Примењена лингвистика у част Ранку Бугарском - Језик у

Slavica Perović: YOU WANT AN APOLOGY? WELL, I AM SORRY!
the speaker. In her paper “Nine Ways of Looking at Apologies”, R. Lakoff calls
such apologies problematic and defines them as:
192
…a statement made by someone in a position of power regretting bad behaviour
by previous holders of that office, in the name of the governed, against wrong ancestors
of the aggrieved group. (...) The reason is simple: the official cases are not
true felicitous apologies, while the personal ones are. No one ever wants to make
the latter kind, especially a powerful person, who stands to lose face, and therefore
possibly power, by making one (2003: 203).
This distinction between public and private apology can best be illustrated
using the example of Bill Clinton’s apologies. When he was apologising on behalf
of his country he was using “s-words” (R. Lakoff 2003), but when he was
doing it in his own name he used all kinds of evasive techniques and euphemistic
expressions.
Let us see the first instance where he made himself very visible linguistically.
He, as President of the United States, apologised formally on behalf of the
government to a group of black men whose syphilis went untreated for decades
as part of a U.S. Public Health Service study, the so-called Tuskegee study (cf.
Ju and Power 1998). The apology was extended to eight men who were survivors
from the study and it was delivered in the White House.
To the survivors, to the wives and family members, the children and grandchildren,
I say what you know: No power on earth can give you back the lives lost, the
pain suffered, the years of internal torment and anguish. What was done cannot
be undone. But, we end the silence. We can stop turning our heads away. We can
look you in the eye and finally say on behalf of the American people, what the U.S.
government did was shameful, and I am sorry. The American people are sorry ...
for the loss, for the years of hurt. You did nothing wrong, but, you were grievously
wronged. I apologise and I am sorry that this apology has been so long in coming
... To our African-American citizens, I am sorry that your federal government orchestrated
a study so clearly racist. That can never be allowed to happen again. It is
against everything our country stands for and what we must stand against is what
it was. (The White House, 16 May 1997; our italics)
From this passage it is obvious that Clinton is deeply moved by the sorrow
of the people who suffered tremendously, showing it through a number of linguistic
signals. First, he makes it very personal, using the pronoun I, the first person
singular, which is in agreement with the verb form am in the appropriate compensatory
phrase to be sorry. Moreover, he varies two expressions, to be sorry, which
he uses three times, with to apologise and uses them in the same sentence. This
shows that he is at ease with these expressions of apology, he is uttering them, but