edwards 1999 emotion discourse

8/12/2019 Edwards 1999 Emotion Discourse

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Culture & Psychology

DOI: 10.1177/1354067X99530011999; 5; 271Culture Psychology Derek Edwards

Emotion Discourse

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kinds of issues. So, we examine how people report and account forevents they have taken part in, heard of, or witnessed. This provides adiscursive purchase upon the kinds of issues that traditionalpsychology studies, under topics such as event memory and causalattribution. But the overlap is partial. There is much to the psychologyof memory, for example, that is not concerned with event reporting,although there is not much in the psychology of memory, given thatscientic texts are also within its scope, to which discourse analysiscannot in principle be applied (Edwards, Middleton, & Potter, 1992).At the same time, the study of everyday event reporting cuts acrossconventional psychological categories, joining together traditionallydiverse areas such as memory and causal attribution, and introducingissues not typically confronted in those elds, such as accountability,variability across versions, the action-performative nature of everydayaccounts and the ways in which factual descriptions of all kinds areassembled and used, on and for the occasions of their production.

The other approach that discursive psychology takes is to examinehow folk psychological concepts are actually used. Ordinarylanguage users possess a rich vocabulary of psychological conceptswhich are an integral part of everyday discourse. Rather than treatingthese concepts as inadequate, inconsistent, pre-scientic ideas thatneed to replaced by proper studies of the mind or brain (Churchland,1988; Stich, 1983), discursive psychology investigates their nature and

uses. This links discursive psychology to other approaches tolanguage-in-use, including conceptual analysis, or ordinary languagephilosophy (Button, Coulter, Lee, & Sharrock, 1995; Coulter, 1990;Harr & Gillett, 1994; Wittgenstein, 1958), social constructionism,including cultural ethnography (Lutz, 1988; White, 1990) and historicaland contemporary cultural psychology (Gergen, 1994; Harr & Parrott,1996; Stearns & Stearns, 1988), and conversation analysis (Edwards,1995a; Heritage, 1984; Sacks, 1992). The approach taken to everydaypsychological concepts is that these are the bases on which people, for better or worse, actually describe and account for things. They are notconcepts that need to be tested to see if they are accurate representa-tions of the real life of the mind. Their empirical basis is discursive;their uses can be recorded and transcribed, and we can analyse them.If people use them inconsistently, indexically, rhetorically, then that isprecisely what we need to study. It is one of the foundational princi-ples of discourse analysis that variations in how concepts and versionsare produced, on and for particular occasions, are precisely the basis onwhich discourse performs actions.

The emotions are often dened, both in professional and in lay

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5 hear giggling (n all that) downstairs and

6 then (0.5) the music changed (0.5) slow

7 records. (1.2) And um: (1.2) >and then they

8 changed to slow records< (0.8) I could

9 hea::r (1.0) that Connie was dancing with

10 (0.2) this blo:ke downstairs. (1.0) And

11 Caroline turned round and said (.) something

12 (.) about it (it was wha-) it was oh Connie

13 look out Im going to tell (.) Jimmy on you.

14 (1.0) And (.) next thing I hear is (.)o

what15 he doesnt know (doesnt) hurt him. o

16 (0.2)

17 Counsellor: oIm sorry? o

18 Jimmy: What he: doesnt know: doesnt hurt him.

19 (0.8) Soon as I heard that I went- (1.6)

20 straight down the stairs. (0.8) n uh (0.6)

21 threw them out. (1.2) Took Connie up the

22 stairs and threw her on the bed. (1.6) I kept23 trying to ru:n to jump out the window. (1.6)

24 But yknow: I I couldnt. (.) I couldnt (.)

25 get myself (0.4) to go out. (.) I couldnt

26 (.) do it.

27 Counsellor: So thats what you felt like.

28 Jimmy: Oh ye:h.

Jimmy narrates his emotions and actions as the understandableresult of sustained provocation by Connie over the course of a longevening. Both its sequential placing in the story, and the expression atthis stage (line 1), identify Jimmys boiling anger as following a seriesof provocations. His anger builds up event by event (lines 12, 1926),as a reaction to events; at this stage and soon as I heard that. Theextremity of Jimmys response, including an aborted leap from anupstairs window, serves as an index of the extremity of that provoca-tion. Not only does the failed leap from the window display the

Edwards Emotion Discourse

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genuineness and intensity of his emotional state, but its self-destructivenature would also detract from any alternative category that mightarise here, such as that of a bad-tempered wife-beater. The counsellor(Extract 2, line 27) picks up its indexical import as evidence of how Jimmy felt, and Jimmy conrms that (line 28). The upshot is that theseare not actions that tell us about him as a person; they are reactions toprovocations by Connie, which tell of the emotional states he gets intothrough having a wife who behaves badly. So Connies depiction of Jimmy as problematically and extremely jealous by nature (see alsoEdwards, 1995b) is countered by Jimmys detailed narrative, whoserhetorical force is to provide an alternative specication of events, as asequence of provocation and understandable reaction. A narrative of emotional reactions can be used, therefore, not only to underminerational accountability, but also to establish it.

Extract 3 is an item from a counselling session with a differentmarried couple, Mary and Jeff. Mary is some way through her rsttelling of what brought them to seek counselling, and she has arrivedat the point where (according to that story) she decided to tell herhusband about a recently ended affair.

Extract 3 (DE-JF:C1:S1:4)

1 Mary: (. . .) so thats when I decided to (.)

2 you know to tell him. (1.0) U::m (1.0)

3 and then::, (.) obviously you went

4 through your a:ngry stage, did nt you?

5 (.)

6 Ve:ry upset obviously, .hh an:d uh,

7 (0.6) we: started ar:guing a lot, an:d

8 (0.6) just drifted awa:y.

Mary provides, as part of her story, an appropriate time and place for,and specication of, Jeffs emotions on hearing about her affair withanother man. He was angry (line 4) and very upset (line 6). Notehow these descriptions characterize Jeffs reactions as emotional ratherthan, say, as having come to a damning but rational appraisal of Marys actions and character. Emotions are worked up descriptivelyrather than being simply the way things were, prior to description. Butthe details I want to focus on here are obviously and stage. Theobviously normalizes, and somewhat endorses, those emotional reac-tions as expectable, and sequentially proper within the story as told.


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accountability. This is one of the advantages of examining emotiondiscourse in use, rather than relying solely on conceptual analysis oridealized cognitive models (e.g. Lakoff, 1987; Wierzbicka, 1992, 1994).Consider, for example, the notion that emotions lend themselves totalking of temporary rather than enduring mental states. The point isthat this is a way of talking, and that it can (but need not) be constructedand used on occasions. There are alternative categories of emotion thatseem conceptually to lend themselves to more enduring dispositionalstatements, and imply that something more cognitive and analytical isgoing on; jealousy and resentment, for instance (Coulter, 1986).However, there appear to be no strict constraints here. We can talk of dispositionally angry, jealous or fearful (timid) people, and, conversely,of sudden pangs of jealousy or resentment (even if we use sensationwords such as pangs to do that (Coulter, 1986, pp. 123124). Emotioncategories provide a exible resource for situated discourse, includingthe potential for rhetorical opposites and contrasts, rather than a set of semantic templates, or xed scenarios, that will mean or imply thesame things about actors and events whenever used.

Emotional Scenarios

Part of the intelligibility of the contrasting stories that are produced bycouples in counselling lies in the construction of scripted event sequences

in which the various emotion descriptions are rendered coherent asparts of normatively intelligible actions, or else stand out as deviantand unreasonable (Edwards, 1994, 1995b; cf. Smith, 1978). The link between emotions and scripted scenes or scenarios is one that recursnot only in everyday talk and counselling discourse, but also inpsychological and anthropological theories of emotion (Gergen, 1994;Lakoff, 1987; Lutz, 1988; Russell, 1991; White, 1990; Wierzbicka, 1994;see Edwards, 1997, for a critical review of cognitive-linguisticapproaches). This is the notion that emotions can be dened and differ-entiated in terms of the standard kinds of event sequences (orcognitively represented event sequences), or dialogue sequences, inwhich they occur. Rather than focusing on standardized scenarios andtheir cognitive representations, discourse analysis focuses on howspecic stories are constructed on and for their occasions, including theways in which links between emotions and scenarios can be discur-sively worked up and made relevant.

Within any language the terms available for talking about socialaccountability, action and reaction, thought and emotion, and so on,are likely to be a set of contrasts and alternatives (Josephs, 1995; cf.


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Saussure, 1974): this reaction rather than that, this mental state ratherthan that. We can expect such a patterning in terms of contrasts anddiscriminations from the basic action-performative principles of discourse and rhetoric.

This is also a feature of anthropological studies which focus onanalysing situated talk (Lutz, 1988, 1990a, 1990b; White, 1990). Forexample, while drawing on notions of cognitive and cultural scenarios,Lutz (1990b) notes, with regard to the Ifaluk word song (roughly, justi-ed anger), that the everyday understanding of this emotion does notsimply occur as a form of reection on experience, but emerges aspeople justify and negotiate both cultural values and the prerogativesof power that some members of this society currently hold (p. 204).Rather than analysing talk in terms of a set of events prior to theirdescription, a standard cognitive scenario that represents their sense,and an emotion word that expresses it, one of the functions of emotiondiscourse is to work back upon the nature of prior events, and constitutethem as events of a certain kind (Buttny, 1993). Thus White (1990), inan ethnography of Micronesian emotions, notes that when Tomasserts that the banishment of his brother made him sad, he is imply-ing, in this context, that the rejection is an instance of a certain kind of social actionone that damages close relations, that is, the sort of thingthat evokes sadness (p. 60). So a sad-oriented reporting of events is alsoitself a kind of social action that performs indexical work on the

reporter: he implicitly claims that his response of telling off the offend-ing parties was an attempt at withdrawal rather than some kind of angry getting even (White, 1990, p. 60).

A key feature of emotion discourse is its deployment in narrative andrhetoric. Emotion terms occur not merely as one-off descriptions of specic acts or reactions, but as parts of interrelated sets of terms thatimplicate each other (syntagmatically) in narrative sequences, and also(paradigmatically) in rhetorically potent contrasts between alternativedescriptions. Narrative sequence and rhetorical contrast are ways of talking about things, ways of constructing the sense of events, andorienting to normative and moral orders, to responsibility and blame,intentionality and social evaluation. Emotion categories are not grasp-able merely as individual feelings or expressions, and nor is theirdiscursive deployment reducible to a kind of detached, cognitivesense-making. They are discursive phenomena and can be studied assuch, as part of how talk performs social actions.

Emotion discourse includes not only terms such as anger, surprise , fear, and so on, but also a rich set of metaphors, such as Jimmys I was boiling at this stage (Extract 2). The notion of boiling belongs to a set


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of anger metaphors, mainly to do with heat and internal pressure, thatLakoff (1987) and others have identied in American English, and thatLakoff traces to the emotions bodily experience and physical manifes-tations. Emotion metaphors can be considered conceptual resources that,where they occur in any language, whatever the metaphorical base, areavailable for discursive deployment. The concepts of anger as bodilyheat, pressure and agitation, for example, provide for a range of expressions such as (from Lakoff, 1987, pp. 381385): hot under thecollar, burst a blood vessel, losing his cool, a heated argument, redwith rage, hopping mad. Then there are associations with distortedvision: blind with rage, see red, so mad I couldnt see straight.Some metaphors are based on bodies imagined as strained containers:lled with anger, brimming with rage, bursting with anger,bottled up, outbursts, exploded.

This is only a small part of angers metaphorical thesaurus. But aswell as raising questions about their conceptual origins, as Lakoff does,it is also useful to inquire into their discursive uses. The variousmetaphors are not equivalent and interchangeable, even those that areclosely related, such that we should consider the grounds for choosingone rather than another, and what kinds of discursive business suchchoices may perform. Apart from heat, pressure and containermetaphors for anger, Lakoff (1987) lists madness, struggle and danger-ous animal metaphors. While is it possible to devise conceptual

relationships between all these, they also have their own narrativeimplications and rhetorical uses. Contained heat metaphors such asboiling with rage are unlike wild animal metaphors such as bit herhead off. Gibbs (1994) suggests that different anger metaphors encodedifferent parts of a complex cognitive model, suitable for use on differ-ent discursive occasions. For example, note that bit her head off isexplicitly active and object-directed, while boiling with rage is morepassive and experiential. The choice between such alternatives isuseful for constructing alternative narratives of causal attribution andaccountability.

Indeed, the point of all those alternative metaphorical expressions is,surely, to enable certain things to be said and not just thought (Edwards,1991), such that the proliferation of metaphors may be motivated notonly by their conceptual sense (as suggested by Lakoff, 1987, andGibbs, 1994), but by what they allow us to say and do. Jimmysboiling anger, for example, formulates it as extreme, and plays a nicelytimed part in his narrative of a gradually building emotional state (atthis stage), with its boiling extremity an index, as we have noted, of the extremity of Connies provocations. Jimmys selection of this heat-


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and pressure-building metaphor performs interactionally signicantnarrative and rhetorical work, building his role in events as passiveand induced, rather than active and culpable. Also, specifying anger insuch graphic (experiential and visual) detail provides the kind of warrant, the kind of document of experiential recall, of being there(Geertz, 1988), that bolsters the validity of all kinds of stories anddescriptions when they are in danger of being countered (Edwards &Potter, 1992). In order to develop this notion of how emotion conceptsand metaphors may be designed and selected for their deployment, weneed to examine them in use, and preferably in spontaneous use(natural discourse), rather than in scenarios invented to illustrate oursemantic intuitions.

Emotion Concepts and Their Rhetorical Uses

Emotion words provide conceptual resources that permit discursiveuses, but empirical studies reveal a exibility and rhetorical organiz-ation that semantic or conceptual analyses underestimate. Conceptualanalysis is necessary in that it aims to clarify what words mean, ratherthan proposing theories of their referents. Thus, the difference thatordinary language philosophers draw (Ryle, 1949; Wittgenstein, 1958) between emotions and sensations helps rid us of too close an associ-ation between emotions and subjective mental or bodily experiences

(Bedford, 1962), and points us towards the moral nexus of action andaccountability, and therefore towards what people are doing whenthey use emotion words. Yet the meanings and contrasts involved ineveryday and professional emotion talk are also matters for empiricalanalysis, rather than matters to be legislated in advance of it. Forexample, while emotions can be conceptually distinguished fromsensations in how they take intentional objects (we are not just afraid but afraid of things), one of the rhetorical uses of emotion words (e.g.Connies discourse of Jimmys jealousy) is to focus on inner feelingsrather than the events in the external world that they are directed at, justas talk of emotional reactions (Jimmys story) can also be a way of spec-ifying the nature of the events that provoke them.

Models of word meanings, whether semantic, etymological, mono-lingual, universalistic, cognitively modelled or derived fromconceptual analysis, tend to aim for coherence, as if the words meaningwas always that whole package, scenario and all, and it all getswheeled out for use on each occasion. But the rich variety of emotionmetaphors, and empirical studies of discourse, suggest somethingmore like a set of rhetorical affordances, in which different parts or


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potentials of meaning, even contrasting ones for the same word, may be worked up and deployed, on and for occasions. This conceptual andrhetorical exibility (cf. Averill, 1990), although plainly a nuisance tosemantic and cognitive model-making, is ideal for the action-perform-ing, accountability-oriented, rhetorical witcraft of discourse (Billig,1987).

On the basis of a variety of empirical materials in which emotionterms are used, I have listed the following set of rhetorical contrasts(Edwards, 1997). These are not denitions of what emotion wordsmean, neither generally nor for individual words. Rather, they pointto a range of things that emotion discourse can do, in narrative talk andtext. They are not a denitive or discrete set. I am not proposing thatthere have to be ten of them, for instance, nor that they ought to leadtowards some kind of formal model. Their interrelatedness and exibility are important features of how they work.

1. Emotion vs cognition: as a participants discursive resource. Actionsand mental states are described as such, formulated as thoughts,opinions, emotions.

2. Emotions as irrational vs rational : emotions are not just irrational.They are an integral part of rational accountability: e.g. Jimmyspathological jealousy, vs his understandable responses to Conniesactivities; cf. the indignant anger of Ifaluk song (Lutz, 1990b).

3. Emotion as cognitively grounded and/or cognitively consequential: Ifaluksong, and Jimmys soon as I heard that . . . imply prior cognitiveassessments. Cognitive consequences are insights and understand-ings stemming from emotional experiences.

4. Event-driven vs dispositional: e.g. Jimmys justied and reactiveanger vs his dispositional jealousy.

5. Dispositions vs temporary states : Jimmy as an enduringly jealous person vs I was boiling at this stage and Jeffs angry stage.

6. Emotional behaviour as controllable action or passive reaction: thenotion of emotions as feelings that are expressed or acted outlends itself to a dichotomy between how someone felt and whatthey did about it, and to the notion of controlling ones passions,and so on. Having emotional reactions can usefully be split intohow you unaccountably feel, and what you accountably do(Jimmys I didnt hit you).

7. Spontaneous vs externally caused: the fact that emotions take inten-tional objects provides for ways of assigning causes: being angryat something can imply being angry because of it. But there isrhetorical scope for internal and other causes to be induced: I can


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be . . . angry at little things becauseI am suffering from dyspepsia,where to know its object is not thereby to understand its cause(Coulter, 1986, p. 129).

8. Natural vs moral : unconscious, automatic, bodily reactions vs social judgements. Rather than these being parts of a comprehensiveanalysis of emotion terms, they can be selectively worked up andused.

9. Internal states vs external behaviour: private (feelings) vs public(expressions, displays). A persons true emotions can be thoseavowed on the basis of personal experience, as privileged reportsfrom the inner life of the mind (Buttny, 1993), or else ascriptions based on overt behaviour, which may be adduced to refute suchavowals.

10. Honest (spontaneous, reactive) vs fake. Emotional reactions, particu-larly when offered as reactive and immediate, provide for anarrative and rhetoric of honest expression, contrasted either tocognitive calculation or to a fake, insincere acting-out. The conceptof emotions as basically honest and spontaneous responses relatesto the popular assumption, and experimental research nding, that body signals can betray the true feelings of people who are tryingto disguise them. Underlying emotions and attitudes may leakpast a persons more consciously controlled gestures and words(Ekman & Friesen, 1969). But the possibly contrary status of

emotional displays, as articial performances, provides scope fordescription and counter-description (Edwards, 1997).

These oppositions and contrasts are used discursively to constructthe nature and causes of events, and (thereby) to manage accountabil-ity. They may be used in various combinations. For example, thepublicprivate dichotomy may be used in relation to activepassiveand honestfake. Thus, true emotions may be those avowed fromprivate experience, denying any impression based on supercialappearances. But such confessions might also be treated as fake, on thegrounds that they contrast with actions (which proverbially speak

louder than words); or again, actions may be treated as insincere whenthey conict with (ascribed) inner feelings.

Grief and Sentiment for Princess Diana

As an illustration of these kinds of rhetorical-narrative concepts, I shall briey examine some textual materials taken from a larger study of press reports following the death of Princess Diana (see also MacMillan


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& Edwards, 1999). This was an event that produced a huge public reac-tion and interest in Britain and elsewhere, together with intense mediainterest in the extent of public emotion. Part of the presss concern wasto handle and manage its own potential culpability in Dianas death, itsrole in the employment of the paparazzi photographers who, itseemed, may have been directly to blame. Extract 4 is from an editorialin the Sun, a popular tabloid newspaper, the day after Dianas death.

Extract 4 (The Sun, 1 September 1997, p. 10; original headline capitals)1 DONT BLAME THE PRESS2 THE SUN SAYS3 In the depths of his grief, Dianas brother4 is entitled to be bitter about her death . . . .5 At such a harrowing time, we can6 understand his emotional outburst

The Sun was responding to a news broadcast in which Dianas brotherEarl Spencer, referring to the apparent role of the photographerspursuing her car, had said: I always believed the press would kill herin the end. 2 Of interest here is the use of emotion descriptions in theSuns editorial, the way that Spencers grief is not merely somethingto report, nor indeed any kind of controversial statement about him, but a basis for disagreeing with his judgement. Spencer had not offeredhis assessment of the press as an expression of grief. Indeed, it wassomething he had always believed, where always places his judge-

ment prior to the trauma of his sisters death (cf. Connies depiction of Jimmys enduring jealousy, has always been, from the day we met);and believed denes it cognitively, as judgement rather than feeling.The notion always believed projects the relevance of some kind of observational basis or grounds for that belief. In contrast, the Sundenes Spencer as speaking out of deep emotion.

Furthermore, the emotion he speaks from is grief rather than, say,anger. Grief s intentional object, of course, would be his sistersdeath. Angers object would (in this example) be the press. So not onlyis Spencer talking out of emotion rather than perception or belief, butthe specic emotion given is one that directs us back to his sistersdeath for its cause or explanation, rather than to the activities of thepress, which were the target of Spencers remarks. Another categoryoffered for Spencer is bitter (line 4). The word bitter invokes excess,and a disposition for saying harsh things. Yet even here, Spencer isdepicted as bitter about her death rather than about the presss rolein it. The point here is not to labour an analysis of a very smallsegment of data, but to point to ways in which emotion wordsprovide rhetorical options and trajectories. These are discourse


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options, ways of talking and writing, ways of constructing rather thanreecting the nature of events, and of avoiding or countering alterna-tive senses of events.

The narrative-rhetorical relevance of the depths of his grief and atsuch a harrowing time is that they provide the occasion and basis forSpencers statement, dened now as his emotional outburst (line 6).The implication is that there is no need to look to rational, observa-tional, long-term grounds for his judgement; it was an emotion-drivenreaction. Further elements in the Suns treatment of Spencer are thenotions of understanding (line 6) and entitlement (line 4). WhereasSpencer emotionally reacts, the Sun itself understands, gets things inperspective, transcending the moment in which Spencer is entrapped,in the very act of dening Spencers reaction as of the moment. Thenotion that Spencer is entitled to be bitter invokes a kind of emotionalscenario or script, that his feelings and judgements are predictable,understandable in the circumstances, even proper in their place (cf.Marys obviously in Extract 3), part of his role as grieving brother. Inacknowledging such an emotional legitimacy, the Sun manages to build Spencers words as emotional, and as stemming from his sistersdeath ( grief rather than anger), and therefore as not to be taken seriouslyas any kind of rational judgement about the press. Of course, therhetorical take-home message is given explicitly in the headline: dont blame the press.

The nature of public reaction to Dianas death has recently becomethe object of critical social comment in a publication (Anderson &Mullen, 1998) by members of the Social Affairs Unit, described inBritains Independent newspaper as a quirkily conservative think-tank(17 April 1998, p. 5). The key article on Diana, by philosopher AnthonyOHear, criticizes public grief over Dianas death as overly sentimen-tal and fake, and has become (as I write this) the controversial subjectof a further urry of press reporting. Public reactions to Dianas deathare attributed to the deplored current state of the western world, ident-ied in terms of Tony Blairs Labour election victory in Britain, and theUS presidency of Bill Clinton. My concern here is not with the articlesstatus as an analysis of modern society, but with its emotion rhetoric,and the part this plays in the articles political argument. My textualsources are, again, the newspaper reports and quotations rather thanthe article itself.

Extract 5 (The Express, 17 April 1998, p. 29)1 Fake Britains authors, all leading academics, state that2 Todays Britain is not modern, let alone cool. It is3 a fake society with fake institutions. The societys dening


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4 moment was Princess Dianas funeral, in which5 sentimentalitymob griefwas personied and canonised,

6 the elevation of feelings above reason, reality and restraint.The interest here is in how emotion categories function as rhetorical

elements within a larger text. The key terms are in line 5, sentimentalityand mob grief . They stand in ironic contrast, not only to reason, realityand constraint (line 6), for which many other emotion categories mightserve, but also to the range of non-ironic emotion descriptions that hadcharacterized press coverage of Dianas death and funeral, such asthose in Extract 4. Rather than an outpouring of genuine public grief,whose spontaneity and scale might attest to its heartfelt reality, whatwe have is mob grief, where mob characterizes the public as

unthinking, herd-following, irrationalreminiscent of Le Bons (1896)classic depiction, and political critique, of crowd behaviour.The term sentimentality invokes shallowness, convention, mere

display rather than genuine or deeply felt emotion. It is a concept notmerely of a particular kind of emotion, but of a kind of inappropriate-ness or shallowness of emotion. As one of the Fake Britain editorsglosses it, in a newspaper article: not deep, committed feelings, butdisplays of feelings. Sentimentality is about public demonstration of feelings. And that includes feelings that people do not, in fact, have(Anderson, 1998). Exploited here, and in Extract 5, are the rhetoricalcontrasts between emotion and reason, genuine feeling and fake

display, and between one category (sentiment) and various alterna-tives also in use (grief, compassion). 3

The rhetorical context of these opposed and alternative categories is,as I have noted, a political objection to modern society in the shape of the Blair and Clinton governments. This is the import of Extract 5, lines2 and 3. The argument is that the electoral rejection of the kind of Conservative, right-wing politics favoured by the authors of the reportstemmed not from any kind of well-grounded social analysis or justi-able set of values, but, rather, from an irrational and supercialsentimentality. Accordingly, a blunt refutation came from PrimeMinister Blair himself (Extract 6), quoted in various newspapers aswhat he had told friends.

Extract 6 (The Mail on Sunday, 19 April 1998).1 The Prime Minister has told friends he is angry and2 contemptuous at the latest attacks on the extraordinary3 cloudburst of grief which still grips many of the4 Princesss admirers.5 [ . . . ] he considers their snobbish put-downs to be an6 insult to all of the ordinary people who were genuinely


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7 inspired by Dianas life and deeply moved by her death.

The categories of character, motive and emotion deployed in Extract6 provide a rhetorical counterpoint to those cited from the Fake Britainreport. Public reaction to Dianas death is dened not as fakesentiment, but as the extraordinary cloudburst of grief (lines 23),whose reality as such is bolstered by the denite article the, by itscontinuing nature (line 3), and by the expressions genuinely inspiredand deeply moved (lines 67). Genuine grief contrasts with senti-mentality, and the mob of Extract 5 is now all of the ordinary people(Extract 6, line 6) for whom Blair speaks, and whose demotic ordinari-ness contrasts with those whose snobbish put-downs have insultedthem. Indeed, what Blair is (quoted as) countering are merely put-

downs rather than, for instance, a carefully argued social critique,whose snobbish nature provides an irrational, attitudinal basis for itsproduction.

Extract 7 is from an article in The Times newspaper, quoting OHear,in which the fakegenuine dichotomy, though prominent in his argu-ment, is explicitly rejected in favour of a possibly less offensive (to thetarget readership) opposition between feeling and reason (lines 12).Of course, this remains a dichotomy useful for dismissing public reac-tion as irrational.

Extract 7 ( The Times, 17 April 1998, front page)1 I do not say that peoples feelings were not genuine, but2 I think that they were elevating feeling above reason.3 [ . . . ] She indulged in infantile temper tantrums and4 forced the rest of the Royal Family to put up with her5 childlike self-centredness, he claims.

The characterizations of Diana (lines 35) involve a rhetoric of scriptand disposition (Edwards, 1995b, 1997). What Diana was like, as aperson, is grounded in the routine ways she would behavethetantrums were plural, and they stemmed from character (her child-like self-centredness) rather than situation. The Royals apparently didnot, by their actions, provoke such tantrums, but were forced to put

up with them. And what they had to put up with was not a series of expressions of indignant, justied anger (such as Blairs, in Extract 6), but tantrums, whose lack of adequate situational cause (unlikeanger, for example) is provided for by that category, these beingdispositional in her, stemming from a childlike and infantile nature.We are back with Connie and Jimmy, and Jeff and Mary, of course, andtheir contrastive narratives of marital disharmony: the construction of links between routine actions and character, scripts and dispositions,


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Notes

1. These codes indicate the location of the data at page 4 of session 1 of alarger corpus.

2. In keeping with journalistic practice, double quotation marks signal notmerely a quote from a news medium, but a direct quotation of somebodys words in that medium.

3. In the same newspaper article as his denition of sentimentaliy,Anderson (1998) declares that compassion, if it is genuine, must begrounded in reality, not just in good intentions, still less in a show of good intentions.

References

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Biography

DEREK EDWARDS is Professor of Psychology in the Department of SocialSciences, Loughborough University. His research has developed adiscursive approach to topics in developmental, cognitive and socialpsychology. He began with ethnographic-linguistic studies of child languageand parentchild interaction, moved on to studies of classroom educationand collective remembering (in a variety of settings), and now focuses on theways in which common-sense psychology is constructed and managed ineveryday discourse, ranging from telephone conversations to counsellingsessions and media texts. His books include Common Knowledge(Routledge,1987, with Neil Mercer), Ideological Dilemmas(Sage, 1988, with Michael Billigand others), Collective Remembering(Sage, 1990, with David Middleton),Discursive Psychology (Sage, 1992, with Jonathan Potter) and Discourse andCognition (Sage, 1997). address: Derek Edwards, DARG (Discourse andRhetoric Group), Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University,Loughborough, Leics. LE11 3TU, Great Britain. [email:[email protected]]


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