“This apology doesn’t seem sincere at all”: a cross-cultural analysis of online (meta)discourses around Will Smith’s apology

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This study looks at Will Smith’s apology for slapping Chris Rock and how it has been metadiscursively constructed in (Tokyo-standard) Japanese and (standard American) English online communication. More specifically, it compares users’ first-order conceptualisations about what makes an (in/effective) apology and how Will Smith’s apology and his supposed violation of moral norms are interpreted by the two audiences.First, the apology strategies employed in the apology video (as reported on YouTube by the ABC7 channel) were coded. Using a Python script, I then downloaded two sets of comments: the comments (in English) to the YouTube video aforementioned and the comments (in Japanese) of a second YouTube video, which is addressed to a Japanese audience and reports, translates and briefly discusses the apology. Finally, I uploaded each data set (collectively amounting to 310,998 tokens) onto AntConc and, using the meta-illocutionary expressions apolog* for English and shazai ‘apology’/ayama* ‘apologise’ for Japanese as nodes, I analysed their collocates and the extended concordance lines they occur in. The questions addressed are: (1) What functions do MIEs serve in the comments? (2) How do the two communities metadiscursively evaluate the apology? (3) What are the moral orders such metadiscourses appeal to?The results indicate that the MIEs are used in the comments with two main functions: to problematise the apology and to endorse it. However, important differences were also observed. The close reading of concordances suggests that negative evaluations of Will Smith and his apology are more prominent in English than in Japanese. A closer look at the collocates also revealed that apolog* typically co-occurs with sincere, usually to challenge the sincerity of the act. Conversely, shazai/ayama* is commonly associated with (o-)tagai (ni) ‘reciprocal(ly)’ to suggest that a reciprocal apology from Chris Rock would be appropriate. Culture-specific moral orders seem to play a role in the negotiation of what is (in)appropriate/(im)polite: while in the English-speaking community sincerity is the single most important factor when evaluating the apology, Japanese speakers prioritise reciprocity. Importantly, however, considerable intra-cultural variation amongst members of each group was also observed.The analysis opens a window on first-order conceptualisations of apologies, revealing an extended negotiation over the pragmatic meanings of MIEs and what an apology is (or should be). Such negotiation is primarily motivated by cultural perceptions of (im)politeness. The findings have also methodological implications for the ways in which corpus and pragmatic approaches can be merged.