Project summary: The project will explore the merits and achievements, the limitations and shortcomings, and the potential complementarity of two different approaches to text-linguistics with regard to the analysis of public and official apologies by politicians in office.

Project outline: A “public and official apology” is an “apology by a collective entity standing to represent a group of some kind, it is enacted by an individual with enough political and moral authority to represent this group, and when it apologises for a historical wrong this act of apologising also has a symbolic and integrative function oriented both to the past and the future” (Tavuchis 1993). Analysing this text genre from the point of view of text-linguistics is particularly challenging: a public and official apology is an instance of one-way communication and therefore not a prime example of an ‘interaction’ in terms of discourse, given that such a formal apology is, as a rule, carefully designed to achieve its specific goal. The project will start from an analytical comparison between two public speeches pertaining to one and the same historical wrong-doing: two Prime Ministers (Harper and Trudeau) apologised for the Canadian government’s role as an active agent in turning away Indian immigrants more than a century ago. Both discourses deal with the same concepts: allocating blame and acknowledging responsibility. Comparing them will help us create a stepping stone to the analysis of a second cluster of speeches. From the late nineties of the previous century and well into the third decade of this century, politicians have offered official apologies for the UN’s strategic mistakes which failed to prevent or stop the Rwanda genocide. Where the Canadian speeches focus on (diminishing) agency in terms of active accountability, the UN speeches (Clinton, Keating and Macron) are faced with the opposite problem: how does one apologise for not being active enough? All five apologies comply, to varying degrees, to the prerequisites of the apologetic genre. They differ, however, in how they each grapple with issues such as responsibility. The project will zoom in on how these differences are embedded textually.

Because of the specificity of public and official apologies, the project will investigate the text-genre from a text-linguistic perspective rather than from the perspective of interactionist linguistics, discourse analysis or linguistic ethnography. The project will focus on two theories that stand out in the modern history of the language sciences for their sophisticated layered approaches to meaning and meaning-making: Eugenio Coseriu’s Structural-Functional approach and Michael Halliday’s Systemic-Functional approach. Their theories of language have in common that they both integrated major contributions of structural linguistics but at the same time went well beyond structuralism by developing comprehensive functional approaches centred on the interaction between the different layers of language, language use and texts. To that end, both Coseriu and Halliday propose three levels of meaning, albeit based on different assumptions and with partly differing objectives.

Coseriu makes the distinction between the universal level of designational meaning, the idiomatic level of language-specific meaning and the expressive level of text-meaning. While the three levels always interact in the creation and reception of discourse and texts, they nevertheless constitute relatively autonomous layers of meaning. They should be analysed accordingly, according to Coseriu, all the more so because they correspond to three different linguistic judgments of language users: congruence, correctness and appropriateness. With regard to text-analysis, Coseriu moreover proposed an elaborate matrix of situational, cultural and contextual settings, that promises to elucidate the functioning of formal apologies from a hermeneutic perspective. The Systemic Functional framework allows for a detailed syntactic-semantic view on apologies, as for Halliday language is primordially a “meaning potential”,  which organises and construes reality in three different layers or domains of meaning. The interpersonal meaning component refers to how a clause functions as an exchange between speaker and addressee. The textual meaning component correlates to how clauses are coherently organised within a discourse. The ideational meaning component pertains to how a clause functions, within its own boundaries, as a representation of experience and reality. For Halliday, all three components interact simultaneously, as language is inherently multifunctional: when we speak, we enact social relationships while organising our speech coherently and expressing our perception of reality. The project will start with this last (ideational) component and proceed bottom-up from there: starting with the analysis of linguistic structures and their ideational meanings and moving on to include textual and interpersonal meanings. In this way, the corpus analysis will serve as a starting point to uncover theoretical contrasts between both frameworks. Coseriu, as opposed to Halliday, advocates an approach to text analysis in which a text is to be seen as an autonomous whole. The analysis should therefore also proceed top-down, on the basis of four ‘settings’ that specify the circumstances in which any kind of text production takes place: the situation of the text, its linguistic, cultural and social ‘region’, the context(s) and the universe of discourse.

The layers conceptualized by Coseriu and Halliday not only interact in complex ways in their frameworks, but unravelling the intricate similarities, correspondences and differences between the frameworks promises to substantially advance our understanding of meaning-making in texts. To the extent that the Coserian and Hallidayan frameworks are in several respects similar (with comparable layers of analysis regarding meaning as well as attention for the interaction between the language-specific, the general and the universal) and different (with bottom-up or top-down approaches to meaning-making in texts), they are likely to be complementary: each highlights specific aspects and features of texts that the other framework does not, or less, explicitly address. At the same time, the two approaches cast an interesting light on each other. A critical analysis of the approaches with a view to establishing their relative compatibility in view of a potential synthesis is therefore of great interest to the general theory of text-linguistics.