Chapter 7 discusses liminality from a pragmatic point of view. All interactionally complex rituals take the participants through a threshold to some degree, in that the rights and obligations and related conventions of pragmatic behaviour holding for rituals tend to differ from their counterparts in ‘ordinary’ life. Yet, it is relevant to study fully-fledged liminal rituals with a sense of irreversibility. For example, ritual public apologies are liminal in the fully-fledged sense because the person who realises such ritual apologies passes a threshold with no return. Liminal rituals come together with strong metapragmatic awareness: if the moral order and the related frame of the ritual are violated, both the participants and the observers tend to become alerted and engage in intensive metapragmatic reflections. Chapter 7 will present a case study focusing on the liminal rite of workplace dismissal. Such dismissals represent typical liminal rituals in the very sense of the word: they change the life of the recipient and as such they are very meaningful and irreversible. Because of this, perceived ‘errors’ in the realisation of this ritual tends to trigger particularly intensive metapragmatic reflections and evaluations.

In this chapter, MCP and B&L-E are applied to contemporary politeness phenomena in the Chinese linguaculture. Four areas are selected for analysis: Self-denigration and self-presentation, moral order and morality, conflict resolution, and humorous mockery. These areas – which would seem to be disparate at first sight – are expected to display different politeness principles at work. However, Chen shows that MCP and B&L-E, working together, offer a unified account for all while, at the same time, are capable of revealing differences among them. Humorous mockery, for instance, has been viewed by some as a genre to which politeness does not apply. Chen’s analysis demonstrates that it does, as long as one sees it as a tug-of-war between self-politeness and other-politeness.

In this chapter we explore the moral interactional work that preschool teachers and children accomplish in everyday preschool practices. We explore how teachers solicit accounts in assisting the children to remedy a problematic conduct of excluding a child from play. It will be shown how the children justify their actions to avoid being blamed for faulty conduct. In their response the preschool teachers use hypothetical scenarios to avoid blaming and instead modeling the children’s actions and feelings to experience the hurt feeling by a peer. The study shows how an EMCA approach can provide insights into how childhood educators socialize children into accountability and compassion while maintaining a democratic ethos.

This chapter explores the interconnections between sociopragmatics and morality. Notions of morality and the moral order have been recently incorporated into research on im/politeness and could potentially be of interest to other sub-fields of sociopragmatics. We review extant conceptualizations of the moral order and insights from moral psychology and propose ways of bringing the two traditions together by seeing morality as instantiated in the moral order and the latter as part and parcel of situated practice. Furthermore, we examine and elaborate on what we believe to be the fundamental links between im/politeness and moral evaluations and discuss how insights gained from research on in/civility and morality can be useful to im/politeness scholarship. In our case study, we briefly illustrate the application of moral psychology models to the analysis of im/politeness by drawing from Rai and Fiske’s Relationship Regulation Theory and conclude the chapter offering suggestions for new avenues of research that could be explored not only by im/politeness scholars but also by researchers working in other sub-fields of sociopragmatics.

Chapter 8 explores the second major component of the evaluation warrant: the socio-moral order that underpins judgements and complements the other major component – interpersonal sensitivities. The chapter starts by considering theorising on morality and the moral order, since recent work in politeness theory has focused particularly on this. First, it discusses pragmatic theorising on the moral order before turning to work in moral psychology and describe two well-known moral frameworks in psychology. The chapter then explores possible links between face, values and moral foundations/motives from an interdisciplinary perspective, in an attempt to gain a deeper understanding of their interconnections. Finally, the chapter argues for the inclusion of a social order that is primarily convention-based (i.e. relates more to descriptive norms and ‘social oughts’) and proposes that there is a continuum between the social and moral warrants to participants’ judgments. The chapter labels this the socio-moral order. As with concepts discussed in previous chapters, the issue of universality and cultural variability is central. There are three main sections to the chapter: morality and the moral order; moral foundations, values and face; social transgressions and morality.

In Chapter 3, we offer practical-moral knowledge as a theoretical frame that can be used to understand the dynamic transactions between the historical construction of a social context and regulatory processes of learning. Practical-moral knowledge is socially embedded and emerges in formal and in formal learning communities. This form of knowledge is socially constructed and reconstructed from a continually emergent and shared semiotic (sign) system of rights, responsibilities, and duties that establishes legitimate actions and interactions for competent participation. This sign system is composed of social and moral orders and gives rise to a community ethos involving a code of conduct for regulating behaviors, a code always under revision as learners and the community co-develop. Learners (and their mentors/teachers) use locally constructed practical-moral knowledge to guide engagement in processes of self-, other-, and co-regulation.