Doctoral Dissertation Research: A Linguistic and Ethnographic Analyis of Apology Narratives Performed in the Context of Federal Sentencing Hearings

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This project analyzes the ways in which federal criminal defendants make use of the right of allocution during sentencing hearings. When given the opportunity to address the court, defendants often make some sort of apology to their families, the court, or the government. Naturally occurring apologies provide a rich forum for the study of affective meaning the communication of feelings, attitudes, and relational dispositions of all types because the sincerity of an apology is crucial to its successful performance in a way that does not seem to hold for other speech acts. The investigator will identify the implicatures generated by the choice of one apology form compared to others, and will link these implicatures to the ideology of the hearing developed, in order to assess the apology's relative goodness. The investigation will contribute to the general understanding of the speech act of apologies, and to the specific ways in which the constraints of this particular institutional setting affect the forms of the apologies produced there. The project will thus inform both the literature on apologies specifically and to speech acts more generally.