Apology as a Speech Act Set : Apology Strategies of Social Media Influencers in the Context of the Covid-19 Pandemic

This thesis studies the apology strategies apparent in public apology posts of social media influencers which relate to the topic of the Covid-19 pandemic. The 2010s has seen the rise of influencers, seeing them acquire large followings and achieving celebrity status. Their high visibility means that the mistakes they make and the offenses they commit are also visible to not only their large following base, but also to the general public. The influencer apology has arguably formed into a genre of its own alongside more traditional genres of public apology, such as the apologies of politicians, entertainers, and other highly visible figures. In this thesis this interesting and current topic is analyzed through speech act theory, and more precisely, along the categorization of apology strategies included in the apology as a speech act set laid out by Cohen and Olshtain. Twelve apology posts gathered from four different social media platforms are analyzed and the apology strategies apparent in them are categorized along a typology based on the one of Cohen and Olshtain as well as Blum-Kulka and Olshtain. This is done in order to find out what kind of different strategies are apparent in the apologies, and which strategies are used the most. Additional categories are added to account for and better study the specific context of the apologies as performed by social media influencers with the shared topic of the Covid-19 pandemic. The results of the analysis indicate that the influencer apology posts all use multiple strategies, a result which aligns with earlier studies which have found that public apologies, in comparison to interpersonal apologies, include the use of a larger variety of different strategies. Of the six main strategies, all but one are apparent in the data. The strategy of offer of repair does not appear, which is offered the explanation that it is a highly context specific strategy, and that the strategy of promise of forbearance is seemingly used in its stead in the context studied. The strategy of an acknowledgement of responsibility is found to be the most prominent strategy in the data. It is the only strategy to appear in all the posts in the data, and it also has the greatest number of occurrences, making up 40% of the total number of occurrences. This finding is in contrast to earlier research, which has found the strategy of the use of an explicit illocutionary force indicating device (i.e. explicit apology verbs such as “apologize” and “(be) sorry”) to be the most prominent strategy. In future studies into the apology genre it will be interesting to analyze if this finding is replicable. When examining the strategies relating to the Covid-19 pandemic, it is found that they include the speakers referencing the common experience and struggle of the pandemic in order to appeal to the hearers, as well as the speakers reminding the hearers of mitigating measures such as social distancing. The thesis employs a cross-platform approach to the study of the material, providing an introductory look into the highly current and interesting topic of the Covid-19 related apologies of social media influencers. In the future, research could focus more narrowly on specific social media platforms or post types, or for a broader dataset, allowing for more balanced quantitative research, a corpus could be collected and utilized. As a multifaceted and significant phenomenon, the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on language of all kinds will be an interesting and significant topic to study