This thesis examines the press uptakes (news reports) of public apologies in Britain and France. Apology, as used here, includes unequivocal apologies, equivocal apologies and refusals to apologise. The approach adopted in this study is primarily data-driven and relies on a comprehensive bilingual (English and French) data set including 268 news texts. The two corpora are compared to reveal any cross-cultural variations pertaining to the speech act of public apology. The main goal of the research is to provide a new account of public apologies by combining methodologies from pragmatics, critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics. The research presented has four main aims: - to further develop and re-interpret the four basic components of apologies, namely apologiser, apologisee, offence and remedy, in terms of their relation to public apology processes. This is achieved by emphasising the different ways used by public figures to apologise, the identity of apologisers and apologisees, and the types of offences involved in the corpora of media texts examined. - to describe the evaluative stancetaking in news texts in order to determine the degree of variation in the evaluative strategies identified in the immediate framing of verbatim apologies, and in the explicitly and implicitly evaluative metapragmatic comments found in the press uptakes. - to explore cross-cultural variations in the perception of public apologies, with the particular aim of gauging any differences in representations of these apologies in newspapers in Britain and in France. This perspective considers the extent to which press uptakes in each country are indicative of the ways in which discourse meanings are verbally and situationally bound. - to determine the ways in which ideology permeates press uptakes of public apologies. This is achieved by considering how evaluative stancetaking is used in the corpora, thereby accessing aspects of ideological positioning as represented in the media texts under scrutiny.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:584909 |
| Date | January 2010 |
| Creators | Ancarno, Clyde |
| Publisher | Cardiff University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://orca.cf.ac.uk/54420/ |
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