Article published In:
(Co-)Constructing Interpersonally Sensitive Activities Across Institutional SettingsEdited by Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen and Rosina Márquez Reiter
[Pragmatics and Society 7:4] 2016
► pp. 595–617
Edited by Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen and Rosina Márquez Reiter
[Pragmatics and Society 7:4] 2016
► pp. 595–617
Apologies made at the Leveson Inquiry
Triggers and responses
This paper discusses apologies made by politicians at a recent UK public inquiry, the Leveson Inquiry into the Culture, Practices and Ethics of the Press. I use the freely available data from the Inquiry to explore how politicians apologise in this interactional setting, contrasting it with more usual monologic political apologies. Firstly, I identify the sorts of actions which may be seen as apologisable. I then take a conversation analytic (CA) approach to explore how the apologies can come as a result of an overt complaint and how the apologies are reacted to by counsel and the Inquiry chair. I show that, unlike in everyday conversation, apologies are not the first pair parts of adjacency pairs (cf. Robinson 2004), but rather form action chains (Pomerantz 1978) where the absence of a response is unmarked. I conclude with some observations on how apology tokens may be losing their apologetic meaning.
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2022. Apology responses and gender differences in spoken British English. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) 32:1 ► pp. 28 ff. 
Beeching, Kate & James Murphy
2019. Introduction: Strategic uses of politeness formulae. Analytical approaches and theoretical accounts. Journal of Pragmatics 142 ► pp. 201 ff.
Murphy, James
2019. Apologising. In The Discursive Construction of Blame, ► pp. 201 ff.
2019. I'm sorry you are such an arsehole: (non-)canonical apologies and their implications for (im)politeness. Journal of Pragmatics 142 ► pp. 223 ff.
Olayinka Unuabonah, Foluke
2020. Argumentation in Nigerian investigative public hearings. Journal of Argumentation in Context 9:2 ► pp. 199 ff.
Sarfo-Kantankah, Kwabena Sarfo
2021. I withdraw and apologise but…: Ghanaian parliamentary apologies, the issue of sincerity and acceptance. Journal of Pragmatics 180 ► pp. 1 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 23 february 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.