A Research On Speech Act Of Apologizing In Diplomatic Context By Government Officers

As a common speech act, apology has been drawing extensive attention from pragmatists andsociolinguists. The previous studies about the topic of apology are very common. But the scholars justlingered on the focus of theoretical dimension and then transferred to the empirical researchesdepending on the collected data. Though involved in broaden fields, most of the perspectives just camefrom following factors contributing to apology strategies such as social distance, social power, offensivedegree, gender and culture. And this present study tries to break the prior perspective of the study objectand methods in the past literatures. Instead, the government officers’ apologies are analyzed in order todiscover the characters of public figures’ apology strategies and syntactic-semantic features.According to the apology strategies proposed by Blum-Kulka and Olshtain in1984, the corpuschosen are analyzed. The corpus are about Japanese former Prime Minister Koizumi’s official apologyin an international forum at the Asian-African Summit on22April2005, British Prime Minister GordonBrown’s officially apology to all child migrants sent overseas under the British Government’s childmigration scheme on24February2010and USOC chief communications and public affairs officerPatrick Sandusky’s apology on12June2012. The research result demonstrates that government officersmay employ the strategies such as direct apology, taking on responsibility, explanation, promise offorbearance, offering of repair, and justifying hearer in terms of the strategies chosen and the modalitymarker such as adverbial intensifier, commitment upgrader, repetition, emphasis and elaboration interms of the syntactic-semantic features to the intensify the proposition in the apology and so as to attainthe special communicative goals, safeguard national dignity and protect national interests.The research on government officers’ apology language deepens the understanding of apologylanguage itself and helps to grasp the particular way to apologize and then to comprehend the realintention. And as for the practical application, such as the translation of diplomatic language, this paperalso has certain inspiration.And it needs to point out that these apology materials chosen avoided any political issues such asterritorial disputes. And the corpus selection had no special standard.