Language Corpora Data as the Source of Sociocultural Information about Pardon Apology

Abstract

The article covers the potentials of the English language corpus in terms of developing intercultural awareness, which is the topical issue nowadays, discussed in various domains of humanities. Successful intercultural communication is contributed by both mastery of language and mastery of speech etiquette. For the speech etiquette standards, nonnative speakers teaching foreign languages may refer to the teaching support kits, dictionaries, reference textbooks, and academic research. Communicating with native speakers and reading general fiction may also be of use. Nevertheless, contradictory recommendations raise concern about reliability of information sources on stylistic and cultural marking of various linguistic units. Reflecting the actual usage of linguistic units instead of biased native speakers’ opinions and being a representational, unified, and well-structured body of data, a language corpus may be used as a reliable information source for the purposes of teaching a foreign language. For the purposes of this study, British National Corpus was chosen as it represents the British English of the late 20^th century. Pardon apology formula was used as an example to study the applicability of language corpus data to identify the social class marking of discourse. The research had for a goal validating or disproving the opinion that pardon apology formula is inherent to the lower-middle and upper-middle class, therefore its frequency was put to analysis. As result, the language corpus shows that pardon apology formula is used by the upper social classes almost twice as frequent as by the other classes (303.47 cases vs 139.54 cases per million). Besides, there is a distinct trend showing that this apology formula is used more frequently by each next social class. Though there are some constraints imposed by multiple meaning and insufficient marking of materials, using the language corpus as a tool of teaching intercultural communication is deemed to be quite practicable.