Customer service exchanges on social media have recently been described as taking place in “the Age of Sorry” (Segal 2018). In order to explore this claim further, this article studies the form sorry in the 6.4-million-word Airlines Twitter Corpus which includes tweets that customers directed at thirteen British and Irish airlines over a period of four months as well as the airlines’ replies. It discusses the airlines’ use of sorry in tweets which attempt to save face and maintain their reputation as reliable air travel providers. At the same time, the analysis explores the use of this form by customers, with a view to uncovering its metapragmatic potential and its perception as a communicative strategy for the legitimation of corporate activity. Embedded in the theoretical framework of discourse pragmatics, this study uses a corpus linguistic methodology to gain further insights into the form sorry and its communicative functions in the discursive construction of customer service online. The results show that airlines use sorry to a considerable extent to convey empathy rather than to apologise. Customers, on the other hand, tend to comment on airlines’ use of the word and their reactions to airlines’ tweets grant insights into the effectiveness of sorry as a communicative strategy. This study therefore contributes to an increased understanding of online service interactions and to enhancing customer communication on social media.

社交媒体上的客户服务交流最近被描述为发生在“对不起的时代”（Segal，2018年）中。为了进一步探讨这一说法，本文研究了640万字的航空公司Twitter语料库中的对不起表格，其中包括客户在四个月内针对13家英国和爱尔兰航空公司的推文以及航空公司的回复。它讨论了航空公司对抱歉的使用在推文中试图挽回面子并保持其作为可靠航空旅行提供商的声誉。同时，分析探索了客户使用此表格的方式，以期发现其元实用性潜力以及将其视为公司活动合法化的一种交流策略。嵌入语篇语用学的理论框架中，本研究使用语料库语言学方法对在线客户服务的话语构建中的对不起形式及其传达功能获得进一步的了解。结果显示，航空公司对不起在很大程度上传达同情而不是道歉。另一方面，客户倾向于评论航空公司对该词的使用，以及他们对航空公司推文的反应使人们对遗憾作为沟通策略的有效性有深刻的见解。因此，这项研究有助于增进对在线服务交互的理解，并增强社交媒体上的客户交流。