Morality and moralization Linguistic approaches to a discourse-relevant phenomenon

This article examines moralising language acts, by which we mean discourse-strategic procedures in which the description of issues and necessary actions is closely linked to moral terms. Words which refer to moral values (such as "freedom", "security" or "credibility") are used to assert a demand which is made to appear inevitable and requiring no further justification. Accordingly, the focus of our argument is the pragmalinguistically striking phenomenon of a specific rhetorical practice involving ultimate justification or inevita-bility, which we view and describe as a pragmeme. For this purpose, we first outline how practices of moralisation are located in linguistic pragmatics, then we consider linguistic forms of moralising and how they are embedded in contextual and especially in pragma-syntactic structures, in order to formulate hypo-theses on their contextual functions. Finally, leading on from this, we use corpus examples to derive structural patterns of moralising, which we condense in the term "pragmeme" and which we operationalise using qualitative and quantitative analyses.