Apologies made at the Leveson Inquiry: Triggers and responses

Murphy, James

Abstract

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.

• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2018
• Deposit Date: Jun 7, 2018
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 7, 2018
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 91-113
• Book Title: The Pragmatics of Sensitive Activities in Institutional Discourse
• ISBN: 9789027263674
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/bct.96.04mur
• Keywords: courtroom discourse, political language, public inquiries, apologies, remedial work, conversation analysis, action chains, Leveson Inquiry
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/875289
• Publisher URL: https://doi.org/10.1075/bct.96.04mur
• Additional Information: Additional Information : This is the author's accepted manuscript. Here is a link to the published book: https://benjamins.com/catalog/bct.96.
• Contract Date: Jun 7, 2018