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 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.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jun 7, 2016
• Publication Date: Dec 5, 2016
• Deposit Date: Jul 18, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Nov 4, 2016
• Journal: Pragmatics and Society
• Print ISSN: 1878-9714
• Electronic ISSN: 1878-9722
• Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 7
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 595-617
• Keywords: apologies, remedial work, conversation analysis, courtroom discourse, political; language, public inquiries, action chains
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/904995
• Publisher URL: http://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/18789722
• Additional Information: Additional Information : This article is under copyright and the publisher should be contacted for permission to re-use or reprint the material in any form
• Contract Date: Jul 18, 2016