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.
References
Aijmer, Karin
1997 “ ‘I think’ – an English Modal Particle.” In Modality in Germanic languages: Historical and comparative perspectives, ed. by Toril Swan and Olaf Jensen Westvik, 1–47. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 
Atkinson, Maxwell
1978 Discovering Suicide: Studies in the Social Organization of Sudden Death. London: Macmillan.
Atkinson, Maxwell, and Paul Drew
1979 Order in Court: The Organisation of Verbal Interaction in Judicial Settings. London: Macmillan.
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson
1987 Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Drew, Paul
1997 “ ‘Open’ Class Repair Initiators in Response to Sequential Sources of Troubles in Conversation”. Journal of Pragmatics 281: 69–101.
Gibbons, John
2003 Forensic Linguistics: An Introduction to Language in the Justice System. Oxford: Blackwell.
Goffman, Erving
1967 Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. New York: Anchor.
1971 Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order. New York: Basic Books.
Grice, Paul
1975 “Logic and Conversation.” In Syntax and Semantics, vol. 31, ed. by Peter Cole and Jerry Morgan, 41–58. New York: Academic Press.
Hansen, Maj-Britt Mosegaard
2008 “On the Availability of Literal Meaning: Evidence from Courtroom Interaction.” Journal of Pragmatics 401: 1392–1410.
Harris, Sandra, Karen Grainger, and Louise Mullany
2006 “The Pragmatics of Political Apologies.” Discourse & Society 171: 715–737.
Heinemann, Trine, and Véronique Traverso
(eds) 2009 Complaining in Interaction. Special Issue of Journal of Pragmatics 411: 2381–2478.
Jefferson, Gail
2004 “Glossary of Transcript Symbols with an Introduction.” In Conversation Analysis: Studies from the First Generation, ed. by Gene Lerner, 13–31. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Kampf, Zohar
2009 “The Age of Apology: Evidence from the Israeli Public Discourse.” Social Semiotics 191: 257–273.
2011 “Journalists as Actors in Social Dramas of Apology.” Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism 121: 71–87.
Kampf, Zohar, and Nava Löwenheim
2012 “Rituals of Apology in the International Arena.” Security Dialogue 431: 43–60.
Levinson, Stephen C
1983 Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2000 Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Prres.
Murphy, James
2014 “(Im)politeness at Prime Minister’s Questions in the U.K. Parliament.” Pragmatics and Society 51: 76–104.
2015 “Revisiting the Apology as a Speech Act: The Case of Parliamentary Apologies.” Journal of Language and Politics 14 (2): 175–204.
Pomerantz, Anita
1978 “Compliment Response: Notes on the Co-operation of Multiple Constraints.” In Studies in the Organisation of Conversational Interaction, ed. by Jim Schenkein, 79–112. New York: Academic Press.
Psathas, George
1995 Conversation Analysis: The Study of Talk-in-Interaction. London: Sage Publications.
Robinson, Jeffrey
2004 “The Sequential Organization of ‘Explicit’ Apologies in Naturally Occurring English.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 371: 291–330.
2006 “Managing Trouble Responsibility and Relationships during Conversational Repair.” Communication Monographs 731: 137–161.
Cited by
Cited by 6 other publications
An, Yi, Hang Su & Mingyou Xiang
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.
Murphy, James
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 13 april 2024. 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.