36.1972, Reviews: Morality in Discourse: Diegoli (2025)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-36-1972. Thu Jun 26 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.1972, Reviews: Morality in Discourse: Diegoli (2025)

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Date: 26-Jun-2025
From: Eugenia Diegoli [eugenia.diegoli2 at unibo.it]
Subject: Sociolinguistics; Morality in Discourse: Diegoli (2025)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/36-136

Title: Morality in Discourse
Series Title: Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics
Publication Year: 2024

Publisher: Oxford University Press
           http://www.oup.com/us
Book URL:
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/morality-in-discourse-9780197618066?utm_source=linguistlist&utm_medium=listserv&utm_campaign=linguistics

Editor(s): Michael Haugh, Rosina Márquez-Reiter

Reviewer: Eugenia Diegoli

SUMMARY
Morality is an increasingly popular topic in pragmatic and discourse
studies, yet there is an ongoing gap in our understanding of how
morality is enacted in everyday communicative practice. “Morality in
Discourse” addresses this gap.
This edited collection consists of one introductory chapter, followed
by 12 chapters divided thematically into four parts: moralising in
interaction; morality and narrative; the politics of morality; and
digitally mediated morality. The chapters investigate morality across
various settings and through the lens of different theoretical
frameworks but all share a discursive approach, analysing morality as
something that is co-constructed in everyday interaction. The
methodological assumption underpinning all chapters is that morality
can be accessed through the careful analysis of linguistic data.
The main aims are twofold: to offer the first compilation of
discursive research on morality and to foster a dialogue on morality
across disciplines. The book fully achieves both goals. Below is a
summary of each chapter.
The introductory chapter surveys some influential approaches to
morality to date and explains that morality is socially
(co-)constructed in (inter)action but relates to factors that go
beyond the interaction itself. It highlights how morality is closely
tied to expressions of evaluation, affect, stance, modality,
reciprocity, im/politeness and accountability, among others. The
chapter concludes by stressing the need for theoretical and
methodological interdisciplinary tools to go beyond the single
linguistic interaction in the study of morality.
Chapter 2 “The Negotiation of Moral Improprieties in the Everyday
Interactions of Young Adult Romantic Partners” by Neill Korobov
studies morality within everyday conversations between romantic
partners in two different situations: speed dates and spontaneous
interaction. It identifies three types of moral improprieties that
routinely emerge in these contexts: (1) negative category attributions
of nonpresent others (i.e. gossip), (2) insults/criticisms, and (3)
accusations of infidelity. The study focuses on what is morally
relevant for the participants and how they formulate, manage and
mitigate moral improprieties; it finds that the improprieties
ultimately function to create affiliation and intimacy – by showing
that they can handle conflict, the couples (re)build affiliation. In
initial romantic encounters especially, moral improprieties, being
highly marked, can help participants “stand out”. Between members of
established romantic couples, playful aggressiveness indexes intimacy
and connection. Morality is indeed a resource interactants exploit for
relational purposes.
In Chapter 3 “The Morality of Contested Descriptions in Everyday and
Institutional Settings” by Jessica S. Robles we learn that
descriptions do much more than represent reality: it is nearly
impossible to describe something or someone without appealing to moral
principles the speaker/writer lives by – especially when that
something is already imbued with morality, such as drug (ab)use, being
rejected from a romantic partner and racism. Descriptions, then, “do”
things by foregrounding certain aspects of reality, backgrounding
others and conveying evaluation. The chapter focuses on situations
where descriptions are contested in some way, which makes
participants’ moral stances more apparent (as elsewhere in the book,
morality is made explicit in moments of deviance).
The data ranges from face-to-face to mediated and written contexts and
spans different levels of formality, including YouTube comment
sections, institutional settings and conversations between friends.
Methodologically, conversational analytical tools and terminologies
are adopted, and this is one of the few chapters that extends the
analysis to non-verbal bodily movements (e.g. gaze, mobilised head
direction).
Chapter 4 “Negotiating Moral Responsibility for Remedying Troubles” by
Bandar Alshammari and Michael Haugh explores the moral responsibility
involved in responding to “trouble-complaints”, that is, trouble
reports that are hearable as complaints. Two types of moral
responsibility are at stake: moral responsibility as culpability (who
is culpable for the troubles?) and remediability (who is responsible
for remedying them?). The study investigates, through the lens of
ethnomethodological conversation analysis, the negotiation of moral
responsibilities in responses to trouble-complaints as observed in
telephone-mediated and copresent institutional encounters between
Saudi and Australian participants. The findings show that participants
avoid imputations of blame, but hold the recipient of the
trouble-complaint morally responsible for remedying the trouble.
The number of analysed instances (20) is too low to draw any firm
conclusion, but some specific patterns seem to emerge: (1)
trouble-complaints regularly occasion an offer of remedy, which is an
implicit acceptance of moral responsibility; (2) complaining often
involves blaming the other, which can be done linguistically by using
agentless formats, epistemic disclaimers, forestalling/obviating
imputations of culpability, interrogatives and more specific language
choices like a turn-final ‘so’ or adversatives.
Chapter 5 “Narrating the Indian Hip Hop OG Ethnography,
Epistemic-Deontic Stance, and Chronotopes” by Jaspal Naveel Singh and
Elloit Cardozo examines mentions of the OG (Original Gangsta, the
pioneer who was there at the beginning of the Indian hip-hop scene) in
oral narratives, and specifically the moral positioning stance-taking
practices that the narrator uses to evaluate the OG and the hip hop
culture of the past and the future. The focus is on epistemic (claims
about knowledge) and deontic (claims about morality) stances and their
intertwining.
The data consists of spoken conversations from linguistic ethnographic
fieldwork carried out in the Indian hip-hop scene and lyrics of Indian
rap songs.
The chapter revolves around the idea of chronotopes, that is,
depictions of time and space that construct voices, which in turn
index epistemic/deontic stances. In hip-hop discourse, evoking the OG
from the past positions his figure in the present and constructs moral
stances about the future. This is done linguistically via linguistic
resources that index chronotopic firstness (‘root’, ‘back in the
days’, ‘first’, etc.).
Deontic stances come up also in the second type of narrative analysed
in the chapter: pedagogic narratives reminding hip-hop practitioners
of their moral obligation of passing on their knowledge.
The chapter concludes by exploring the OG in Indian rap songs, where
self-identifications as OGs are more common than in interviews and can
be interpreted as chronotopic alignments with the first generation of
Indian rappers.
Chapter 6 “Moral Stance in Mothers’ Stories in Online Peer
Advice-Giving” by Loukia Lindholm takes a discursive approach to
mothers’ narratives on an American parenting website. Motherhood is a
morally charged concept: it is embedded with ideas on how mothers
should (not) behave and is subject to moral scrutiny. The
advice-giving activity around which parenting websites revolve further
facilitates the production of morally loaded mothers’ narratives.
The data consists of randomly selected discussions in English from the
forum, which include posted messages, replies to the posted messages,
and replies to the replies. The analytical focus is on the discursive
strategies of assigning praise and blame to social actors involved in
the narratives.
The author identifies three types of moral stances, located on a
continuum: constant, dynamic and fluid. In constant moral narratives,
the moral stance remains stable throughout the telling; dynamic moral
stances indicate a shift from an initial moral position to a revised
one; fluid moral stances allow for different and sometimes conflicting
moral positions. All three types of moral stances and the narratives
through which they are enacted assign blame and praiseworthiness to
social actors. One may assign blame to others for moral transgressions
while depicting oneself as a praiseworthy individual who observes the
normative rules around motherhood (the “looking good” principle).
Elsewhere, the narrator may decide to mitigate the blameworthiness of
others’ actions/behaviour. This can be done discursively by framing
the event in specific ways and emphasising a lack of power/control on
the part of the social actor.  Finally, one may negotiate the
attribution of self-blame and engage in negative self-evaluation.
Emotional words and strategies signalling morally salient texts
include: direct and inner speech, repeated punctuation, evaluative
commentary and modal markers.
The promotion of moral values by mothers in interviews about domestic
abuse is the focus of Chapter 7 “Mothering Morality in the Everyday
Violence of Domestic Abuse” by Shonna Trinch, which looks at both the
perspective of the women (how do they construct their motherhood? how
do they manage to mother in abusive contexts?) and of the state
representatives (how do they construct women as mothers?).
The data comes from five interviews carried out in the United States
where women victims of domestic abuse seek help. Methodologically, the
study draws mainly from Conversation Analysis and Membership
Categorisation Analysis (MCA), bringing to light the ways in which
people project an image of themselves that makes them recognisable as
specific types of members.
The study shows that the interview setting construes a moral order
with preferred sequences of adjacency pairs: women emerge as moral
characters both through what they narrate (the abusive relationship)
and through how they navigate the context in which the narration takes
place (the interview). They manage the demands of being victims in one
place/time, while at the same time being caregivers in another
place/time. The juxtaposition of two “storyworlds” is reminiscent of
the idea of chronotope in Chapter 5.
The analysis focuses on interactional problems where the moral order
preferred in the interview setting is not followed. The interviewer
favours concise narratives of physical violence and may not pick up on
or engage with parallel narratives of control and emotional abuse.
Even if the question-and-answer adjacency pair is apparently followed,
the two participants in the interaction do not seem to be cooperating
– they are following different sequential and moral rules. Linguistic
cues that may signal interactional problems range from morphosyntactic
choices (e.g. first person pronouns) to discursive strategies (e.g.
expressing concern for one’s child).
The author concludes by suggesting that we should change approach and
prioritise the women’s moral order over the one of the state
representatives.
Chapter 8 “Morality at the Abyss” by Daniel N. Silva investigates the
morality discursively constructed by the (mainly black) population of
Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. The favelas are a context over which a
military institution has armed control and the police’s frequent
aggressions reflect a legitimised model of repressing policing against
minorities and residents of poor neighbourhoods. These practices of
silencing and oppression are what make the favelas the “abyss” the
title refers to: a place of incommunicability.
The spoken data comes from two settings: a group discussion about a
documentary organised by a theatre teacher and a speech made by an
activist of the collective Papo Reto.
In the first case study, participants spontaneously bring up episodes
where they have been victims of aggression by the police and contest
the stigmatisation of blackness and the morally loaded stereotype of
the favela as a problem.
This first case study shows that morality is intrinsically linked to
authority because people in power can impose a certain moral order
over other, equally possible, moral orders (see also the previous
chapter). Authority and the moral order it enforces are not abstract
constructs but are enacted and challenged in the data through various
linguistic strategies, including reported speech.
The second case study revolves around the Papo Reto collective, which
makes communicative actions its main tool for conflict resolution (the
name ‘Papo Reto’ itself indexes a direct and honest form of talk – and
a type of moral person). The data comes from a speech made by one of
the activists, where they depict an image of the state and its
representatives as militarised, corrupted, disordered and ultimately
dangerous, as opposed to favela activists and citizens as organised
and predictable because they behave according to a local ethic people
in power do not have. Practices of silencing come up again, directly
in opposition to the collective open and direct way of communicating.
The author concludes by arguing that we can understand moral systems
only if we look at the social context in which they are produced, and
that everyday moral systems do not necessarily conform to the dominant
moral order. Linguistically, this difference is typically indexed by
metapragmatic resources.
The focus of Chapter 9 “Rituals of Morality Questions of Regret and
Sorrow in News Interviews” by Michal Hamo and Zohar Kamp is on
“objectified” standards for moral judgments, i.e. moral orders framed
as objective and taken/given for granted, in news interviews in
Hebrew. The authors investigate questions of regret and sorrow
(identified through the modal markers mitkharet ‘regret’ in ‘do you
regret’ and mictaer ‘sorry’ in ‘are you sorry’) as strategies
journalists use to display objectified moral judgments.
Regret and sorrow are related to morality because they are moral
emotions and as such follow acquired scripts prescribing when we
should feel what. This is all part of public rituals of morality that
set up models for moral behaviour. The study of speech acts, as
signalled by specific lexical items, can shed light on these otherwise
implicit rules and assumptions about what we as social and moral
personas should feel in any given situation.
The data consists of 627 instances of moral questioning in various
Israeli electronic news media platforms identified through the Hebrew
semi-equivalent of ‘regret’ and ‘sorry’.
The authors found that ‘regret’ and ‘sorry’ are used in three
prototypical patterns: to shame the recipient; to demand
accountability and elicit an apology; to elicit emotion (remorse,
sorrow, sadness) and (negative) evaluation. All three patterns have
prototypical manifestations. We may note that the authors can tell
whether a certain pattern is typical or not because they look at a lot
of data; in other words, they adopt a qualitative approach on a larger
scale.
The analysis of questions about what one feels sorry/regret for shows
how interviewers construct public rituals of morality that frame
certain behaviours as wrong while positively evaluating others. By
focusing on speech acts and moral emotions, the chapter provides a
unique pragmatic and cognitive angle to the study of morality in a
non-English context.
Chapter 10 “The Discursive Construction of Morality in Political Blame
Games” by Sten Hansson investigates blame games (struggles over
blameworthiness) in British public discourses about “no deal” Brexit
in 2020. Blame games are important loci of moral negotiation because
blaming those who do not conform to the moral standards of a given
society is a central discursive practice in the formation/maintenance
of the moral order.
Specifically, in the data critics attribute blame to Prime Minister
Boris Johnson for: (a) his character traits; (b) whether he acts in
line with his rights and obligations; and (c) the consequences of his
actions.
This is done linguistically by reporting Johnson’s words and showing
them to be false, comparing the moral norms a government is supposed
to follow with those it follows in actual practice and listing
possible negative outcomes of Johnson’s political choices.
The second half of the chapter examines how Johnson tries to avoid or
mitigate blame: he may counterattack and blame the blame maker,
justify his acts and behaviour, or appeal to positive outcomes of his
actions.
The blaming practices tend to follow a particular sequence where a
claim that someone should (not) be blamed is accompanied by data or
evidence supporting it and a warrant or conclusion connecting the
claim to the data. Linguistically, blaming avoidance practices often
include: evaluative lexis, the strategic backgrounding/foregrounding
of certain actors and/or their actions, and the denial or minimisation
of certain acts and/or one’s accountability or intentionality.
Scholars can take several approaches to the study of blaming
practices: they may move from the micro-level of linguistic analysis
to the meso-level of situational variables, to the broader historical,
social and political context; they could focus on discursive practices
of manipulation, or logical fallacies.
The chapter closes with a reflection on the potentially damaging
effects of a blame-dominated political representation and a
self-reflection on how the stances of the author affect their views on
blame – an important issue in critical discourse analysis more
broadly.
Chapter 11 “Morality, Metapragmatics, and Race Discussions About
Whitesplain on Social Media” by Judith Bridges and Camilla Vásquez
analyses the neologism whitesplain (white + explain) in metapragmatic
commentary to index moral discourses around race and racism across
three different online platforms (Reddit, Twitter, Tumblr) in the US.
The authors find noticeable differences across the three platforms, in
line with the well-established idea in Computer-Mediated Discourse
Analysis (e.g. Herring, 2004) that the web is far from being a
homogeneous context.
Theoretically, the study draws from citizen sociolinguistics (which is
expanded into citizen pragmatics) as a means to explore lay people’s
insights on language practices and the moral judgements they index.
Metalinguistic comments from Reddit call whitesplain into question,
providing a moral negative evaluation of the people using it and
dismissing the progressive values it invokes. Twitter users express
more varied, and sometimes opposite, positions. The authors focus on a
piece of interaction where the mismatch between what is said, what is
meant and what is inferred by the recipient is fairly explicit. The
discrepancy between intended meaning/self-perception and inferred
meaning/other people’s perception is apparent also in the interactions
from Tumblr, a progressive forum where overall the neologism was
enthusiastically accepted.
These trends are compared with those observed in a broader study,
which is a great way of putting them in perspective and distinguishing
trends that may be generalisable to other environments from those that
are more context-specific.
The study convincingly shows that negotiating words’ meanings often
entails negotiating social issues and that language is a window into
the moral order.
Chapter 12 “Whose Morality Is Out of Order?” by Chaoqun Xie explores
online interactions between a teacher and his students in China. In
these interactions, the teacher’s respectability is challenged and his
behaviour is construed as morally deviant. Students confront him,
first implicitly and then directly, undermining his viewpoint on
things and openly accusing him (the teacher had previously shared part
of a student’s paper without permission and expressed negatively
evaluated views on ancient China). By confronting the teacher,
however, the students also deviate from moral norms that associate
older age and the role of teacher with respectability.
The chapter adopts an important cultural angle, showing how
culture-specific ideologies affect moral judgments in terms of
respectability, and closes with a discussion of the possible social
and cultural explanations of these moments of deviance and the role
the online environment plays in unfolding these (im)moral behaviours.
In line with other chapters, the study shows that morality, which is
usually taken for granted, becomes more apparent in moments of
deviance, and stresses the interactional and social nature of moral
judgements, which always require the (real or imagined) presence of a
moral other.
Chapter 13 “Moralizing (Un)civil Behavior” by Rosina Márquez Reiter
and Patricia Bou-Franch investigates Uruguayan citizens’ moralising
reactions to the proposal to ban smoking cigarettes (but not cannabis,
which is legal in Uruguay) around children and vulnerable people. The
data consists of a corpus of online comments from the Facebook page of
a national newspaper. Theoretically, the study is grounded in
sociopragmatics.
Through a bottom-up thematic analysis of all the textual comments that
make up the corpus, the authors uncover four overlapping thematic
categories around which users construe moralising discourses: (1)
relational violence (i.e. noncriminal behaviour that nonetheless
violates social norms); (2) citizen insecurity; (3) politics and
(lack) of regulation; and (4) personal attacks.
The data analysis focuses on interpellations to the government and/or
other users, i.e. reflective communicative practices used to
rationalise and evaluate (un)civil and (im)moral behaviour in public
spaces, including the public space of online environments like
Facebook. Linguistically, interpellations can take the form of direct
or indirect questions, possibly accompanied by intensifiers, general
addressivity devices (e.g. vocatives), markers of impoliteness (e.g.
insults, implicated impoliteness), complaints, exhortative clauses and
imperatives. Functionally, they often have a (dis)affiliative
function.
The analysis pays focused attention to specific features of the online
environment, which is operationalised as a communicative space with
its norms and rules (see also Chapter 11); by doing so, the authors
demonstrate that, if moral concerns are ubiquitous across registers
and language varieties, their linguistic manifestations are
context-specific, and include, for example, punctuation and graphic
choices. Similarly, the careful examination of interpolations and
their co-text shows that even within the same public space there is a
great degree of individual variability in judgments of
in/appropriateness and im/morality.
EVALUATION
This is a timely and original piece of work that encompasses
wide-ranging literatures and undertakes the analyses with great care,
without ever overstating or over-interpreting the data (something we
may be tempted to do when dealing with a concept as slippery as
morality). It meets its own aims with success across a great variety
of settings and perspectives while preserving an overall coherence in
the ways it talks about morality that makes it easy to read. The
organisation of the chapters is logical and sensible.
However, as the editors duly note in the introduction, the multimodal
aspects of communication are not properly addressed. This is even more
surprising if we consider that many chapters draw from multimodal
types of data (e.g. Chapters 2, 5, 7, 8 and 9). Moreover, with some
notable exceptions (e.g. Chapter 12), the focus is generally on
Western contexts, and hence the volume tends to reflect Western
notions of morality. There is also no comparative study contrasting
discursive manifestations of morality across linguacultures, which
would have been an interesting addition to the collection (see e.g.
Kádár, 2017). Finally, the methods are almost exclusively qualitative.
This of course makes sense given that the object of inquiry is a
highly context-specific phenomenon; yet some basic form of statistical
analysis would have allowed for more robust findings, providing a more
comprehensive account of morality that abstracts from the single
interaction (see e.g. Culpeper & Tantucci, 2021; Hansson et al.,
2024). Chapter 9 is one of the few chapters that, even in the absence
of inferential statistical analyses, adopts a more rigorous approach
to the question of morality across a considerable number of texts,
which can also account for the incremental and cumulative dimension of
discourse. As Fairclough notes, “[a] single text on its own is quite
insignificant: the effects of media power are cumulative, working
through the repetition of particular ways of handling causality and
agency, particular ways of positioning the reader, and so forth”
(1989, p. 45). It seems to me that the main weakness of this volume is
the lack of attention paid to this cumulative aspect of moral
discourse.
It is beyond the scope of any one book to cover all potentially
relevant aspects of morality in discourse, and despite the above
limitations, the book’s contributions are manifold. It will certainly
foster the study of morality across disciplines and is ideal for
readers with an interest in the interaction of language and society,
and anyone curious about the unspoken rules we live by.
REFERENCES
Culpeper, J., & Tantucci, V. (2021). The Principle of (Im)politeness
Reciprocity. Journal of Pragmatics, 175, 146–164.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2021.01.008
Fairclough, N. (1989). Language and power. Longman.
Hansson, S., Fuoli, M., & Page, R. (2024). Strategies of blaming on
social media: An experimental study of linguistic framing and
retweetability. Communication Research, 51(5), 467–495.
https://doi.org/10.1177/00936502231211363
Herring, S. C. (2004). Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis: An
Approach to Researching Online Behavior. In S. Barab, R. Kling, & J.
H. Gray (Eds.), Designing for Virtual Communities in the Service of
Learning (1st ed., pp. 338–376). Cambridge University Press.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511805080.016
Kádár, D. Z. (2017). Politeness, impoliteness and ritual: Maintaining
the moral order in interpersonal interaction.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Eugenia Diegoli is Assistant Professor at Ca’ Foscari University of
Venice. Her overlapping research interests include Japanese language
and linguistics, corpus linguistics, discourse analysis and
pragmatics. Her first monograph “Online apologies in Japanese” was
published by Brill in 2025.



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