Cross-Cultural Apologies

[Alexandre Enkerli]

A recent episode of the Open Source radio show (and podcast) centres
on apologies:
http://www.radioopensource.org/mea-culpa/
Guests: Aaron Lazare, Barbara Brown Taylor, and Andrew Cline.

It does pay lip-service to the linguistic dimensions of apologies
(including the transition from "apologist" to "sorry," which we
haven't made in French).

Several mentions were made of cross-cultural communication. It'd be
rather easy to give a Goffman/Brown/Levinson/Grice reading of that
conversation. But there are other dimensions, including
socio-political and theological issues.

Though they do talk about Benedict XVI, the more extended example used
is that of Clinton's apology.

Sorry for my previous message.

-- 
Alexandre
http://enkerli.wordpress.com/