Public apology by public figures has to be apologetic and properly constructed in order for it to be publicly accepted. It also requires public figures or celebrities to use the right apology strategies so that the intention of the apologies is well-received by the targeted audiences, and for the apologies to eventually be accepted. This study aims to explore the strategies used by Malaysian public figures in making apology statements through social media. Content analysis method was employed to analyse the written or verbal apologies intended to other public figures, their followers, or the netizens. It was found that the most frequent strategy used in Malaysian public figures’ apologies is Illocutionary Force Indicating Device (IFID); in which request of forgiveness strategy is the most frequent sub-strategy while expression of regret is the least frequent sub-strategy. Other notable strategies in their apologies is the strategy of acknowledging responsibility, and non-apology strategies. Interestingly, this study has also found several new apology strategies used by Malaysian public figures which include flattery, diversion, mention of fault, acceptance of punishment or criticism, thanking, and expression of hope.
Ahmed, S. T. S. (2018). Challenges of English language teaching in Yemeni primary and secondary schools. GRIN Verlag. https://www.grin.com/document/444271
Al-Adaileh, B. A. M. (2007). The Speech Act of Apology: A Linguistic Exploration of Politeness Orientation in British and Jordanian Culture. PhD thesis. The University of Leeds. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/202/1/uk_bl_ethos_446510.pdf
Alfattah, A. M. H. (2010). Apology strategies of Yemeni EFL university students. The Modern Journal of Applied Linguistics. http://www.mjal.org/Journal/apology.pdf
Alquraishy, S. (2011). The Use of Apology Strategies by Iraqi EFL Learners. 1. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/314537513_The_Use_of_Apology_Strategies_by_Iraqi_EFL_Learners
Al-Sobh, M. A. (2013). An Analysis of Apology as a Politeness Strategy Expressed by Jordanian University Students. International Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 3(2), 150-154. http://www.ijhssnet.com/journals/Vol_3_No_2_Special_Issue_January_2013/15.pdf
Alsulayyi, M. (2007). A contrastive study of the use of apology strategies by Saudi EFL Teachers and British native speakers of English: A pragmatic approach. International Journal of English Linguistics, 7(1), 45-57. https://doi.org/10.5539/ijel.v7n1p45
Anandarajan, M., Hill, C., Nolan, T. (2019). The Fundamentals of Content Analysis. Practical Text Analytics. Advances in Analytics and Data Science, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95663-3_2
Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Vol. 88. London, UK: Oxford University Press.
Aydin, M. (2013). Cross cultural pragmatics: A study of apology speech acts by Turkish speakers. Cornerstone: A Collection of Scholarly and Creative Works for Minnesota State University, Mankato. https://cornerstone.lib.mnsu.edu/etds/269/
Bach, K. (1998). Speech acts. The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved 6 September 2022, from https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/speech-acts/v-1. doi:10.4324/9780415249126-U043-1
Banikalef, A., & Marlyna, M. (2013b). Social Beliefs for the realization of the speech acts of apology among Jordanian EFL graduate students. English Linguistics Research, 2(1), 134-146.
Banikalef, A., Maros, M., Aladdin, A., & Al-Natour, M. (2015). Apology strategies in Jordanian Arabic. GEMA Online Journal of Language Studies, 15(2), 83-99.
Benoit, W., & Drew, S. (1997). Appropriateness and effectiveness of image repair strategies. Communication Reports. 10:2, 153-163, https://doi.org/10.1080/08934219709367671
Blum-Kulka, S., House, J., & Kasper, G. (1989). Cross-cultural pragmatics: Requests and apologies. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation.
Byram, M. (1995). Acquiring intercultural competence: A review of learning theories. In L. Sercu (Ed.), Intercultural Competence: The Secondary School (pp. 45-56). Aalborg University Press.
Cable News Network. (1998, December 11) Poll: Americans divided on Clinton's apologies. http://edition.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1998/12/11/poll/
Canale, M., & Swain, M. (1980). Theoretical bases of communicative approaches to second language teaching and testing. Applied Linguistics, 1, 1-47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/applin/I.1.1
Cerulo, K. A., & Ruane, J. M. (2014). Apologies of the rich and famous: Cultural, cognitive, and social explanations of why we care and why we forgive. Social Psychology Quarterly. 77(2), 123–149. https://doi.org/10.1177/0190272514530412
Cohen, A., & Olshtain, E. (1981). Developing a measure of sociocultural competence: The case of apology. Language Learning, 31(1), 113-134.
Cunningham, M. (1999). Saying sorry: The politics of apology. The Political Quarterly, 70, 285-293.
Forbus, K. D. (2019). Qualitative representations: How People Reason and Learn about the Continuous World. MIT Press. ISBN 0262038943, 9780262038942
Goffman, E. (1971). Relations in public: Microstudies of the public order. New York: Basic Books.
Harper, J. (2020). The Teaching of intercultural communicative competence in China: How much help do coursebooks provide? Open Journal of Modern Linguistics, 10, 647-664.
Hilda, R., Herland, F. M., & Diana, A. (2021). The Analysis of locutionary act, illocutionary act, and perlocutionary act in five feet apart movie. Journal of Islamic Media Studies, 2(1), 138-149. https://doi.org/10.32923/medio.v1i2.1915
Holmes, J. (1995). Women, Men, and Politeness. London: Longman.
Jacobsson, M. (2002). Thank you and thanks in Early Modern English. ICAME Journal, 26: 63-80
Johnson, A. (2021). Influencer Apologies All Sound the Same for a Reason. Her Campus. https://www.hercampus.com/culture/influencer-apology-video-trend-youtube/.
Lutzky, U., & Kehoe, A. (2017). ‘‘Oops, I didn’t mean to be so ?ippant’’. A corpus pragmatic analysis of apologies in blog data. Journal of Pragmatics. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2016.12.007
Makalintal, B. (2019). How YouTubers turned the apology video into a genre. Vice. https://www.vice.com/en/article/ywykzb/how-youtubers-james-charles-jaclyn-hill-pewdiepie-turned-the-apology-video-into-a-genre.
Nemeth, M. V. (2015). Apologizing Strategies in Japanese and Hungarian. Debrecen University Press. https://argumentum.unideb.hu/2018-anyagok/nemethm1.pdf
Olshtain, E., & Cohen, A. (1983). Apology: A speech act set. In N. Wolfson, & E. Judd (Eds.), Sociolinguistics and Language Acquisition (pp. 18-36). Rowley, MA: Newbury House.
Sari, M. K. (2016). Apology Strategy in English by Native Speaker. Lingua Cultura, 10(1), 13-17. http://dx.doi.org/10.21512/lc.v10i1.815
Savignon, S. (2002). Communicative language teaching: Linguistic theory and classroom practice. https://www.academia.edu/7630071/E_D_I_Interpreting_Communicative_Language_Teaching
Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sercu, L. (2005). Foreign language teachers and intercultural competence. Multilingual Matters Ltd. https://doi.org/10.21832/9781853598456
Shimul, A. S., Barber, M., & Abedin, M. I. (2022). Celebrity transgression and consumers’ forgiveness: does religiosity matter? Journal of Islamic Marketing, 13(6), 1224-1243. https://doi.org/10.1108/JIMA-06-2020-0184
Trosborg, A. (1995). Interlanguage pragmatics. Requests, complaints and apologies. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/9783110885286
Tucker, H. (2006). Communicative collaboration: Language, literature, and communicative competence redefined. The Modern Language Journal, 90(2), 264-266.
Uoti, K. (2022). Apology as a Speech Act Set : Apology Strategies of Social Media Influencers in the Context of the Covid-19 Pandemic. [Master’s Thesis, University of Turku]. UTUPub. https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi-fe2022042530307
Wardoyo, C. (2015). Strategies of expressing written apologies in the online newspapers. Journal on English as a Foreign Language. 4. 73. 10.23971/jefl.v4i2.77.
Wierzbicka, A. (1985). Different Cultures, Different Languages, Different Speech Acts. Journal of Pragmatics, 9, 145-178. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0378-2166(85)90023-2
Xu, S. (2017). Apology Strategies Employed by the Public Figures in the Open Letters of Chinese and English. Advances in Intelligent Systems Research, volume 156. https://doi.org/10.2991/meici-17.2017.41
Zhang, L. (2016). Enhancing communicative competence through free messaging apps in EFL classes. Creative Education, 7, 2597-2603. doi: 10.4236/ce.2016.717244.
In-Text Citation: (Ismail et al., 2022)
To Cite this Article: Ismail, W. N. F. W., Zaidi, N. N. A., Rani, M. S. A., Kamarudin, S., & Abdullah, N. H. (2022). Malaysian Public Figures’ Apology Strategies. International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences, 12(12), 1167– 1181.
Copyright: © 2022 The Author(s)
Published by HRMARS (www.hrmars.com)
This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this license may be seen at: http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode
