Avoiding Sincere Apologies among Iranian Politicians and Its Cultural Justification: A Pragmatic Study

Political apologies, are among special type of apologies, which the politicians state to protect their own faces and to fulfill the communal need. But apologizing has its own strategies. Kempf (2009) introduces some verbal strategies such as Using lexical and syntactical means, omitting or blurring the gent, denying responsibility, selecting a specific victim, undermining the existence of the victim, and apology for a component of the offense (and not for the entire occurrence), etc. by the use of which the politicians avoid sincere apologies. Through Investigation of 100 utterances of apologies by politicians as broadcasted in the national and local media, the present article claims that these apologies are insincere. The results indicate that these insincerities have their roots in the Iranian cultural Memes of collectivism, overstating and truth avoiding.