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
Apologies made at the Leveson Inquiry
Triggers and responses
James Murphy | University of the West of England
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.
Keywords: courtroom discourse, political language, public inquiries, apologies, remedial work, conversation analysis, action chains, Leveson Inquiry
Published online: 20 December 2016
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.7.4.04mur
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.7.4.04mur
References
References
Aijmer, Karin
Atkinson, Maxwell
Atkinson, Maxwell, and Paul Drew
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson
Drew, Paul
Gibbons, John
Grice, Paul
Hansen, Maj-Britt Mosegaard
Harris, Sandra, Karen Grainger, and Louise Mullany
Heinemann, Trine, and Véronique Traverso
Jefferson, Gail
Kampf, Zohar
Kampf, Zohar, and Nava Löwenheim
Murphy, James
Pomerantz, Anita
Psathas, George
Robinson, Jeffrey
Cited by
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