“We apologise for any inconvenience”: A local grammar of apology in corporate apology letters

Corporate apologies serve as strategic responses to organisational crises, balancing expressions of regret with reputational, legal, and stakeholder management concerns. This study analyses 389 apology letters issued by Fortune 500 companies between 2014 and 2023, with a focus on the recurrent lexico-grammatical patterning of apology expressions. Through a local grammar approach to mapping recurring form–meaning regularities in the corpus, 25 patterns were identified and grouped into six sets, revealing a preference for specification-rich, structurally explicit, and emotionally moderated apology constructions. The findings show that corporate apologies are typically elaborated through contextual specification, while intensification and direct reference to the offended remain comparatively limited. Implicit realisations, such as acknowledgements of harm or responsibility, were identified, although less frequent, through a model-assisted prompting procedure using ChatGPT. To situate the linguistic findings, the study also considers the crisis contexts in which the letters were produced, including service failures, product issues, reputational controversies, and regulatory or community-facing incidents. The study contributes to ESP and business discourse research by offering a systematic account of how apology is conventionally realised in corporate letters and by providing a descriptive framework that can support genre awareness in professional communication pedagogy.