PhD TV · Utopia: The TV guide to thesis defenses

Beatrix QuillUtopia UniversityFaculty of Letters

Humanities and the artsLanguages and literature

Four hundred public apologies from universities, railways and governments are read as a genre with its own syntax. The thesis finds that the passive voice predicts whether anything changes afterwards, that apologies grow longer as they grow emptier, and that the shortest ones in the corpus were followed by the largest reforms.

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