A SORRY STATE: INVESTIGATING POLITICAL APOLOGIES IN SINGAPORE

Abstract

This thesis investigates four apologies in Singapore to explore how the presence of third-party participants affect the way a politician apologises. I first examine a corpus of social media comments to discern citizens’ responses towards each apology. Then, I analyse the apology strategies employed, and compare them against the corpus counts to draw insights on the relationship between apology strategies and citizens’ responses to the apology. As political apologies are situated in the public domain, they often involve an audience. Given the limitations of current dyadic speaker-hearer approaches in accounting for an audience, I suggest a triadic approach that utilises third-party participant roles (Bell, 1984) to study how different participant roles affect political apologies. I also combine Murphy’s (2015) apology strategies with Kampf’s (2009) responsibility-minimising tactics to identify the strategies used in each apology. Findings from my study reveal that the presence of third-party participants can affect the apology strategies used, which reinforces the need to consider the influence of third-party participants in political apologies. Certain apology strategies can index qualities that contribute to the construction of the politician’s persona. Other factors can also affect the public’s response to the apology, such as the degree of offence, type of offence, and the politician’s prior experience, political party, and political experience. By exploring the relationship between the use of apology strategies and citizens’ evaluation of these political apologies, this thesis thus demonstrates how politicians and citizens can co-construct political personas through realising a political apology.