The Role of Gender in the Realisation of Apologies in Local Council Meetings: A Variational Pragmatic Approach in British and New Zealand English

Abstract

Abstract This variational pragmatic study investigates the realisation of apologies in local council meetings in New Zealand and Britain. Specifically, it aims to establish to what extent the macro-social factors gender and region influence the choice and combination of apology strategies. The data are drawn from two multi-modal corpora, The Corpus of Australian and New Zealand Spoken English (CoANZSE) and The Corpus of British Isles Spoken English (CoBISE). Our findings reveal general shared trends both across the two regional varieties and the two gender groups. Apologies are mostly realised by sorry forms and speakers prefer to use just one single apology strategy. Nevertheless, within these general trends, some distinct gender patterns are manifest. Overall, though, our findings indicate that the influence of gender and region on the realisation of apologies is limited. The communicative setting of council meetings seems to exert a bigger impact on the apology behaviour of the councillors.