COMMUNICATIVE INTENTION IN APOLOGY SPEECH ACTS: A PRAGMATIC COMPARISON BASED ON TWO DRAMA SERIES IN AMERICAN ENGLISH AND BULGARIAN

The paper presents a comparative analysis of apology communicative acts observed in interaction and captured from two drama series, in American English and in Bulgarian. The analysis further branches into examining the typology of apology utterances in both languages, classifying them into direct/indirect, evasive and optingout apologies while highlighting their pragmatic peculiarities. A focal point in the research is the interpretation of communicative intention within each dataset and the implications of apology utterances regarding specific conversational implicatures. The study exceeds the conventional interpretations on the issue of implicature, offering a modern approach on the matters of communicative interactions, as well as providing new perspectives on the pragmatics of apology.