Illocutionary modality of politeness in the pragmatics of speech acts: apology as a form of self corrective verbal behavior

the article examines the issues of the pragmalinguistic nature of the speech act of apology in English discourse, revealing its complex illocutionary structure and communicative orientation. The specific features of expressing the modality of politeness in English language verbal behavior are highlighted; lexical grammatical and discursive means ensuring the reparative and etiquette function of the apology act are analyzed. Genre, institutional and sociolinguistic variations of apology formulas are demonstrated, including formal, informal and mediatized contexts, as well as gender differences in their use. The research methodology is based on corpus analysis, pragmalinguistic, semantic functional and discourse approaches, which allows for the systematization of strategies for mitigating illocutionary threat and restoring communicative balance. The results contribute to the expansion of theoretical concepts of the modality of politeness and to the deeper analysis of speech etiquette in English philology.

illocutionary modality, politeness, pragmalinguistics, speech act of apology, English discourse, discourse analysis, communicative competence, sociolinguistics