Spanish in Context 7:2 (2010), 254–278. doi 10.1075/sic.7.2.05wag issn 1571–0718 / e-issn 1571–0726 © John Benjamins Publishing Company Apologizing in Cuernavaca, Mexico and Panama City, Panama A cross-cultural comparison of positive- and negative-politeness strategies Lisa C. Wagner and Regina Roebuck is comparative study of naturally occurring apologies in Cuernavaca and Panamanian Spanish investigates the apology strategies community members employ most oſten, and the types of positive- and negative-politeness strategies they use to perform this speech act. e authors calculate the frequency with which speakers use positive- and negative-politeness strategies in their apol- ogy acts and investigate whether members of these two speech communities demonstrate a preference for positive or negative politeness when apologizing. Instead of using a language-specific parameter such as “Spanish Language” and assuming that all native speakers of this language have and will use a closed set of linguistic strategies in the same way when they apologize, the authors argue that speech acts, politeness and face are socio-culturally sensitive variables whose values and effects vary between communities of practice. To support this claim, they show how the communities of Cuernavaca, Mexico and Panama City, Panama differ from previous findings on apologizing within different communi- ties of practice in the Spanish-speaking world. Keywords: apologies, face, politeness, face threatening acts, Spanish 1. eoretical frameworks: Understanding the apology act In an attempt to define and characterize apologies, researchers from a wide range of scholarly disciplines have investigated this phenomenon using different theo- ries, approaches, data collection techniques and analyses. e various disciplines of theoretical, descriptive and applied linguistics place emphasis on linguistic structures and strategies of language use. Consequently, a large portion of the lin- guistic research to date has focused on the types of occurrences that necessitate