Apologizing to China: Elastic apologies and the meta-discourse of American diplomats

Abstract

The linguistic study of apologies has focused on identifying pragmatic norms, but with porous and inconsistent results. Functionalist models have had more success, but have not fully recognized the centrality of negotiation and discursive struggle highlighted by Thomas (Journal of Pragmatics 9: 765–783, 1985), Watts (Politeness in language, Mouton De Gruyter, 2005) and others. One major source for extended apologies is the collective apology but research in this area, mostly social-psychological, has revealed little about the pragmatics. This paper evaluates the pragmatics of apology negotiations in two Sino-American crises (1999 and 2001), as discussed in off-the-record interviews by several US officials involved in these negotiations. The apologies involved extended negotiation, with multiple speakers and audiences separated by very different cultures, multiple written translations of the “apologies”, strategic illocutionary and semantic ambiguities—and a struggle to achieve each side's realpolitical goals, accompanied by a dialectical struggle over the pragmatic meaning of the wordings used and over what an apology actually is and does. All of this proceeded in lock with a broader system of verbal remedies as well as looping back to a set of non-verbal strategies such as delay and penalization. The study indicates the importance of negotiation and discursive struggle in the diplomatic apology and possibly in apologies in general.