How to say sorry: A corpus-assisted discourse study of public apologies

In the last twenty years, the exponential increase in public apologies in high-visibility contexts such as politics and show business has led more and more scholars to define this era as the "Age of Apology". Apologies are a type of persuasive discourse which can constitute a flourishing field of study for linguists who wish to study the "language of persuasion". Through skillful use of rhetorical and linguistic strategies, in fact, a speaker can succeed in convincing and even manipulating the reader. The literature on apologies and persuasion is vast; however, the study of public apologies in corpus linguistics is still in its infancy and deals almost exclusively with political figures’ discourse. Therefore, the present study wishes to shed light on the strategies and language used in public apologies by other potentially influential figures such as celebrities and well-known corporations, in the hope of integrating, at least partially, the studies of public apologies. The method adopted in this dissertation falls under corpus-assisted discourse studies. Using a specialized corpus composed of public apologies published online in the last ten years (2010-2020), the aim of this paper is to analyze and unveil the possible linguistic, rhetorical and persuasive strategies present in such texts and to compare the language used with the one proposed and identified by the past literature of apologies. The analysis allowed us not only to observe trends already mentioned in the literature, but also to discover new patterns, like the frequency of words in the semantic field of learning or feelings, as well as to identify differences in the use of the language of public apologies by different categories of speakers.