proposes the notion of pragmatic space to investigate ‘apologies’ and ‘thanks’ as neighboring speech acts that overlap to different degrees and present different prototypical features in Japanese and English. The analysis reveals that the acritical use of English speech act labels is not suitable for describing ‘apologies’ and ‘thanks’ in Japanese.