RU
Philology. Theory & Practice
  • Original research article
  • June 25, 2025
  • Open access

Communicative and pragmatic aspect of public apologies in corporate communication

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Abstract

Public apologies are one of the expressive examples of how the speech act moves from the private sphere of use to the public one, from interpersonal communication to corporate communication. The aim of the study is to identify the communicative and pragmatic features of public apology of Russian banks. The article presents the results of analyzing 263 apologies of 50 Russian banks on the banki.ru. The inventory and typical sequences of speech moves in the apology typotext are described in public institutional communication. The scientific novelty lies in the fact that the functioning of speech moves typical of speech acts of apology and regret in the context of public communication of Russian banks has been studied for the first time. As a result, for the first time, we have established the pragmatic originality of the speech patterns characteristic of public apologies of banks in Russia. In public answers of banks' representatives, the most frequent speech moves include reviewing the incident, expressing regret and/or apology, gratitude and hope for further cooperation. Less typical is the use of directives, promise and readiness to change, values of the bank and compensation. It was found that banks avoid talking about the damage and responsibility, so they apologize in the absence of a violation on the part of the bank, use lexical means to blur the damage, and report about damage indirectly.

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Author information

Tatyana Leonidovna Kopus

PhD

Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation, Moscow

About this article

Publication history

  • Received: May 12, 2025.
  • Published: June 25, 2025.

Keywords

  • публичные извинения
  • корпоративная коммуникация
  • корпоративные извинения банков
  • речевой акт извинения
  • прагматика
  • public apologies
  • corporate communication
  • corporate apologies from banks
  • speech act of apology
  • pragmatics

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Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)