Apology has been mostly studied from a pragmatics standpoint and as a frequent speech act, especially in Persian language. This paper, however, aims at a Discourse analysis of Apology, taking as its framework, the interdisciplinary approach introduced in Lakoff (2015). The data are collected form official apologies in the Iranian media between 2015-2018. The results show that firstly, without taking an interdisciplinary stance many interactional aspects of this speech act is neglected. This is because Apology is one of the face-saving speech acts in the representation of which contextual and interpersonal factors, and the speaker’ s and addressee’ s perspective play an important role in the ways preferred by the speaker to apologize. Moreover the nature of public and political Discourse multiplies the complexities and forces the speakers get the benefit of all linguistic and extra-linguistic means at different levels to achieve their communicative goals. Secondly, the prototypical explicit apologies in public Discourse are rare, so that most of the cases studied are instances of non-Apology rather than Apology. The reason behind this fact can be traced back to the nature of public and political Discourses in which Apology would bring about negative consequences for the apologizer. Also, one of the main presuppositions of this speech act is that the apologizer implicitly accepts the responsibility of the wrongdoing and her reluctance to apologize explicitly in public and political Discourse is a conscious or unconscious attempt to avoid the negative consequences of shouldering the responsibilities in these formal settings. Accordingly, different representations of Apology can be placed somewhere on a continuum with prototypical Apology at one end and non-Apology at the other one. This paves the way for considering Apology as a radial category at the level of Discourse and for adding a cognitive level of analysis to the framework at hand.

This study investigates the use of apologizing strategies by speakers of Azerbaijani Turkish in Iran. One hundred and twenty (60 male and 60 female) randomly selected speakers of Azerbaijani Turkish from Tabriz participated in a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) and returned 2400 Apology speech acts. The DCT included 20 scenarios representing 10 Discourse situations. The acts were analyzed based on the categorization suggested by Blum-Kulka and Olshtain (1984), which included Illocutionary Force Indicating Device, Taking on responsibility, Explanation, Offer of repair, Promise of forbearance, Concern for the hearer, and Nonverbal strategies. The findings indicated that the highly preferred Apology strategies among the participants are explanation and offer of repair. Moreover, there was a statistically significant association between the independent variables (the participants’ age, gender, and level of education) and the choice of Apology strategies. However, such an association was only significant for some Discourse situations; e.g., in interaction with relatives that are in an equal status with the participant and in an adult-child interaction where the participant has a superior status. 

The study analyzes the Apology delivered by the then-democratic Presidential contender in 2007, Senator Barack H. Obama, to the Indian-American community. This Apology succeeded in convincing American citizens of Obama’ s goodwill and clean political standards, which eventually led him to surpass his chief opponent, Senator Hillary R. Clinton and become the President of the United States. The study employs Searle’ s (1969) speech act theory (SAT) and Holmes’ s (1990) Apology strategies through pragmatics. The study, then, administrates thematic analysis through positive Discourse analysis to gain insights from Obama’ s leadership values. Findings educate readers on the importance of an Apology construction and encourage readers to follow the example of a world-class leader’ s values by having an insight into Obama’ s leadership.

This study aimed at extracting and categorizing the range of strategies used in performing the speech act of apologizing in Persian. The first objective was to see if Persian apologies were as formulaic in pragmatic structure as in English apologies are said to be (Wolfson, 1983; Holmes, 1990; Bergman and Kasper, 1993). The other issue explored in this study was the investigation of the effect of the values assigned to the two context-external variables of social distance and social dominance on the frequency of the Apology intensifiers. To this end, Persian apologetic utterances were collected and analyzed. The research findings indicated that Persian apologies are as formulaic in pragmatic structures as are English apologies. Also, the values assigned to the two context-external variables were found to have significant effect on the frequency of the intensifiers in different situations.

Based on the hypothesis that not only linguistics competence must be considered during the test development, but also pragmatics competence should be evaluated, the present study was conducted to develop a scale to assess learners’,pragmatic proficiency. To this end, this study developed the pragmatics test of multiple-choice Discourse completion task (MDCT) in the case of four primitive speech acts of request, thanks, Apology, and refusal for Iranian EFL learners. In the first phase, 155 Iranian university students were asked to write the situations at university, home or in society, in which they apologize, thank, request something and refuse an offer or invitation. In the second phase, to ensure the naturalness of the situations, another group of students were asked to rate the selected situations based on the frequency of occurrence of these situations in their everyday life. In the third phase, the tests were reviewed by several native speakers and TEFL colleagues. Finally, the items MDCT were developed by the researchers and in the final step, two pilot tests were conducted. The findings indicated that the scale was reliable, valid and appropriate to measure Iranian EFL learners’,pragmatic knowledge.

One of the ways of mental damage compensation is Apology that plays an important role in the healing of mental and emotional pain of victim and has a detrimental effect on his relationship with the wrongdoer. In Iranian law this has been the subject of legislative attention and article 10 of the Civil Liability Act gives the court the authority in case of mental damage to force the wrongdoer to apologize for the loss. However, Apology has not been defined and its terms has not considered in Iran laws. Countries such as Canada and the US were leading countries in this case and have used the Apology as a tool to relieve mental pain and did a lot of research in defining and explaining of Apology. In current research we study the notion and terms of Apology and its role in mental damage compensation of victim and its effects on wrongdoer behavior and also the process of Apology in the court. In conclusion, on one hand, the Iranian legislator must define the Apology and on the other hand, the role of judicial procedure must be emphasized to order to apologize as one of the methods of spiritual compensation if appropriate.

This study examins the effect of social status on politness in apologetic Discourse based on politeness model of (Brown & Levinson 1987-1978). The research method was quantitative and qualitative and data collection was done by sending a questionnaire electronically to students. The Questionnaire (DCT) assessed Apology strategies for 12 common mistakes in the community. Research participants included a limited number of students from Al-Zahra Campus, Elmi Karbordi University of Jihad and Khaneh kargar in Zanjan. Analyzing the collected responses of 44 female and 62 male students, the results showed that, people use more negative politeness strategy in expressing Apology. Analyzing the effect of social status on using politeness strategies showed in all three positions of social status; Equally, higher position and lower position, people use more negative politeness strategy. The results also showed that the use of politeness strategies in compensating for mistakes depends on the type of mistake made and people use the best Apology strategy that can compensate the mistake made. The results of the study did not show a significant difference between gender and the use of politeness strategy.