Pedidos de desculpas feitos por políticos brasileiros: uma visão da pragmática linguística
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1590/1678-460X202339455898Keywords:
pedidos de desculpas, polidez, atos de fala, expressão de atitudeAbstract
A public apology usually contains elements relevant to the general public and not just the direct victims of the offense (Govier & Verwoerd, 2002). From this perspective, the aim of this study was to analyze 20 apologies from Brazilian politicians, published between 2010 and 2021, in order to identify the linguistic elements that characterize them. Our hypothesis was that stance taking (Spencer-Oatey 2019; Garfinkel, 1967; Mazzara, 1997, Evans, 2016), as well as the use of politeness strategies (Brown and Levinson, 1987; Leech, 2014, Locher & Watts, 2008; Locher, 2014) contributed to the felicity of the apologies, potentially serving as resources to promote the moral reconciliation between the offender and the offended party. The results confirmed that political apologies display three main characteristics: (a) explicit and conventionalized elements (IFIDS- illocutionary force indicating devices - Searle, 1969); (b) politeness strategies; and (c) expression of posture. These elements work together to ensure the effectiveness of the perlocutionary effect of the apologies so that they achieve the restorative moral effect expected.
References
Aijmer, K. (2013). Analyzing modal adverbs as modal particles and discourse markers. In L. Degand, B. Cornille & P. Pietrandrea (Eds.), Discourse markers and modal particles: categorization and description (pp. 89-106). John Benjamins Company.
Austin, J. L. (1975). How to do things with words. Oxford University Press.
Brown, P., & Levinson, C. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge University Press.
Culpeper, J., & Tantucci, V. (2021). The principle of (Im)politeness reciprocity. Journal of Pragmatics, 175, 146-164. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2021.01.008
Davies, B. (2018). Evaluating evaluations: what different types of metapragmatic behaviour can tell us about participants’ understandings of the moral order. Journal of Politeness Research, 14(1), 121-151. https://doi.org/110.1515/pr-2017-0037
Du Bois, J. W. (2008). The stance triangle. In R. Englebretson (Ed.), Stancetaking in discourse: Subjectivity, evaluation, interaction (pp. 139-182). John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Eelen, G. (2014). A Critique of Politeness Theory: Volume 1. Routledge.
Evans, A. (2016). Stance and identity in Twitter hashtags. Language@Internet, 13(1), 47-63.
Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in Ethnomethodoly. Routledge.
Goffman, E. (1967) On Face-Work. In E. Goffman (Ed.), Interaction Ritual (pp. 5-45). Pantheon.
Govier, T., & Verwoerd, W. (2002). The promise and pitfalls of apology. Journal of Social Philosophy, 33(1), 67-82. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9833.00124
Grainger, K., & Harris, S. (2007). Apologies: Introduction. Oxford Press.
Harris, S & Grainger, K., & Mullany, L. (2006). The pragmatics of political apologies. Discourse & Society, 17(6), p. 715-737. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926506068429
Holmes, J. (1998). Apologies in New Zealand English. In J. Cheshire & P. Trudgill (Eds.), The Sociolinguistics Reader: Gender and Discourse, v. 2, (pp. 201-39). Arnold.
Jason, A. E. (2010). Apologizing for the Past for a Better Future: Collective Apologies in the United States, Australia, and Canada. Southern Communication Journal, 75(1), 57-75. https://doi.org/10.1080/10417940902802605
Kampf, Z. (2008). The pragmatics of forgiveness: judgments of apologies in the Israeli political arena. Discourse & Society , 19(5), 577-598. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926508092244
Kerbrat-Orecchioni, C. (2017). La politesse dans les interactions verbales. Max Niemeyer Verlag.
Leech, G. (2014). The pragmatics of politeness. Oxford University Press.
Locher, M. A., & Watts, R.J. (2008). Relational work and impoliteness: Negotiating norms of linguistic behaviour. De Gruyter Mouton.
Locher, M. A. (2014). The relational aspect of language: avenues of research. Proceedings of the Conference of the German Association of University teachers of English, 309-322. http://edoc.unibas.ch/dok/A6243487 (Acessado em 17 março, 2023).
Munanga, K. (2006). Algumas considerações sobre “raça”, ação afirmativa e identidade negra no Brasil: fundamentos antropológicos. Revista USP, 68, 46-57. https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2316-9036.v0i68p46-57
Mazzara, B. (1997). Stereotipi e pregiudizi. Il Mulino.
Miller, V. (2008). New media, networking and phatic culture. Convergence, 14, 387-400. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856508094659
Murphy, J. (2014). Apologies in the discourse of politicians: A pragmatic approach. The University of Manchester Press.
Marrus, M. R. (2007). Official apologies and the quest for historical justice. Journal of Human Rights, 6(1), 75-105. https://doi.org/10.1080/14754830601098402
Mendoza-Denton, N. (2002). Language and Identity. In J. K. Chambers & N. Schilling (Eds.), The Handbook of language variation and change (pp. 99-116). John Wiley & Sons.
Mills, S. (2003). Gender and Politeness. Cambridge University Press.
Oliveira, A. L. A. M., Cunha, G. X, & Miranda, M. V. (2017). Nominalizations as complex strategies of politeness and face-work in scientific papers written in Brazilian Portuguese. Cadernos de estudos linguísticos, 59(2), 361-374. https://doi.org/10.20396/cel.v59i2.8649880
Perini-Loureiro, G. F. M. (2021). Analisando o desqualificável: um estudo sobre pedidos de desculpas de figuras públicas em redes sociais [Tese de doutorado]. Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais.
Rajagopalan, K. (2010). The soft ideological underbelly of the notion of intelligibility in discussions about ‘World Englishes’. Applied Linguistics, 31(3), 465-470. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amq014
Rühlemann, C., & Aijmer, K. (2015). Corpus Pragmatics: Laying the Foundations. In K. Aijmer & C. Rühlemann (Eds.), Corpus Pragmatics: A Handbook (pp. 1-26). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139057493.001
Santana, V. R., Alexius, S. C., & Sella, A. F. (2016). Até porque: enunciadores que acionam crenças. Travessias, 10(3), 183-193. https://e-revista.unioeste.br/index.php/travessias/article/view/14898 (Acessado em 23 março, 2023)
Searle, J. (1969). Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge University Press.
Schmidt, T. (2010). We Say Sorry: Apology, the Law and Theatricality. Law Text Culture, 14(11), 55-78. https://ro.uow.edu.au/ltc/vol14/iss1/5 (Acessado em 23 março, 2023).
Spencer-Oatey, H., & Xing, J. (2019). Interdisciplinary perspectives on interpersonal relations and the evaluation process: Culture, norms, and the moral order. Journal of Pragmatics , 151, 141-154. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2019.02.015
Su, H., & Wei, N. (2018). I’m really sorry about what I said: A local grammar of apology. Pragmatics, 28(3), 439-462. https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.17005.su
Simaki, V., Paradis, C., & Kerren, A. (2018). Evaluating stance-annotated sentences from the Brexit Blog Corpus: A quantitative linguistic analysis. ICAME Journal, 42(1), 133-166. https://doi.org/10.1515/icame-2018-0007
Tavuchis, N. (1991). Mea culpa: A sociology of apology and reconciliation. Stanford University Press.