‘For (…) a leader like this Prime Minister to talk about morals and morality is a disgrace’: offensive action, uptake and moral implications in the context of parliamentary debates

Abstract

This contribution examines the negotiation of offensive action, its uptake and moral implications in the context of parliamentary debate and user comments on social media, by drawing data from the British Parliament. Being institutional discourse, public discourse and media discourse, communicative action in parliament is constrained within a society's code of conduct, describing what may count as offensive action and which institutional sanctions an offender would need to expect. Adopting a discourse-pragmatic approach, debates on offence are distinguished with respect to metadebates in parliament, and metadebates following up on the offensive action in users' comments in social media. The study shows that parliamentary debate is imbued with complex moral issues and that participants draw on a variety of strategies to assign offence the status of an object of discourse in order to initiate metadebates on its (in-)appropriateness, such as the strategic use of challenges, presuppositions, and of explicit and implicit references to morality. Due to the pluralism of communicative action and the multilayeredness of participant roles and interactional frames, participants voice and take offence as representatives of political groups and as individuals, and in spite of the seeming regulatedness of parliamentary interactions engage in metadebates about what they consider as (in-)appropriate and morally right or wrong.