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4.1  Research questions ........................ 27

4.2  Corpus data ................................. 27

4.3  Corpus tools ................................. 28

CHAPTER 5  RESULTS AND ANALYSIS ............................. 31

5.1  Forms of apology in business meetings ................... 31

5.1.1 The lexemes of apology ................................. 31

5.1.2 The syntactic structures of apology ..................... 32

CHAPTER 6  DISCUSSION

6.1  A recapitulation of the research findings

This study examines how BELF speakers make apologies in business meetings through observing its forms and functions. To highlight the peculiarities of apology in BEFL, cases for ENL are investigated for juxtaposition. The research data was retrieved from VOICE and BNC, then was analyzed based on VOICE 3.0 Online and Sketch Engine. 

The results show that, the frequency of apologies in VOICE-BM is much lower than BNC-BM. BELF interlocutors use less variant and less balanced lexemes than ENL speakers to convey their regrets. Besides, BELF speakers utter apologizing expressions more creatively and innovatively. For the functions of apologies, it conducts discourse management and interpersonal management in business meetings. In BELF, apology serves a signal for the lack of common ground to promote discourse management. Also, it functions as mitigation markers to manage interpersonal relationship.

This study summarizes two contextual factors that lead to those differences and similarities. Firstly, the intercultural context leads to those variations of BELF from ENL, such as simpler apologizing expression and more innovative sentential structures. Secondly, the shared business meeting situational background leads to many congruent features of BELF and ENL interaction. Participants intend to utilize simple lexemes and sentences. And also, apologies in business meetings play the role of mitigation markers more than other genres. 

CHAPTER 7  CONCLUSION

7.1  Summary of major findings

As aforementioned, the present study aims to explore the idiosyncrasies of apologies in BELF communication by referring to ENL. Corpora used for this research are business meeting subcorpus of VOICE and BNC. Two corpus software are utilized for assistance: VOICE 3.0 Online and Sketch Engine. The analytical procedure mainly covers two parts: form and function perspective. 

For the forms of apologies in BELF and ENL, the current study carries out inspection by lexemes and syntax. Firstly, the standardized frequency of apologizing expressions in VOICE-BM (594.95) is much lower than BNC-BM (951.70), and the difference of frequency in the two corpora is highly significant (LL=14.24, p<0.000). Furthermore, the distribution of apologizing lexemes in VOICE-BM is much more unbalanced than BNC-BM. BELF speakers are inclined to apologize for their offences in a homogenous way. It is just sorry and excuse that take up nearly 90% of all apologizing expressions but forgive and regret doesn’t occur in the targeted data. Secondly, the distribution of three syntactic structures of apology in the two corpora本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。