”I’m just letting everyone know that I’m an idiot”: Apology Strategies in YouTubers’ Apology Videos

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”I’m just letting everyone know that I’m an idiot”:

Apology Strategies in YouTubers’ Apology Videos

Janina Julia Loisa, 283210 Master’s Thesis

English Language and Culture University of Eastern Finland Philosophical Faculty

School of Humanities 25.5.2021

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Itä-Suomen yliopisto, Filosofinen tiedekunta Humanistinen osasto

Englannin kieli ja kulttuuri

Loisa, Janina J.: ”I’m just letting everyone know that I’m an idiot”: Anteeksipyyntöstrategiat YouTubettajien anteeksipyyntövideoissa

Pro gradu -tutkielma, 59 sivua + lähdeluettelo (5 sivua) Tutkielman ohjaaja: Professori Mikko Laitinen

Toukokuu 2021

Asiasanat: puheaktit, kohteliaisuus, anteeksipyynnöt, anteeksipyyntöstrategiat, YouTube, sosiaalinen media, puhuttu englanti

Tämän tutkielman tarkoitus on tutkia YouTubettajien anteeksipyyntövideoita ja selvittää, millaisia strategioita he käyttävät pyytäessään anteeksi. Toinen tavoite on verrata miesten ja naisten videoita keskenään ja tutkia, millaisia eroja heidän strategioiden käytössä on. Tämä tutkimus yrittää siis selvittää, miten yksilöt pyytävät anteeksi julkisesti suurelle yleisölle yhdellä sosiaalisen median alustalla.

Tutkimuskysymykset ovat:

1. Millaisia kielellisiä strategioita YouTube-sisällön tuottajat käyttävät pyytääkseen anteeksi?

1a. Miten yleisiä nämä strategiat ovat ja miten ne ovat jakautuneet?

2. Millaisia eroja miesten ja naisten välillä on näiden strategioiden käytössä?

Tutkimuksen materiaali koostuu 20 YouTube-videosta, ns. ”anteeksipyyntövideoista”, joissa puhuja pyytää anteeksi tekoa, jonka hän on tehnyt tai jonka tekemisestä häntä syytetään.

Materiaali kerättiin YouTube-sivustolta käyttämällä hakusanoja kuten ”sorry”, ”apology” ja

”response”. 12 videoista on miehiltä ja kahdeksan on naisilta. Videotallenteet litteroitiin tekstiksi, mikä tuotti yhteensä 24 755 sanaa: 11 774 sanaa miehiltä ja 12 981 sanaa naisilta.

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Tässä tutkimuksessa hyödynnetään sekä määrällistä että laadullista analyysia. Ensimmäiseen tutkimuskysymykseen vastataan tutkimalla videoita yksityiskohtaisesti ja erottelemalla niistä löydetyt strategiat omiin kategorioihinsa. Aiempia tutkimuksia käytettiin näiden kategorioiden valitsemisen avustuksena. Toisin kuin perinteisissä anteeksipyyntötutkimuksissa, määrällistä puolta lähestytään yksittäisten strategiailmentymien sijaan sanamäärän kautta. Toiseen tutkimuskysymykseen vastataan vertaamalla miesten ja naisten strategioiden käyttöä määrällisesti ja laadullisesti.

Materiaalista tunnistettiin seitsemän anteeksipyyntöstrategiaa, joista kahteen kuuluu alakategorioita. Ne ovat, järjestyksessä yleisemmästä harvinaisempaan, selitys tai kertomus tilanteesta; vastuun myöntäminen johon kuuluu alakategoriat syytteen hyväksyminen, itsekritiikki, tahattomuuden ilmaiseminen, katumuksen ilmaiseminen ja pettymyksen tai häpeän ilmaiseminen itseä kohtaan; kehujen, kiitollisuuden tai rakkauden ilmaiseminen; vastuun kieltäminen johon kuuluu alakategoriat teon kokonainen tai osittainen kieltäminen, uhrin kritisoiminen, anteeksipyynnön tarpeen kieltäminen ja teon vähättely; tarjous korjata tilanne; lupaus välttää tilanteen toistuminen; ja anteeksipyyntö.

Aiemmat anteeksipyyntötutkimukset ovat ehdottaneet naisten olevan anteeksipyytelevämpiä ja käyttävän enemmän anteeksipyyntötermejä (kuten I’m sorry), mutta tämä tutkimus ei vahvista kyseistä ehdotusta. Tutkimuksen materiaalissa miehet ja naiset käyttävät anteeksipyyntötermejä likimain yhtä paljon. Tulokset kuitenkin indikoivat, että miesten ja naisten välillä on eroja liittyen muiden anteeksipyyntöstrategioiden käyttöön.

Tämä tutkimus tarjoaa näkemyksen siihen, miten yksilöt pyytävät anteeksi suurelle yleisölle YouTuben kaltaisella julkisella alustalla. Se myös esittää uudenlaisen näkökulman puheaktien ja anteeksipyyntöjen tutkimiseen, mikä toivottavasti inspiroi lisää tutkimuksia liittyen

YouTubettajien anteeksipyyntövideoihin.

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University of Eastern Finland, Philosophical Faculty School of Humanities

English Language and Culture

Loisa, Janina J.: ”I’m just letting everyone know that I’m an idiot”: Apology Strategies in YouTubers’

Apology Videos

Master’s Thesis, 59 pages + list of references (5 pages) Supervisor: Professor Mikko Laitinen

May 2021

Keywords: speech acts, politeness, apologies, apology strategies, YouTube, social media, spoken English

The aim of this study is to examine YouTube content creators’ apology videos and find out what kinds of strategies they use to express an apology. Another goal is to compare female and male YouTubers and see what kinds of differences there are in their strategy usage. This study, thus, aims to investigate a social media platform to see how individuals apologize to a large audience in a public setting.

The research questions are:

1. What kinds of linguistic strategies are used to express apologies in the YouTube videos of content creators?

1a. What is the frequency and distribution of these strategies like?

2. What kinds of differences are there in the usage of these strategies between men and women?

The material used in this study consists of 20 YouTube videos, so-called “apology videos”, where the speaker apologizes for an offense that they have committed or that they are accused of having committed. The material was collected using search words like “sorry”, “apology” and

“response” on YouTube. Out of the 20 videos, 12 are from male creators and eight are from

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female creators. The videos were transcribed into text, which produced 24,755 words: 11,774 for men and 12,981 for women.

The methods of the study consist of quantitative and qualitative analysis. The first research question is answered by examining the videos in detail and identifying strategies, which are separated into their own categories. Previous research was used as guidance for identifying the categories. Unlike in traditional apology studies, the quantitative aspect is approached by utilizing word-count instead of instances of strategy use. The second research question is answered by quantitatively and qualitatively comparing the strategy use of women and men.

Seven main apology strategies were discovered in the data, of which two have additional sub- strategies. They are, in order from most to least frequent, an explanation or account of the situation; an acknowledgement of responsibility with the sub-strategies accepting the blame, self- criticism, expressing lack of intent, expressing regret or remorse and expressing disappointment or shame in oneself; expressing praise, gratitude or love; not acknowledging responsibility with the sub- strategies denying the offense completely or partially, criticizing the victim, denying the need to

apologize and belittling the offense; an offer of repair; a promise of forbearance; and an expression of apology.

Previous studies on apologies have suggested that women are more apologetic and use more apology terms (like I’m sorry) than men, but this study does not confirm that notion. In this study’s data, men and women use apology terms almost equally. However, the results indicate that there are differences in the choices of other apology strategies between men and women.

This study gives a look into how individuals apologize to a wide audience on a public platform like YouTube. It also presents a new perspective to speech act and apology research which will hopefully inspire new studies on YouTube apologies.

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1 Introduction

The topic of this thesis is the speech act of apology in the context of YouTube videos. Speech acts, which have originally been studied by Austin (1962) and Searle (1980, originally published in 1969), are a very popular field of study which has received a lot of attention during the years.

Some commonly studied speech acts include requests, compliments, and apologies. Apologies specifically have been studied mostly in everyday situations (e.g. Kim 2008, Shariati and Chamani 2010, Beeching 2019), but with the rise of social media apologies can be looked at from a new perspective. In recent years, content creators on the video-sharing platform YouTube have been uploading numerous videos onto the platform, so-called “apology videos”, in which they

apologize to their audience for an offense. These kinds of long-form, monologue-type apologies have usually not been studied linguistically but rather in the context of, for instance, crisis communication and public image in the media (e.g. Manika et al. 2015, Sandlin and Gracyalny 2018). The purpose of this thesis is to fill this gap in research and offer a linguistic perspective to the study of YouTube apologies. Apologies are also linked to politeness in that they are used to be polite and restore social harmony. Brown and Levinson’s (1987, originally published in 1978) politeness theory and its terms will thus be discussed in this work as well.

The aim of this thesis is to examine apology videos from YouTube content creators (or

“YouTubers”) and find out what kinds of linguistic strategies are used in order to express an apology. The basic idea is to look at apology videos through the lens of traditional apology research, applying their methods as far as they are suitable, and find out how these videos are constructed and what linguistic methods people use to make a public apology. As such, this study only focuses on the apologies by the speakers and not the hearers’ responses to them.

The study and its results can give a new perspective to the study of apologies as speech acts, as well as more information on how YouTube is used for public communication by individuals.

Social media is still quite a new medium to us and its use needs to be explored. Especially social media influencers and YouTubers, who are often under a lot of pressure, are attempting to find the most effective ways to communicate to their audience online.

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In addition, this paper aims to compare male and female YouTubers’ use of strategies and find out whether their methods differ in any significant way from each other. Many apology studies have examined gender, like Bataineh and Bataineh (2008) and Ogiermann (2008), and they have found women to be more apologetic than men. This study will investigate whether this is true for YouTuber apologies as well.

The research questions of this study are presented below. They will be answered through quantitative and qualitative analysis which is further described in section 5.

1. What kinds of linguistic strategies are used to express apologies in the YouTube videos of content creators?

1a. What is the frequency and distribution of these strategies like?

2. What kinds of differences are there in the usage of these strategies between men and women?

The structure of the thesis is as follows. After the introduction, in section 2, speech act theory is discussed in general and then the focus is put specifically on the speech act of apology in section 2.1. Some previous research on speech acts and apologies are introduced. Section 3 discusses the relation between apologies and Brown and Levinson’s (1987) universal model of politeness.

Section 4 concentrates on apologies in relation to gender and introduces previous research and findings on the topic. Section 5 presents the materials and methods of the study, as well as information regarding YouTube and apology videos, and some ethical considerations relating to using social media content as data in research. The results of the study are presented in section 6 which consist of the discovered apology strategies and a comparison of strategy usage

between men and women. Finally, sections 7 and 8 include the discussion and conclusion.

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2 Speech acts

This section discusses the topic of speech acts which can also be called “communicative acts”

(e.g. in Shariati and Chamani 2010). Speech act theory has originally been developed by Austin (1962), who is often considered to be the most important figure in speech act research, and Searle (1980, originally published in 1969) who has expanded on the theory in his works.

According to Austin’s theory, speech acts are “things that people do with words”, as suggested by the title of his work How to Do Things with Words (1962). For example, making a promise is a speech act. Speech acts are not completely independent acts since they are expressed as a reaction to a certain situation or behavior (Olshtain and Cohen 1983: 19). They are also not limited to a certain form, as they can be whole sentences or single utterances, and they can be performed in direct or indirect ways (ibid.: 20). Research has shown that the realizations of speech acts have culture-specific and language-specific variation which will be discussed later in section 2.2.

One of the most essential parts of the speech act theory that Austin (1962) developed is the classification of locutionary acts (physically saying something), illocutionary acts (what the speaker intends to express) and perlocutionary acts (the result or effect of what has been said) (ibid.: 94, 98, 101). Searle (1980: 22) provides some example sentences to illustrate these acts in practice:

1. “Sam smokes habitually.”

2. “Sam, smoke habitually!”

Both of these sentences are locutionary acts, since they are utterances formed of words and present information. However, it is obvious that there is something more to them. As Searle (ibid.: 23) says, sentence 1 is an example of an assertion and sentence 2 is an example of an order. These verbs, “assert” and “order” are considered illocutionary acts (ibid.). They represent the intention behind the sentence and perform a speech act. Since sentence 2 is an order, the expected effect of it is that the speaker gets Sam to smoke habitually. This result or effect is called a perlocutionary act (ibid.: 25).

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Both Austin and Searle have suggested classifications for different types of illocutionary acts.

They are introduced next.

Austin (1962: 150–162) developed the category of illocutionary acts further and presented five types of acts. The first type is verdictives, which are acts that deliver a finding or a verdict (like pronounce or estimate). Exercitives are acts that make a decision against or for a certain action (like warn or command). Commissives are acts which “commit you to doing something, but include also declarations or announcements of intention” (1962: 150–151) (like promise or bet).

Behabitives are a miscellaneous group of acts that are linked to social behavior and reactions to people’s behavior and attitudes (like apologize or thank). Finally, expositives are “used in acts of exposition involving the expounding of views, the conducting of arguments, and the clarifying of usages and or references” (ibid.: 160) (like affirm or describe).

Searle (1975: 354–361) added to Austin’s theory by creating an alternative taxonomy of

illocutionary acts that includes five categories. First, representatives are acts which “commit the speaker (in varying degrees) to something’s being the case, to the truth of the expressed

proposition” (1975: 354) (like conclude or complain). Directives are acts that try to make the hearer do something (like command or invite). The next category is commissives, which Searle directly borrowed from Austin’s taxonomy, with some changes to which verbs are included under it.

Expressives are acts that express the speaker’s emotions and attitude toward a situation or behavior (like apologize or thank). Finally, declarations are acts that alternate reality according to what was included in the proposition (like appoint or nominate). Following these theories, many researchers have given their own perspective on speech acts and criticized Austin’s and Searle’s points of view (see Leech 1983, Geis 1995, Thomas 1995, Trosborg 1995, LoCastro 2003).

When speech acts are studied, the focus is usually on the wide category of illocutionary acts. A few of the most commonly studied speech acts are complaints (Trosborg 1995, Boxer 2010, Kurtyka 2019), compliments (Jucker 2009, Ishihara 2010), offers and refusals (Eslami 2010, Allami and Naeimi 2011, Anchimbe 2018), requests (Blum-Kulka and Olshtain 1984, Trosborg 1995, Usó- Juan 2010) and, most importantly, apologies. The speech act of apology seems to be one of the

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most popular acts that has received lots of attention in the field. Apologies, which are the focus of this thesis, are discussed in more detail in the next section.

2.1 The speech act of apology

Apologies are one type of speech act. Defining apologies in extreme detail is not easy, because they can be realized in many forms and be used for many functions. However, some general features and functions can be drawn.

Apologies are categorized under illocutionary acts. Austin, as mentioned above, classifies them into behabitives, which he defines as “a kind of performative concerned roughly with reactions to behaviour and with behaviour towards others and designed to exhibit attitudes and feelings”

(1962: 83). Searle, on the other hand, classifies them into expressives, which “express the

psychological state specified in the sincerity condition about a state of affairs in the propositional content” (1975: 356). In other words, both of these definitions state that apologies are acts which express the speaker’s reaction and attitude to a certain situation.

As mentioned earlier by Olshtain and Cohen (1983), speech acts are triggered by certain

situations or behaviors. Blum-Kulka and Olshtain (1984: 206) present three preconditions for an apology to occur: First, the speaker (offender) does an action, does not do the action, or is about to do the action. Next, only the speaker, only the hearer, both of them, or a third party considers the action to be a violation of a social norm. Last, someone involved in the situation considers the action or inaction to have offended the hearer or affected them in a negative way. According to Blum-Kulka and Olshtain these three preconditions have to be met, but in addition the

speaker (the offender) must recognize the above-mentioned preconditions in order to realize that they should apologize to the hearer. (1984: 206) Thus, the speech act of apology is

expressed when social norms have been violated and the violator sees an apology as a

necessary remedial measure. After this, the speaker must figure out how to express the apology to the hearer.

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Searle (1980) brings up the concept of an illocutionary force indicating device (IFID), which he defines as follows: “The illocutionary force indicator shows how the proposition is to be taken, or to put it another way, what illocutionary force the utterance is to have; that is, what illocutionary act the speaker is performing in the utterance of the sentence.” (ibid.: 30) As a reminder, an illocutionary act refers to the speaker’s intention behind what they are saying. According to Searle, these devices in the English language are “word order, stress, intonation contour, punctuation, the mood of the verb, and the so-called performative verbs” (ibid.: 30). In terms of apologies, the last-mentioned performative verbs are essential. Blum-Kulka and Olshtain (1984:

207) present the following performative verbs as examples of English IFIDs for apologies: (be) sorry, excuse, apologize, forgive, regret and pardon. These are some of the verbs that are used in apologies to indicate the illocutionary force of an apology. Sorry seems to be the most common realization of English apology IFIDs (Beeching 2019: 284). Searle (1975: 345) notes that there is a difference between illocutionary acts and illocutionary (performative) verbs. Illocutionary acts themselves belong to all languages, but specific illocutionary verbs are language-specific.

Apologies are most often expressed through IFIDs (like saying “I’m sorry”) but usually a speaker who is apologizing says something else along with the IFID. This is what is described as an apology speech act set by Olshtain and Cohen (1983: 21). Speech act sets consist of one or more semantic formulas which are used to perform the speech act. In terms of apologies, a semantic formula can be, for example, an “expression of responsibility” (ibid.: 21). In this paper, the

semantic formulas will be referred to as “strategies”. Thus, an apology is usually a combination of an IFID and additional strategies.

When apologies are studied, one of the goals is often to investigate what kinds of strategies are used in the act of expressing an apology. Examples of these strategies along with some previous research on apologies are introduced in the next section.

2.2 Previous research and suggested apology strategy frameworks

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Apologies have been a popular topic in speech act performance studies over the years. As mentioned, most studies aim to examine the used apology strategies. Often the goal has also been to investigate how much of the apology speech act set is universal and how much is affected by culture and language, which is why many studies are cross-cultural (Shariati and Chamani 2010: 1690, Jones and Adrefiza 2017: 89). Researchers have often utilized a framework of strategies (or semantic formulas) in their studies that they based on another study or that they created themselves based on their data. Some previous research including their

frameworks will now be introduced.

One of the most influential and commonly cited works in the field is the CCSARP project (A Cross- Cultural Study of Speech Act Realization Patterns) by Blum-Kulka and Olshtain (1984). At the time when they were writing the paper, the project was still in progress. The paper thus describes the project and presents its coding scheme but does not yet present any findings.

The purpose of the project was to examine and compare the speech acts of requests and apologies, produced by native and non-native speakers of multiple languages (Blum-Kulka and Olshtain 1984: 196). Their goal, more specifically, was to look at situational, cross-cultural, and individual variability (ibid.: 197). The languages and varieties studied in the project are Australian English, American English, British English, Canadian French, Danish, German, Hebrew and

Russian (ibid.: 197). In order to collect the data, they utilized a discourse completion test (DCT), which includes different kinds of incomplete discourse sequences that the participants had to complete with the required speech acts (ibid.: 198). The participants of the project consisted of 400 university students for each of the studied languages with an equal number of men and women, and with half being native speakers and half non-native speakers. (ibid.: 199) The five apology strategies recognized in the project are 1. IFIDs, 2. taking on responsibility including the sub-categories a. S [speaker] expresses trait of self-deficiency, b. explicit self-blame, and c. denial of fault, 3. explanation or account of cause, 4. offer of repair and 5. promise of forbearance (ibid.: 207–

208). Most of these strategies are ones where the speaker recognizes that they are at fault and they need to apologize. However c. denial of fault stands out because denying fault is essentially a non-apology strategy, because it is the speaker’s “rejection of the need to apologize” (ibid.:

207). Many apology strategy frameworks include these kinds of non-apology strategies.

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After the publication of the CCSARP project, its coding scheme has been utilized in a variety of studies on apologies. These include, e.g., Scher and Darley (1997), Afghari (2007), Kasanga and Lwanga-Lumu (2007) and Qari (2019).

Olshtain and Cohen (1983) wrote an article on the apology speech act set, where they introduce their framework for apologies strategies as well as studies that they and their students have executed by utilizing it. For example, “The Cohen and Olshtain Hebrew University Study” by Cohen and Olshtain was done with the purpose of assessing cultural competence (1983: 25). The participants of the study consisted of 12 native English speakers, 12 Hebrew speakers who gave responses in Hebrew and 20 Hebrew speakers who gave responses in English (as a foreign language). They presented eight everyday apology situations to which the participants had to provide a response for (ibid.: 25). These responses were categorized according to the apology strategy framework in table 1, and they also created archetypal apologies for each situation based on the data (ibid.: 27). They found signs of native-language transfer in the apology patterns, signs of successful avoidance of said transfer, and signs of deficiency in linguistic proficiency (ibid.: 26). The study indicates that there are culture-specific apology patterns which can transfer when apologizing in a foreign language.

Table 1 below presents Olshtain and Cohen’s (1983) apology strategies. As shown, they also found non-apology strategies or strategies which indicate rejection of the need to apologize.

Table 1. Apology strategy framework by Olshtain and Cohen (1983: 22–23).

The offender accepts the responsibility for the offense committed:

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9 1. An expression of apology

A. An expression of regret (e.g. I’m sorry) B. An offer of apology (e.g. I apologize) C. A request for forgiveness (e.g. Forgive me)

2. An explanation or account of the situation (e.g. The bus was late) 3. An acknowledgement of responsibility

A. Accepting the blame (e.g. It was my fault) B. Expressing self-deficiency (e.g. I was confused)

C. Recognizing the other person as deserving an apology (e.g. You are right) D. Expressing lack of intent (e.g. I didn’t mean to)

4. An offer of repair (e.g. I’ll help you get up)

5. A promise of forbearance (e.g. It won’t happen again) The offender rejects the need to apologize:

1. A denial of the need to apologize (e.g. There was no need for you to get insulted)

2. A denial of responsibility

A. Not accepting the blame (e.g. It wasn’t my fault) B. Blaming the other participant (e.g. It’s your own fault)

Shariati and Chamani (2010) study the apology speech act in spoken Persian. They utilized a corpus of 500 apology exchanges which were collected by the researchers and their assistants by utilizing an ethnographic approach, which included them observing and writing down apologies in everyday situations (ibid.: 1691). They found 1000 cases of strategy use in the data of 500 exchanges, which was because one occurrence often included more than one strategy (ibid.: 1692). Shariati and Chamani used previously mentioned Olshtain and Cohen’s (1983) framework for their study’s coding scheme (table 1). The results show that the strategies in the data, from most to least frequent, were IFIDs, acknowledging responsibility with a number of sub- strategies, explanation, offer of repair and promise of forbearance (2010: 1693). The non-apology strategies were included under acknowledging responsibility. They discovered that their findings

“on the one hand, confirm previous findings suggesting the universality of apology strategies and on the other hand, it supports the scholars who emphasize the culture-specific aspect of

language” (2010: 1697).

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Bataineh and Bataineh (2008) did a cross-cultural study of apologies. They studied and

compared the apology strategies of students that are native speakers of American English and native speakers of Jordanian Arabic. Their sample group included 100 American and 100

Jordanian students. The study was done through a questionnaire, which consisted of situations described by other students. The task of the sample group was to respond accordingly to the situations which, in their opinion, warranted an apology. (2008: 800) They found that there were differences in the apology strategies between the two groups, but also between the genders in the same culture (ibid.: 816) (which will be discussed in section 4). Table 2 presents the apology strategies found in their data which are divided into explicit apologies, less explicit apology strategies and non-apology strategies.

Table 2. Apology strategies from Bataineh and Bataineh (2008: 802–816).

Explicit apology Less explicit apology strategies

Non-apology strategies A. One expression of

apology (e.g. I am sorry)

B. One expression of apology and one intensifier (e.g. I am very sorry)

C. One expression of apology and two intensifiers (e.g. I am so, so sorry)

D. Two expressions of apology (e.g. I am sorry; forgive me) E. Two expressions of

apology and one intensifier (e.g. Excuse me; I am very sorry) and other variations.

A. Accounts B. Reparation

C. Promise not to repeat the offense

D. Showing lack of intent to do harm

E. Self-castigation F. Gratitude

G. Promise of better times to come H. Checking on

consequences

I. Asking victim not to be angry

J. Assessment of responsibility K. Using proverbs and

sayings

A. Brushing off incident as unimportant B. Blaming victim C. Offending victim D. Avoidance of subject

or person

E. Laughing the incident off

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Page (2014) looks at corporate apologies with a focus on written tweets on the microblogging site Twitter. The examined data includes tweets from corporates, celebrities, and ordinary individuals. The material includes 1183 apologies which she identified using concordancing tools (like AntConc) and manual analysis. All tweets were coded according to their components. (2014:

33) Common IFIDs were searched from the data and the results show that sorry and apology or apologise were the most frequent (ibid.: 34). She finds that nearly every single tweet consists of an IFID combined with some additional strategies (ibid.: 36). Other components identified in the data include explanations; offer of repair; follow up moves: questions and imperatives; greetings, closings and terms of address (ibid.: 37–40). She concludes that in addition to using an IFID there are other components that can be used in combination with it, and these “may be used in the service of saving the apologiser’s face and re-establishing rapport between the interactants in a strategy of image repair.” (ibid.: 43)

Including the studies introduced previously, most apology studies seem to look at short and quick, everyday instances of apologies. For example, when someone arrives late, they might say something like “I am sorry that I am late; I missed the bus.” However, the focus of this study is on YouTube apology videos which can be very long forms of apology. These videos last for many minutes and are, in essence, monologues, so a single video will include many kinds of strategy combinations, such as explicit apologies, explanations and promises of repair. Based on my research, these kinds of long-form apologies have yet to be studied as much as the short-form ones. This is probably because apologies in video format are not as common as the short, everyday ones that are usually expressed in private domains. In contrast, apology videos are posted to a public platform with the purpose of many people seeing them. Nonetheless, with the rise of social media, it is no surprise that there are increasingly more studies today that focus on apologies on YouTube. However, many of the studies that I could find are not in the field of linguistics. For example, Sandlin and Gracyalny’s (2018) study is about image repair and forgiveness, while Manika et al. (2015) focus on service failure and crisis communication.

Apologies in video format have not received much attention from the field of linguistics, which is why this can be an interesting perspective to examine.

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3 Apologies and politeness

This section discusses the relationship between apologies and politeness. Some relevant theory and terminology will be presented which will be useful background information for other parts of the study.

Politeness is evidently related to apologies since people try to be polite by admitting their mistakes and apologizing to others when they have violated a social norm. Holmes (1989: 195) agrees with this, saying that the main purpose of apologies is “to provide a remedy for an offence and restore social equilibrium.”

Many scholars have presented theories on politeness (e.g. Lakoff 1973, Leech 1983) but Brown and Levinson’s (1987) universal model of politeness is one of the most influential frameworks in the field. They present the notion of “face”, which “all competent adult members of a society have”, and that is “the public self-image that every member wants to claim for himself.” (1987:

61) Following this assumption, they also present that the concept of face has two sides: “a positive face” and “a negative face”. The positive face is defined as “the positive consistent self- image or ‘personality’ (crucially including the desire that this self-image be appreciated and approved of) claimed by interactants”, while the negative face is “the basic claim to territories, personal preserves, rights to non-distraction – i.e. to freedom of action and freedom from imposition.” (ibid.: 61) Positive and negative face needs are essential when looking at apologies.

Holmes (1989: 195) states that “[a]pologies … are speech acts which pay attention to the ‘face’

needs of the addressee.” According to Holmes (ibid.: 196), the function of an apology in this context is to maintain or support the hearer’s face and thus also support the relationship of the two parties. Blum-Kulka and Olshtain (1984: 206) agree with apologies being supportive for the hearer. Apologizing is thus an ideal speech act for restoring and maintaining relationships.

Even though apologies are supportive for the hearer, the case is not the same for the speaker.

According to Brown and Levinson (1987: 68), apologies are “face-threatening acts” (FTAs) to a speaker’s positive face; When the speaker apologizes to the hearer, they simultaneously admit to

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committing an offense, which is face-damaging to the speaker. Blum-Kulka and Olshtain (1984:

206) also suggest that because the speaker admits to being involved in a violation of a social norm, “apologies involve loss of face for the speaker.” Qari (2019: 84) presents a different perspective, agreeing with Meier (1992), and suggests that the prior offense is the face-

threatening act and apologizing for the offense can be a face-saving act for the speaker. I would like to argue that this depends on whether the hearer already knows about the offense or not.

As Brown and Levinson say (1987: 68), an apology is especially face-damaging if the hearer learns about the offense through the apology. However, if the hearer already knows about the offense and wants an apology, the apology can serve as a face-saving act for the speaker.

If the speaker feels like apologizing will damage their face, they can do certain actions in order to mitigate the damage. Brown and Levinson (1987: 70) suggest that the face-threat can be

mitigated through positive politeness or negative politeness. According to them, positive politeness is directed toward the positive face of the recipient and is thus approach-based. The function of it is to signal to the recipient that the speaker appreciates their positive face wants. On the other hand, negative politeness is directed toward the negative face of the recipient and is thus

avoidance-based. The function of it is to signal to the recipient that the speaker respects their

“basic want to maintain claims of territory and self-determination” (1987: 70). Through these assumptions, apology strategies can be classified into positive or negative politeness strategies depending on whether it is the positive or the negative face that is given consideration.

Explicit apologies (IFIDs) themselves are usually regarded as a negative politeness strategy which shows consideration towards the hearer (Ogiermann 2009: 59, Jones and Adrefiza 2017: 91). This is also confirmed by, for instance, Shariati and Chamani (2010: 1690, quoting Brown and

Levinson, 1987: 187). They say that an apology may function as “a negative politeness strategy that indicates [speaker]’s “reluctance to impinge on H [hearer]’s negative face” to save the hearer’s face needs.” One negative politeness strategy described by Brown and Levinson (1987:

70) is giving the hearer an “out”, which allows the hearer to escape the situation without

responding if they do not want to. This can be applied to apologies when the speaker is talking about themselves exclusively and does not put pressure on the hearer to, for example, forgive

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the speaker. Asking for forgiveness asks the hearer to come into the situation, which might threaten their negative face (Ogiermann 2008: 266).

According to Ogiermann (2009: 179), positive politeness apology strategies include offer of repair, promise of forbearance and concern for hearer. These strategies are regarded as positive

politeness because they consider the positive face of the hearer and the speaker more strongly than other strategies. They also appear in a similar form in Brown and Levinson’s positive politeness strategies (offer, promise and attend to hearer) (1987: 102).

The analysis of the data in this study will not include a deep analysis based on politeness theory, although that would certainly be interesting. However, the concepts and terms of the theory will be referenced here and there, which is why this section is important as background knowledge.

These concepts are helpful descriptors of the possible motivators behind apology strategy choices.

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4 Apologies and gender

Previous studies on speech acts, including apologies, suggest that there are multiple social

factors that influence the speaker’s choice of speech act strategies. Some of these factors include

“social power (status), social distance, sex, and age” (Olshtain 1989: 158, referring to Olshtain and Weinbach 1987). Following this finding, the second research question of this study focuses on the comparison between men and women in the use of apology strategies. Gender has been a commonly studied social factor in apology research, which is why this section will describe previous research and findings on the topic. As a whole, studies tend to indicate that there is a difference in the way men and women apologize and specifically that women are more

apologetic than men. Schumann and Ross (2010) present a counterargument to this popular view which will also be discussed toward the end of this section.

4.1 Previous research on apologies and gender

At the end of the 80’s, Holmes (1989) examined gender differences in apologies in New Zealand English. She employed an ethnographic approach and collected 183 apology interchanges (apologies and responses) and found that the distribution of apologies across genders has differences. Women gave 74.5% of the apologies while men gave only 25.5%; women also received 73.3% of the apologies whereas men received 26.7% of them (1989: 197). Most of the apologies (56.3%) occurred between women whereas only 8.5% of the apologies occurred between men. The apologies between male-female and female-male pairs were quite evenly distributed. The results thus show that New Zealand women apologize more than their male counterparts, but women are also apologized to much more often. Holmes finds the result interesting because in western culture men are most often considered to be the gender that holds more power, which is why Holmes expected that women would apologize more to men.

She offers the explanation that women and men have different perceptions of apologies and of how they function. (ibid.: 198–199)

Holmes found 295 instances of apology strategy use and divided these into four basic categories of apology strategies along with a number of sub-categories. The four basic categories are A.

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explicit expression of apology, B. explanation or account, C. acknowledgement of responsibility and D.

a promise of forbearance (ibid.: 200). She concludes that there is overall not much difference between men and women in terms of strategy usage. One difference is that “men appear to use more formal sub-strategies more often than women” (ibid.: 199) and although the numbers are too small to be able to generalize this idea, it suggests that “perhaps women and men regard apologies as doing different jobs” (ibid.: 200). Holmes then analyses the types of offenses that were apologized for and finds that “this data suggests that … women are particularly concerned about intrusions relating to a person’s space and talking rights, while men are more concerned by inconvenience which costs another time, and damage to another’s possessions” (ibid.: 202).

Holmes also looks at the seriousness of the offense, power relations between participants, social distance, and response strategies. Based on everything, Holmes concludes that women and men apologize in somewhat different ways and in different contexts which may be because women and men do not perceive apologies in the same way. She also brings up the possibility that women consider face needs more important than men, which is why they apologize more and they are apologized to more than men (ibid.: 206).

The previously mentioned Bataineh and Bataineh (2008) conducted a cross-cultural study on 100 American and 100 Jordanian students (each group had 50 male and 50 female respondents) and their use of apology strategies. They utilized a questionnaire that presented different kinds of situations warranting apologies to which the respondents had to answer. The American group answered the questionnaire in English and the Jordanian group answered in Arabic. They found that both American and Jordanian female respondents gave explicit apologies (e.g. I am very sorry) more than their male counterparts, and also used more primary strategies (such as accounts and reparation) (2008: 807–808, 815). Both American and Jordanian male respondents were found to use more non-apology strategies (such as laughing it off or blaming the victim) than their female counterparts (ibid.: 808, 815). American and Jordanian students were compared next, and Bataineh and Bataineh found that Jordanian students used more manifestations of an explicit apology than Americans. Both groups used the same primary strategies (explicit apology, accounts and reparation) but the frequencies varied. (ibid.: 815–816) The study thus implies that there are differences in the use of apology strategies based on both gender and culture.

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Ogiermann (2008) studies the apologies of British and Russian university students. She used a discourse completion test (DCT) for data collection which includes scenarios to which the subjects had to respond. The British students responded in English and the Russian ones in Russian. She found that both British and Russian women express more explicit apologies than their male counterparts and often prefer the form of the apology which has a stronger

illocutionary force (ibid.: 278). Both British and Russian women employed a bit more adverbial intensifiers (e.g. really, very) than men (ibid.). Both British and Russian women also used

exclamations more frequently than men did (ibid.: 274, 276). British and Russian women tended to use more positive politeness apology strategies than men, which “seems to confirm the thesis that women put more effort into maintaining relationships than men” (ibid.: 278). British and Russian women use more upgrading (e.g. justify, lack of intent, embarrassment) and fewer

downgrading accounts (e.g. deny, minimize, act innocently) than their male counterparts, although the choices of account types are “partly contradictory” (ibid.: 279). Ogiermann also finds that “the classification of the responses according to whether they entail responsibility acceptance

considerably reduces the differences between genders. In both languages, the number of apologetic responses are nearly equal for both genders” (ibid.: 279–280). Ogiermann concludes that while there are gender-specific differences in the data, the most statistically significant differences appear between languages (ibid.: 278). This study shows support for the notion that women and men apologize in slightly different ways, but it also emphasizes the importance of culture.

In more recent years, Jones and Adrefiza (2017) conducted a cross-cultural study on Australian English (AE) and Bahasa Indonesian (BI) native speakers’ apologies. The study includes 12 Australian English speakers (6 men and 6 women) and 12 Bahasa Indonesian speakers (6 men and 6 women) who were asked to express apologies in different situations. They had time to prepare and then their apologies were audio-recorded. Jones and Adrefiza found that in both languages women use apology terms (AE sorry, BI maaf) more than their male counterparts (2017: 98). They also noticed that while intensifiers (such as really, so) are not used much in BI, they are used slightly more in AE. Furthermore, female AE speakers used them more than their male counterparts (ibid.: 106). Jones and Adrefiza thus find that male AE speakers “appear less insistent on the apology” and are “altogether quite ‘cool’, casual and brief”, whereas female AE

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speakers “quite heavily emphasize sorry” and “tend to be more ‘committed’ to the apology than the males” (ibid.: 107). As for the Indonesian apologies, they find that “[t]he females are not necessarily any more elaborate than their male counterparts” and that women use hearer- oriented forms and, consequently, negative politeness, more than men (ibid.: 107–108). Jones and Adrefiza also conclude that AE apologies tend to be speaker-oriented whereas BI apologies tend to be hearer-oriented (ibid.: 104).

As demonstrated by the studies introduced just now, previous research indicates that there are differences in the way women and men apologize, even across languages and cultures. There are differences in apology strategy use and there is a strong tendency for women to be more apologetic than men. I was interested to know whether an opposing view on this had been presented, but nearly all the studies I was able to find seemed to support this notion, although Holmes (1989) did find in her study that there were no large differences in men and women’s usage of apology strategies. However, Schumann and Ross (2010: 1649) claim that “[d]espite widespread acceptance of the idea that there exists a gender difference in apology behaviour, there is no compelling evidence of such a difference.” They also criticize Holmes’ (1989) study’s finding about women apologizing more than men and give two alternative explanations for it:

“First, perhaps women offered more apologies because they committed more offenses. Second, men might have a higher threshold for what constitutes an offense” (2010: 1650). Schumann and Ross conducted two studies to investigate the matter.

Schumann and Ross’ (2010) first study includes 33 female and 33 male university students who were asked to answer a diary-type questionnaire for 12 nights. These entries were to describe situations during this period where the participant was an offender (i.e. participant apologized to someone or did something that might require an apology), and situations where the participant was a victim (i.e. participant was apologized to or someone did something to the participant that might have required an apology) (2010: 1650). The material was then analyzed and the offenses were categorized. The results show that women did report apologizing more, but this was

influenced by the fact that they also committed more offenses in general (ibid.: 1651). Schumann and Ross thus found that there was no difference between men and women in the frequency of apologies or in how the groups apologized: “It appears that once men and women categorized a

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behavior as offensive, they were equally likely to apologize for it, and their apologies were similarly effusive.” (ibid.: 1651) Based on the data, Schumann and Ross suggest that men and women may have different ideas of what is considered offensive behavior and that “women have a lower threshold for what constitutes offensive behavior” (ibid.: 1651).

The second study they did was based on the results of the first one and this time their aim was

“to determine whether gender differences in perceptions of apology deservedness were mediated by judgments of offense severity” (Schumann and Ross 2010: 1652). This time the study included 63 female and 57 male students, who were asked to imagine certain conflict scenarios with a friend and to evaluate the scenarios as instructed. The students were also asked to recall a recent case from their own life where they offended a friend and to evaluate that situation similarly. Schumann and Ross found that women considered their offenses in both scenarios to be more severe compared to men and that the severity affected their view on how deserving the victim was of an apology (ibid.: 1653).

Based on these two studies, Schumann and Ross thus present the possibility that women are not more apologetic than men, but rather women and men have different ideas for which actions are considered offensive and require an apology. If women consider more actions offensive, they will apologize and expect apologies more as well. This is an interesting counterargument to the popular notion presented by multiple previous studies and something that is good to keep in mind in regard to the current study. Whereas many previous studies have aimed to find out who apologizes more frequently, this study’s aim is not to examine how many apology videos men and women produce nor compare that to how many offenses they commit. That might be a topic for another study, but as of now that cannot be investigated. What the current study can do and aims to do, however, is evaluate whether there are differences in the way apologies are presented by men and women.

This ends the theoretical part of this thesis. Next, we will move on to discussing the empirical study.

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5 Material and methods

This section introduces the material and methods of the study. The material used in this study is YouTube videos in English from YouTube content creators. Specifically, these videos are so-called

“apology videos”, where the creator apologizes for an offense that they have committed or that they are accused of having committed. The recipient of the apology can be the creator’s general audience, a certain person, or both. The material is described in more detail in section 5.1 and the methods are explained in section 5.2. These videos and YouTube as a platform are described in further detail in section 5.3. Finally, section 5.4 mentions some ethical considerations of the study.

5.1 Collection of the material

The method of collecting the material for this study differs significantly from traditional apology research. Shariati and Chamani (2010: 1690) note that data for previous studies in apology research has been acquired mostly through role-plays, either face-to-face with someone or through written tasks on paper (e.g. Cohen and Olshtain 1981, Blum-Kulka and Olshtain 1984, Olshtain 1989, Bataineh and Bataineh 2008, Jones and Adrefiza 2017). This approach has its weaknesses, such as possible unnatural behavior from participants, which is why Shariati and Chamani (2010) decided to go for ethnographic observation (similarly to Holmes 1989). This method enables the collection of natural speech, but its downside is that the data collection takes more time and effort. The current study looks at speech in videos which have been produced personally by the speakers. The advantages of this method are that the data is

naturally produced and that the collection of it does not require much effort since the videos are available online. Since these apologies are in video format online, it is likely that they are edited and prepared beforehand. This can be considered a downside if the study focuses on

spontaneous speech. However, this study focuses on the way that the apologies are presented by the speakers, regardless of whether they are edited and prepared prior to filming or not.

In order to gather the correct types of videos, relevant keywords such as “sorry”, “apology” and

“response” were typed on the YouTube search bar. The results were sorted by view count in

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order to find the most viewed apology videos. After this the videos were looked through and the videos that fit into this study’s requirements were identified. These requirements were the following:

a. The creator of the video is a single person, not a group or a corporation. Studying individuals fits the main purpose of this study.

b. The video is uploaded by the original creator. It cannot be a re-upload. It is ideal that the material is from the original source and presented in the way that the original creator intended. Something to note is that a few of the videos that are used as material in this study have been made private or deleted sometime after I already created transcripts and analyzed them. They have been used in this study regardless.

c. The main purpose of the entire video is to seriously apologize for an offense. The video can also only include the apology; it cannot be, for instance, a small part of a vlog (video blog).

d. The maximum length of a video is about 15 minutes. This is mainly in order to narrow down the search results and make the handling of the data easier and faster.

Following the given requirements, 20 videos were gathered for this study: 12 from male creators and eight from female creators. The runtime of all 20 videos is 2 hours and 18 minutes, of which men’s videos take 1 hour and 10 minutes and women’s take 1 hour and 8 minutes. Therefore, even though the number of videos is not quite even for both groups, the runtime of the videos is nearly equal. The lengths of the individual videos vary anywhere between 1-2 minutes to nearly 15 minutes. The 20 speakers in the videos are between 18 and 32 years of age and they are from various countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Sweden. I would like to note that although all the subjects in the data identify as male or female, I consider all other gender identities valid as well. The subjects were selected based on how relevant their video was to the study. If there were potential subjects that identified as something other than male or female, I would still have taken them into consideration, but that was not necessary in this case.

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After gathering the videos, they had to be transcribed into text. The transcription process was done in two different ways. The first approach was manual transcription where the videos were written down manually as the video was being watched through. The second approach was faster and easier, as the automatically generated English captions from the videos (for which they were available) were directly copied to help fasten the transcription process. After copying the captions, they were checked while watching the video in order to clean up the form and correct any mistakes that the auto-generated speech-to-text might have. All the resulting material amount up to 24,755 words: 11,774 for men and 12,981 for women. Below I have provided two samples of the material from two speakers in order to show what the material is like in its raw form.

… I already made a video owning up to that and taking accountability that- the certain environment that I was in, that I grew up in, it, you know, I grew up in the hood and I said that before. I didn't really, you know, wasn't the best place to grow up and and sometimes it was this [mumbles]... I don’t know, it's very hard but I just wanna, I want to apologize and if people want to unsubscribe and not be here for me I totally get it. I wouldn't want to be here for myself either. But I guess this is one of those situations I'm just gonna have to constantly apologize for the rest of my life. I've people who are really close to me that I value are like “hey, this is something that you should really address because like, you know, like address it” so that's why I'm doing it, because I’ve people who love me, people around me watch my videos and my mom, my- even my mom watches my videos. Sometimes I try to like be careful of what I say and in them, she watches all the videos and she'll like tell me stuff like “you know what…” but I just want to express like… I just want to express like I'm just, I'm sorry if I hurt you guys or let you guys down. I totally understand, but once again, I want a 100% own my actions, I want 100%, again, own the the receipts or whatever…

(Speaker M10)

There have been Reddit threads and 4chan threads with hundreds of comments on it of people trying to prove that I'm not trans because I haven't done this or that or, you know, digging up my old pictures and, you know... I'm a strong person, I'm a happy person but to sit here and pretend like it doesn't affect me at all would just be a lie. So the thought that this entire time I've done that exact same thing to someone else and push that off on someone else fucks with me and I'm fucking sorry. From my perspective, knowing what it takes to transition, the tens of thousands of dollars it takes to save up for these surgeries, to take that plunge and to step into that is difficult and to know that at the… this is getting kind of hard to film and I'm fucking frustrated. Having gone through that myself and knowing that [she] went through that and that during the process of [her] doing that, [she]

had this trans person on YouTube making videos saying some of the things that I said is really messing with me and I feel really fucking bad. You know, this whole thing has really taught me a lesson that I should really try to stick to ideas, opinions, policy, rather than like trying to get in someone's head and like make judgements about something that's so

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personal and so nuanced, like. I will say in this moment, [name], I apologize. I'm genuinely, from my core, sorry. (Speaker F3)

5.2 Methods of the study

The methods of this study are both quantitative and qualitative analysis. The first part of the first research question (What kinds of linguistic strategies are used to express apologies in the YouTube videos of content creators?) is answered by examining the videos in detail and creating suitable descriptions of the strategies that are identified. The second part (What is the frequency and distribution of these strategies like?) is determined by utilizing the word count. Rather than

counting the individual occurrences of the strategies, the strategies were given numerical values by how many words they took up. These word amounts were then calculated into percentages.

For example, the words that have been determined to represent strategy X could have taken 10% of a video’s total word amount. As such, strategy X is deemed to take up 10% of the video.

This is quite a different approach in comparison to methods in previous apology research.

Traditionally, apology strategies are counted by singular instances of strategy use. This

traditional approach has not been utilized in this study because it is not suitable for an accurate representation of this kind of data. I feel that the approach used in this study represents the data in an accurate way.

In order to identify the strategies and create suitable categories for them, multiple frameworks from previous apology studies were used as guidance. None of them have been followed exactly but they have been used as the basis for the current study. The first one is the model created by Olshtain and Cohen (1983) which was introduced in table 1 in section 2.2. Their model includes seven categories: 1. An expression of an apology, 2. an explanation or account of the situation, 3. an acknowledgement of responsibility, 4. an offer of repair, 5. a promise of forbearance, 6. a denial of the need to apologize and 7. a denial of responsibility. Some of these categories include sub-strategies as well. Although the types of studies that Olshtain and Cohen have executed using this model are very different from the current study, the framework that they provide is very

comprehensive to all kinds of apology situations, which is why it was deemed suitable for this study as well. Suszczyriska (1999), who studied apologies in English, Polish and Hungarian, Ogiermann (2008), who studied apologies in English and Russian, and Shariati and Chamani

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(2010), who studied the universality of apologies in Persian speakers, have also utilized Olshtain and Cohen’s framework as the basis for their studies.

Another framework that influenced the current study is Bataineh and Bataineh’s (2008)

framework, which was introduced in table 2 in section 2.2. They studied American and Jordanian students’ use of apology strategies through a questionnaire and created their own framework, which has three main categories: 1. Explicit apology (includes five strategies), 2. less explicit apology strategies (includes 11 strategies) and 3. non-apology strategies (includes five strategies).

A third framework that was used as guidance for the current study is from Fraser (1981). He presents nine strategies for apologies which are 1. announcing that you are apologizing, 2. stating one's obligation to apologize, 3. offering to apologize, 4. requesting the hearer accept an apology, 5.

expressing regret for the offense, 6. requesting forgiveness for the offense, 7. acknowledging responsibility for the offending act, 8. promising forbearance from a similar offending act and 9.

offering redress.

The three frameworks that were just introduced are only a portion of the different apology frameworks that one can find, but I find that many of the frameworks are often not so different from each other. It seems that the general, most common strategies (like expressions of regret or explanations) are the same in all of them although they are usually given slightly different names. Often there are also study-specific strategies that do not appear in every framework. In the end, these frameworks were used as guidance for the current study, but ultimately the strategies were decided based on the data used in this study.

Next, I shall briefly introduce the strategies that were chosen for this study and describe what kinds of utterances are included in which strategy.

The first strategy is 1. an expression of apology. This strategy includes all instances when the speaker says a common apology expression, such as “I am sorry” or “I apologize”. These expressions belong to IFIDs (see section 2.1).

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The second strategy is 2. an acknowledgement of responsibility. This strategy includes the

instances where the speaker acknowledges their responsibility for the offense in some way. This strategy has five sub-strategies, which make the meaning of this strategy clearer. The first sub- strategy is 2a. accepting the blame, which describes instances where the speaker admits, for example, that their actions were wrong, they made a mistake or that the victim is right in

blaming the speaker. In other words, they express acceptance and agreement over the fact that they are being blamed. The second sub-strategy is 2b. self-criticism. This sub-strategy includes cases where the speaker explicitly talks about themselves in a negative manner. They criticize themselves by insulting themselves or expressing that they did not know or realize what was happening (when they should have known). The third sub-strategy is 2c. expressing lack of intent, which includes cases where the speaker expresses that they did not mean to do something or that what they did came across the wrong way. It also includes instances where the speaker claims that everyone makes mistakes in life or that they are just human for making mistakes, but there was no ill intent. The fourth sub-strategy is 2d. expressing regret or remorse. It includes cases where the speaker says some form of “I regret doing it”, “I wish I would not have done it”, “I should not have done it” or “I feel bad for doing it”. The last sub-strategy of this category is 2e.

expressing disappointment or shame in oneself. This includes instances where the speaker explicitly expresses that they are disappointed in themselves or their actions, or that they feel ashamed.

The third main strategy is 3. an explanation or account of the situation. This includes instances where the speaker explains to the hearer what has happened and gives their personal account of the situation. This strategy is meant to include those explanations and accounts that are somewhat neutral in tone. Sometimes explanations transform into, for example, expressions of lack of intent, which is when those utterances are moved to the appropriate category. This strategy includes those explanations that are given as background information to the hearer, without explicitly trying to convince the hearer of the speaker’s own position. These explanations often include a clear description of the offense, but sometimes the speaker avoids restating the offense and talks around the issue.

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The fourth strategy is 4. expressing praise, gratitude, or love. This strategy includes instances where the speaker praises the victim or talks about them and their qualities in a positive way. It does not include the cases where the speaker admits that the victim is right; those cases belong under 2a. accepting the blame. This strategy is for the kind of additional praise that would not necessarily be required for an apology. This also includes the moments when the speaker

addresses the audience or the victim and thanks them for something, or expresses love towards them.

The fifth strategy is 5. an offer of repair. It includes instances where the speaker offers reparation in order to compensate for the harm that their offense has caused. These offers are usually concrete actions that the speaker has done or is promising to do in the near future.

The sixth strategy is 6. a promise of forbearance. This one includes cases where the speaker promises the hearer that they will not repeat the offense in the future and that they will attempt to improve themselves as a person. This strategy is similar to the fifth one in that they are both remedial offers the speaker is making for the victim and the audience. An offer of repair is a concrete action in the present whereas a promise of forbearance is a verbal promise for the future.

The seventh and last strategy is 7. not acknowledging responsibility which includes cases where the speaker in some way refuses to acknowledge responsibility over the offense. These can also be called non-apology strategies. There are four sub-strategies for this category of which the first one is 7a. denying the offense completely or partially. This includes instances where the speaker denies that they ever committed the offense or denies some part of the offense. The second sub-strategy is 7b. criticizing the victim, which includes cases where the speaker criticizes or blames the victim or the accusers in some way, directing the blame away from themselves. The third sub-strategy is 7c. denying the need to apologize. This includes moments where the speaker expresses the opinion that they have not done anything wrong or that their actions do not require an apology. The fourth and last sub-strategy of the final strategy is 7d. belittling the offense. This sub-strategy includes cases where the speaker belittles the offense and expresses

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the opinion that their actions were not as bad as what they are being accused of. They are admitting that they committed the offense, but they are evaluating the severity of it.

All the strategies and sub-strategies of this study have now been introduced. They will be described again along with some illustrating examples in section 6.1 which presents the results of the study.

The second research question (What kinds of differences are there in the usage of these strategies between men and women?) will be answered by comparing the videos of men and women,

quantitatively and qualitatively. The results acquired during the examination of the first research question are utilized in answering this question as well.

5.3 YouTube and apology videos

YouTube is an American video-sharing platform that was established in 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim (see YouTube.com). It is quite a new medium in terms of linguistic research, but its content, including videos as well as the comments under the videos, has been used as data for linguistic studies increasingly in recent times because of the increased usage of social media.

Potts (2015: 163) analyzed “queer discourses produced by a group of very popular professional video game players on social media.” As for the data, she utilized YouTube videos, the comments on these videos and an interview. Potts (ibid.: 163) found that “the production of

nonheteronormative discourses by prominent gamers online has contributed to the formation of a self-policing fan community that advocates acceptance and rejects bigotry.” Bou-Franch and Blitvich (2014) examine “conflict management in massive polylogues” in YouTube and use the comments of a YouTube video as data. Bhatia (2018) examines the digital beauty industry, specifically the genre of beauty how-to-tutorials. She analyzes YouTube videos posted by a popular content creator. Bhatia (ibid.: 106) finds that “in the pursuit of establishing themselves as both engaged and interactive participants of the YouTube community but also expert and savvy users of YouTube keen on building their subscriber base, vloggers discursively exploit the

”I’m just letting everyone know that I’m an idiot”: Apology Strategies in YouTubers’ Apology Videos