Despite the wealth of literature generated over the past two decades on the apology as a speech act, the political apology has been relatively neglected as a research topic. This article aims to examine the pragmatics of such apologies as a generic type of discourse by identifying their salient characteristics: they are in the public domain and highly mediated; they are generated by (and generate) conflict and controversy; on the basis of media and viewer evaluations/judgements, they need to contain both an illocutionary force indicating device ( Ifid) and an explicit expression of the acceptance of responsibility/blame for the ‘offence’ in order to be clearly perceived as valid apologies; and they rarely, if ever, involve an expression of absolution. Drawing primarily on data concerning recent political events in the UK (especially the Iraq War), the article attempts to set out and illustrate the different types of political apology. The resulting analysis is related both to previous and current apology research and to recent developments in politeness theory.

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Health professionals associated with stroke care tend to emphasize the optimistic possibilities for recovery from stroke and downplay its disabling nature. Therefore, unlike in cancer care, the 'bad news' interview is not a recognized part of stroke care. Nevertheless, at some stages in the trajectory of the illness the issue of disability may have to be discussed and this paper concerns one such occasion. The data are taken from a corpus of video-recorded naturally occurring interactions between stroke patients and health professionals. In the case studied here, an occupational therapist discusses with a patient the arrangements for her care after discharge from hospital. It emerges over the course of the interaction that the patient has to face some unpleasant realities about her future daily life. By conducting a microanalysis of this interaction, using appropriate concepts from conversation analysis and politeness theory, we show how the patient and therapist collaboratively manage the emergent 'bad news' situation and, over the course of the interaction, arrive at the realization that 'things are not the same'.