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Article published In:
Pragmatics and Society
Vol. 14:5 (2023) ► pp.732–752

“A tour guide losing her cool”

Emotional stance and social positioning in doing moral work

| Zhejiang International Studies University
ORCID logo | Nanjing Xiaozhuang University
This article seeks to explore the mechanisms of holding others accountable for a perceived deviation from moral order through public complaints on Chinese social media as well as the influences of emotional stance and social positioning when people perceive a breach of the moral order and try to restore it. Our data consists of a transcribed complaint narrative (CN) widely deemed morally transgressive, and a corpus of web-based news comments (WNC), displaying public counter-offensive actions to the CN. A contextualized discourse analysis reveals that abundant context-spanning impoliteness formulae in WNC are strategies for constructing collective identities and magnifying the condemnation of immorality. In the process of moral order appeal, using various emotive impoliteness formulae appear to be a situated norm.
Keywords: complaint, moral order, situated norm, emotional stance, collective identity, positioning, impoliteness formulae
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Making complaints and doing moral work
  • 3.The incident revisited
  • 4.Data analysis
    • 4.1The moral order and social norm in formulaic expressions
      • 4.1.1“Morality” and “conscience”: Two sides of one story
      • 4.1.2Context-spanning impoliteness formulae
      • 4.1.3Context-tied formulae
    • 4.2Emotional stance in social positioning on social media
      • 4.2.1Interjections
      • 4.2.2Emotional formulae
  • 5.The interplay of social positioning and emotional stance in negotiation of moral order
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 28 April 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.20003.xie
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