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

This 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. The current study 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 reveals that even those contexts that are pragmatically ambiguous are governed by a moral order of things. It is also relevant to previous research on face and offence-taking because perceived inappropriateness in sensitive settings can trigger strong feelings. As a case study, the paper investigates a dataset of 120 critical incidents of workplace dismissal which was obtained from online sources.