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1.2 Research Object
With the development of modern media, apologies can take on various forms; however, this paper chooses American apologies in written form, including public letters and statements to be the research object in this paper. The corpus consists of 7 American public apologies including apology letters issued by American government, companies and American public figures. The corpus contains the ABC’s apology letter, CNN’s apology letter, U.S. athletes’ apology letter, Nature’s apology letter, Sharon Stone’s apology letter, Apple’s apology letter. The research object is the apology strategies applied by American appear in the corpus.
1.3 Purpose of the Thesis
The speech act of apology is within the scope of pragmatics, sociolinguistics and cross-cultural communication. This thesis focuses on finding out apology strategies used by Americans and the relationship between the speech act of apology and the strategy, especially the locutionary act and illocutionary act. The study contributes to a better understanding of Americans’ public apology strategies, reduces the communication failure and makes the communication between Chinese and American proceeds more smoothly.
1.4 Structure of the Thesis
The research method of this paper combined qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis. The qualitative method is referred to give a detailed description of the strategies identified in the corpus, while the quantitative method focuses on the distribution of the applied strategies. These two methods are frequently applied in researches. The model of apology strategies is based on Trosborg’s classification which including seven strategies, namely minimizing, explanation or account, taking on responsibility, strategy of apology, offer of repair, promise of forbearance and concern for the hearer. In order to make a comprehensive and advisable conclusion, this paper includes five parts:
The first chapter is introduction, which mainly contains the background of the thesis, motivation of the thesis and according to the two principles which have been mentioned above, the corpus will be set up. The samples are downloaded directly from the Internet, including 7 American public apologies, in terms of American inpiduals, American companies and American government.