apologies and other stuff

ppt on teams – shared channel general folder

Janet Holmes (1995) devised a list of categories of offences.

Pragmatics argument.

Positive / negative politeness

Positive face – the desire to be liked and accepted

Negative face –

Holmes identified apologies as forms of negative politeness which attend to negative face needs. She categorised them.

Harris, Grainger, and Mullaney (2006) presented the following list of strategies which constitute apologies.

Left branching clause and conditional ‘if’ clause (e.g. ‘if I had know, X, I wouldn’t have done Y’) often used to justify or mitigate.

To be honest – idiomatic phrase.

Public apologia website

Discourse structure – look at order of ideas in a text

Labov’s narrative structure

Start, end, what’s the focus?

Shiri Lev-Ari’s 2025 research looking at apologetic posts on X suggests that people use longer words in their apologies than in other communication and perceive apologetic sentences with longer words as more apologetic.

polysyllabic / monosyllabic

‘why learn French when your phone can do it for you?’

when analysing a text:
producer: who made it and what are they trying to do?

receiver: what assumptions / values

in text who/what: social actors, how are they framed?

metonymy

synecdoche