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Sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic conventions for apology vary from culture to culture. While the illocutionary purpose of apologizing in English is “the speaker's sense of social obligation” (Wierzbicka 1987: 215~217) and Japanese sumimasen involves “social-self with a social alter” (Ide 1998: 524), this study argues that Korean mianhada is an apology from the speaker's moral perspective linked with collective-self. Employing Wierzbicka's (1987) Natural Semantic Metalanguage, this study discusses that sorry is a separate concept but mianhada is a nebulous concept mixed with other emotions, e.g., thank and love. In addition, presenting the examples from corpus-based dictionaries, COCA, and the Sejong 21st Century Corpus, this study discusses that sorry is authentically used as indirect and ritualistic apologies while mianhada is used as direct, indirect, ritualistic and substantive apologies. Finally, distinguishing main functions of mianhada into a sincere apology, a pseudo-apology, gratitude, a request initiator, a preclosing signal, and a territory invasion signal to strangers, this study provides cultural and ethnographical explanations.
