Intercultural Pragmatic Analysis of "Sorry" in Inflight Service Refusals by Flight Attendants: A Case Study of a Thai Airline

In seeking to investigate the use of "sorry" in interlanguage refusal by Thai EFL users in an intercultural communication context, the present study collected data from Thai flight attendants who served passengers on international flights for a Thai airline, so as to examine how "sorry" is adopted in refusals in the context of in-flight services. A discourse completion task (DCT) questionnaire was employed to solicit responses from ten male and ten female participants. Through Weerachairattana and Wannaruk's (2016) classification of refusals and the syntactical construction of "sorry" by Arizavi and Choubsaz (2018), the data gathered were coded and analyzed in terms of semantic formulas, strategies used, and pragmatic transfer. Findings revealed that "sorry" conveyed conventional implicatures as "a marker for refusals," "expressing an excuse or reason," and "introducing a reason or showing sympathy," attested by the constructions used in refusals. The term was also uttered with an "excuse, reason, or explanation" to express politeness and regret in refusals in which pragmatic transfer was produced by flight attendants due to L1 pragmatic norms. These different functions of "sorry" used in refusals were bound to surrounding and situational contexts. However, gender differences did not have much bearing on the use of "sorry" in refusals because organizational culture plays a more significant part in discourse in professional contexts. This study was conducted in the hope that it could contribute to interlanguage pragmatic study, particularly to expand our understanding of intercultural communication between English native speakers and EFL learners and users.