(IN)SINCERITY IN APOLOGY: CONTEXTUALISING APOLOGIES IN WOLE SOYINKA’S ALAPATA APATA

Abstract

Analysis of apology has been considered by scholars from different
perspectives with little attention paid to the damage done by insincere
apology. This paper was therefore designed to investigate the use of
apologies in Wole Soyinka’s Alapata Apata (AA) with a view to
examining their sincerity or otherwise. John Gumperz’s theory of
interactional sociolinguistics was adopted and descriptive design was
used. Wole Soyinka was purposively chosen because of his literary
prowess and prominent deployment of apologies in his plays while
Alapata Apata was purposively selected because of its thematic
relevance. Eleven of the forty-four apology instances in the text were
subjected to pragmatic analysis. It is revealed that unlike sincere
apologies that are characterized by acknowledgement of offence,
humility and remorse, insincere ones are characterized by attack,
challenge, mockery and ironical statements. The paper concludes that
insincere apologies are worse than non-apologies; they compound
rather than remedy situations. It is recommended that parents should
inculcate the culture of apology into their children right from
childhood.