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Article published In:
Pragmatics and Society
Vol. 13:1 (2022) ► pp.1–21

Sociality and moral conflicts

Migrant stories of relational vulnerability

ORCID logo | The Open University
ORCID logo | Dalian University of Foreign Languages | Hungarian Research Center for Linguistics

This paper explores how understandings of sociality influence the way members of two different social groups discursively animate moral conflicts. It examines how moral conflicts are constructed in life-story interviews by Chinese and Latin American migrants as they reflect on patterns of sociation with co-ethnics in London. These interviews typify the kind of conflicts that emerged across a 102 interview database where a discrepancy between expectations of how contextually-situated interpersonal relations are established and how they should unfold are. The transnational setting that we focus on inevitably draws our attention to the importance of the larger relational context where interpersonal relations among migrant co-ethnics are entrenched. In this context, rights and obligations towards one another are often reconfigured to adapt to the circumstances of the new environment. This paper turns the pragmatic lens on transcultural relations.

Keywords: sociality, sociability, moral oughts, social oughts, Chinese, Latin American, (im)politeness
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Sociality and politeness
    • 1.2Case study
  • 2.Data and methodology
  • 3.Analysis
    • 3.1On the importance of pengyou ‘friend’ in Chinese
    • 3.2On taking undue advantage
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 21 March 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.19021.mar
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