Capturing injunctive norm in pragmatics: Meta-reflective evaluations and the moral order

Publication date: Available online 22 February 2020Source: LinguaAuthor(s): Dániel Z. KádárAbstractThis paper contributes to the development of pragmatic research into norms by revisiting the concept of ‘norm’ beyond how it has been conventionally interpreted in the field, and by also proposing a metapragmatic approach which can be adopted to provide evidence of the operation of norm over and above what has previously been discussed. Regarding the first of these objectives, while pragmatics has studied descriptive norms in detail by focusing on what is usually done or avoided in a particular context, little attention has been paid to injunctive norms that embody what is approved/disapproved of in a particular situation. This paper fills this knowledge gap by examining the relationship between the valenced evaluations of perceived inappropriate behaviour and the injunctive norms behind these evaluations. As to its second – methodological – goal, this paper proposes an approach which explores critical incidents that are pragmatically ambiguous and non-routine, and in which descriptive norms are, consequently, much less important than their injunctive counterparts. The approach being proposed observes the ways in which an injunctive norm is ‘talked into being’ by a cluster of metapragmatic reflections. The examination of injunctive norms is not only relevant to pragmatics, but also to the recent body of research dedicated to morality in language use, because it re...
Source: Lingua - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research