Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict - Volume 7, Issue 1, 2019

In this position paper, we provide an overview of what we regard as the most important features of the relationship between the moral order and morality in the context of language conflict and aggression. While in previous pragmatic research the concepts of morality and moral order have been rarely brought together, we illustrate that they are inseparable, in particular in the context of conflict and aggression. We propose an analytic model – with replicability in mind – which captures the dynamic relationship between these phenomena: the model is centred on the idea that perceived (a) violations of the moral order, (b) breaches of moral norms, principles and ideologies, (c) conflict and (d) aggression constitute a cluster. The explanatory power of this dynamics resides in the fact that it can account for a variety of seemingly unrelated scenarios, such as conflicts triggered by the violation of interactional norms vs. rites of moral aggression. Along with detailing the model, we explore the relationship between various methodologies through which one can examine morality and the moral order in the context of language conflict and aggression.

Treating uncivil encounters as breaches of the ritual contract of civil inattention (Goffman 1963), this article connects ritualized interaction between strangers in everyday life and the production and maintenance of moral order more generally. The ongoing enactment of the ritual of civil inattention maintains and characterizes the particular kind of moral order that strangers collectively produce in urban public spaces.

Drawing on select empirical materials – from unsolicited commentary to queue-jumping – gathered under the auspices of the Researching Incivility in Everyday Life (RIEL) Project this article builds upon the ‘everyday incivilities’ approach pioneered by Smith, Phillips and King (2010) to examine moral dimensions of everyday encounters between strangers. Preliminary analysis of the RIEL data indicates that ritual dimensions of interaction between strangers in public space provide interactants with moral affordances, that is, opportunities to align themselves with an idealized moral order through projective moral action.

Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) in the UK attracts much criticism for the adversarial and occasional aggressive language on display. During his successful campaign for the leadership of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn called for a “new kind of politics” (ITV 2015). One feature of his “new” approach, apparent during his early sessions as Leader of the Opposition, was to include questions to Prime Minister David Cameron sourced from members of the public. Although, subsequently, these “public questions” became less frequent, they provided an opportunity to compare their interactional effects with standard “non-public questions”. Arguably, the aim of this salient feature of corbyn’s approach to questioning Cameron was to redress the moral order of PMQs. We test this proposal via two measures of the PM’s responses: reply rate and personalisation. Results showed that Corbyn’s public questions did not enhance Cameron’s reply rate. However, whereas Cameron used significantly more personal attacks than Corbyn in response to non-public questions, the level of such attacks by the PM for public questions was as low as Corbyn’s, with no significant difference between them. In this latter regard, such an approach showed the potential to mitigate the ritualistic and customary verbal aggression of PMQs.

This study is concerned with the increasing use of impolite language that one observes during interactions which take place over the Internet. Drawing on a number of Instagram posts uploaded by various socialites and public figures, this study proposes the notion of a ‘Basic Moral Perspective’ as being a window to an understanding of the nature of some impolite language witnessed on social media. I define ‘Basic Moral Perspective’ as the moral predisposition which interactants possess. As the study shows, in contexts in which there appears to be little relational history between interactants, the ‘Basic Moral Perspective’, amongst other factors, that interactants bring to an interaction can potentially result in impolite language. As will be shown throughout the study, the interactants’ Basic Moral Perspective can provide a clue as to how certain interactions are responded to.

The present paper examines data which has been drawn from the official proceedings of a murder trial in a Greek court, concerning the killing of an adolescent by a police officer (see also Georgalidou 2012, 2016), and addresses the issues of aggressive discursive strategies and the moral order in the trial process. It analyses the explicit and implicit strategies involved in morally discrediting the opponent, a rather frequent defence strategy (Atkinson and Drew 1979; Coulthard and Johnson 2007; Levinson 1979). The paper examines agency deflection towards the victim (Georgalidou 2016), attribution of a socio-spatial identity to the victim and witnesses in an essentialist and reductionist way, and other linguistic and discursive means, the majority of which mobilize moral panic and have implications for the moral order in court. I argue that these aggressive discursive means primarily contribute to the construction of a normative moral order by both adversarial parties.