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

本研究分析联邦刑事被告在量刑听证会上运用申辩权的方式。当被告有机会在法庭上发言时，他们通常会向家人、法庭或政府道歉。 自然发生的道歉为情感意义的研究提供了一个丰富的论坛，因为道歉的真诚性对它的成功表现至关重要，这似乎不适用于其他言语行为。 研究者将确定一种道歉形式的选择所产生的含义与其他形式相比，并将这些含义与听证会的意识形态联系起来，以评估道歉的相对善良。 本文的研究将有助于对道歉言语行为的一般性理解，以及这种特定制度环境的约束对道歉形式产生影响的具体方式。 因此，该项目将为专门关于道歉的文献和更普遍的言语行为提供信息。

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.