A Multimodal Study of Political Apologies by Selected Leaders A thesis submitted in Linguistics

Abstract

The main aim of this study is to investigate the verbal and visual features of the apologies of three political leaders: the apology of the then British Prime Minister David Cameron in 2010 for Bloody Sunday which took place in 1972, the apology to former students of Indian Residential schools by the then Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper (2008) and the then American President Nixon’s apology for the Watergate scandal (1977) which was pulled out of him in an interview with the British host David Frost. In this study, the multimodal analytical framework is combined with the pragmatic to analyse the apologies. This thesis attempts to detect the visual features of these apologies which are the gaze, gestures and facial expressions in the light of Kress and van Leeuwen’s multimodal analytical framework (2006). It also aims to look at the verbal features that cover the speech-act set of apology proposed by Olshtain and Cohen (1983) which includes five semantic formulas which are: “expression of an apology,” “explanation or account of the situation,” “acknowledgment of responsibility,” “offer of repair,” and “promise of forbearance.” It tackles how the combination of both the visual and the verbal features could intensify the apology to have a stronger effect on the audience. The data were collected from YouTube and the videos of the selected apologies were downloaded. After analysing the three apologies from a multimodal