“Oops, I didn't mean to be so flippant”. A corpus pragmatic analysis of apologies in blog data

•Apologies in blogs and the adaptability of this speech act to the online medium.•Study based on the Birmingham Blog Corpus http://www.webcorp.org.uk/blogs.•Going beyond routinised forms to discover new ways of apologising online.•Oops as an Illocutionary Force Indicating Device with an apology function in blogs.•Combining the analysis of shared and unique collocates to uncover new IFIDs.

This article studies the form oops and its function as an Illocutionary Force Indicating Device (IFID) signalling apologies in a corpus of blog posts and reader comments. The focus is on the adaptability of speech acts to online media and the implications for the formal choice of linguistic expressions beyond the prototypical examples of routinised apology IFIDs. Thus, this study takes a closer look at the pragmatic functions of oops in the Birmingham Blog Corpus, a diachronically-structured collection covering the period 2000-2010, to gain new insights into its use and distribution.