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‘The moral in the story’: a diachronic investigation of lexicalised morality in

the UK press

Article in Corpora · November 2010

DOI: 10.3366/cor.2010.0104

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‘The moral in the story’: a diachronic investigation of
lexicalised morality in the UK press

Anna Marchi1

Abstract

In this paper, I explore the discourses surrounding whatever is explicitly

identified as a moral issue in the SiBol corpora. This analysis is
mainly diachronic but will combine a variety of parameters in order to
access patterns of change/stability across different newspapers, within a
single newspaper in time, across different news types, across topics and
in the broader context of recent history. I adopt the Corpus-Assisted
Discourse Studies (CADS)2 methodology – merging, and shunting between,
quantitative and qualitative approaches. The analysis investigates morality-
related lexical items, their collocations, the surrounding contexts, and the
news items and topics they are framed within, in an attempt to offer a general
picture of the topic, while also aiming to provide an in-depth understanding
of what the press means or projects by moral.

1. Introduction

Morality is an inescapable feature of mortality. Adam becomes the

protagonist of the Bible story the moment he becomes a moral being – and
a mortal, fully human, being – by eating from the tree of knowledge of
good and evil. In recent times, Steven Pinker, in advocating the notion of
a universal moral grammar, similarly links human moral instinct to the very
conception of the meaning of life:

Moral goodness is what gives each of us the sense that we are worthy
human beings. We seek it in our friends and mates, nurture it in our
children, advance it in our politics and justify it with our religions.

1
c/o ab via Pietralata 32, 40122 Bologna, Italy.
Correspondence to: Anna Marchi, e-mail: [email protected]
2
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus-assisted_discourse_studies

Corpora 2010 Vol. 5 (2): 161–189

DOI: 10.3366/E1749503210000432
© Edinburgh University Press
www.eupjournals.com/cor
162 A. Marchi

A disrespect for morality is blamed for everyday sins and history’s worst
atrocities. To carry this weight, the concept of morality would have to
be bigger than any of us and outside all of us.
(Pinker, 2008)

Framing a topic or an issue as moral (or immoral) implies that we are to

address something fundamental, ‘the very conception of the meaning of life’.
The purpose of this paper is to analyse a number of items deriving from the
core word moral3 as used in the SiBol corpora – namely, moral itself, along
with morally, morality, immoral, immorally and immorality – in order to trace
a diachronic profile of what the British broadsheet press in the years 1993 and
2005 portray as the domain of morality.
After briefly discussing the concept of discourses of morality, I
describe in this paper the analytical processes that were followed in order to
carry out this piece of corpus-assisted research. The analysis begins with an
examination of the difference between MORAL and ETHICAL.4 I then move to
focus on the MORAL set, and, through keywords, collocational analysis and
close reading of concordance lines, focus the investigation on specific topics
in order to offer a portrait of the two time periods.

2. Dissecting morality

[S]cratch the surface of most news stories and you find a moral agenda.
(Marr, 2005: 62)

It is, nowadays, widely accepted that there is no such thing as objective

journalism: news gathering and news writing imply human judgment
and, thus, may well involve moral evaluation. Morality and journalism
are intertwined. In his pioneering and much quoted (even by the media
themselves) study on what he calls ‘moral panics’ (see also Partington,
2010), Cohen (1972: 17) says that the mass media constitute ‘a main source
of information about the normative contours of a society [. . . ] about the
boundaries beyond which one should not venture and about the shapes the
devil can assume’.
The debate on whether the media or, more specifically, media
discourse, construes or represents society and morality is wide and open,
and there is a long tradition of research aimed at uncovering ideology

3
For simplification, in this paper the ensemble of items will be referred to as the MORAL set
or just MORAL. The set comprises the most frequently occurring terms which contain the
word moral and also refer to the concept of morality (moral, morality, morally, immoral,
immorality and immorally), while it excludes other words such as the verb moralise, because
the negative evaluation it seems to imply would not correspond to the research question that I
am investigating. The word amoral was taken into consideration, but excluded from the
analysis due to its relative infrequency.
4
Mirroring the MORAL set, and including ethics, ethical, ethically, unethical and unethically.
Lexicalised morality in the UK press 163

(see Hall, 1982; Fowler, 1991; and van Dijk, 1998; amongst others) and the
moral agendas underlying the news. News-media discourse both reflects and
shapes a society and its mores, since it functions as a social barometer – that
is, an indicator of existing conditions or existing orders of discourse that are
socially shaped. But at the same time it is also socially shaping, because the
cumulative power of the media discourse reinforces and reproduces the status
quo (Fairclough, 2001).
News discourse in particular has an important role in the definition
and hierarchisation of reality, because it ‘incorporates assumptions about
what matters, what makes sense, what time and place we live in, what range
of considerations we should take seriously’ (Schudson, 1995: 14). It seems
relevant, therefore, to understand how powerful symbolic agents such as
newspapers present the moral domain, since this allows us to understand
better the ‘common sense’ of an era, which is defined by Gramsci (2000:
344) as ‘the conception of the world which is uncritically absorbed by the
various social and cultural environments in which the moral individuality of
the average man is developed’.
Morality is an abstract category and is conceptualised in texts in
a number of ways. It can be seen as a subcategory of evaluation, in the
sense described by Hunston and Thompson (2000), very generally, as ‘the
indication that something is good or bad’ (Hunston, 2004: 157). Evaluative
judgments of goodness and badness are likely to be inscribed and reiterated in
newspaper prose, sometimes more overtly (so phenomena may be described
as fair, improper, dreadful, right, wrong, a virtue, a sin, etc.) but more
often subtly, either unconsciously or consciously with a manipulative intent.
‘Evaluation is often implicit and it relies for its effect on intertextuality, and,
in many texts it is multilayered’ (Hunston and Thompson, 2000: 117).
It is not the intention, here, to investigate how moral discourses
are constructed/reproduced by the press, nor to scrutinise the hidden moral
implications of newsmaking. Instead, explicit references to ‘morality’ are
addressed in order to access what is projected as morality, and what is
described as moral (or immoral). The research questions in this paper are,
therefore:

(1) What does the British broadsheet press explicitly frame as being
within the moral sphere? And,
(2) Has the discourse about morality changed over time (specifically,
between 1993 and 2005)?

3. Method, corpus and process

As Partington (2010) states in his overview, CADS aims to investigate non-

obvious meanings within specific discourse types. The analysis is, by its
nature, comparative, and, in the case of Modern Diachronic Corpus-Assisted
Discourse Studies, the comparison is primarily a diachronic one. CADS
164 A. Marchi

methodology combines the quantitative approach of Corpus Linguistics with

the qualitative approach of Discourse Analysis. As with other examples
of mixed methodology in applied linguistics (Hart-Mautner, 1995; Stubbs,
2001; and Baker et al., 2008), the idea behind complementing discourse
analysis with corpus techniques is to allow us to consider larger amounts
of data, to put a greater distance between the observer and the data, and at
the same time to allow for an in-depth analysis that does not lose contact with
the rich wider extra-linguistic context.
In CADS there is a continuous shunting between quantitative and
qualitative approaches which interact and inform each other in a recursive
process: we start with a research question, we turn to the data, (i.e., to the
‘boiled down extract’ (Scott and Tribble, 2006: 7) of the data), and look
for patterns. When something that is potentially interesting is found, we
look more closely, expanding the analysis to the larger stretches of text and
considering contextual elements. Close reading and extra-textual elements
implement the original research question and open new paths, and the process
starts again.
The tools used in this research are Xaira5 and WordSmith 5.0,6 which
offer complementary approaches. These tools also favour the ‘funnelling’
process, which involves examining the data, finding specific patterns,
restricting the analysis to that phenomenon/portion and then expanding
the analysis again; this allows us to move from the general to the
particular, retaining a general picture while working on fine-grained aspects.
Specifically, WordSmith was used to produce wordlists and keywords while
Xaira was employed for collocation and concordance analysis. Xaira also
allowed the XML mark-up of the corpus to be exploited to best advantage.
SiBol (the Siena–Bologna Modern Diachronic Corpus of British
newspapers) contains the complete output of major British national
broadsheets – The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, The
Times and The Sunday Times, and the Observer – in two different, but recent,
moments in time: 1993 and 2005. The Observer was only available for the
year 2005, since the corpus compilers had no access to the 1993 texts. The
SiBol 93 corpus contains approximately 100 million orthographic words;
SiBol 05 is somewhat larger with about 155 million orthographic words (10
million of which are accounted for by the inclusion of the Observer). The
corpus is XML-valid7 and TEI-conformant;8 all texts have been marked-
up in order to retrieve specific news types or parts of the newspapers,
and specific portions of individual news items. The newspapers have been

5
Xaira (XML Aware Indexing and Retrieval Architecture) developed at Oxford University is
the XML version of Sara, the software that was originally developed for interrogating the
British National Corpus. For further information, see: http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/rts/xaira/
6
See the manual for WordSmith 5.0, which is available at:
http://www.lexically.net/downloads/version5/HTML/index.html
7
eXtensible Mark-up Language (see: http://www.w3.org/XML/).
8
Text Encoding Initiative (see: http://www.tei-c.org/index.xml).
Lexicalised morality in the UK press 165

encoded according to a variety of parameters. This categorisation permits

comparison across the defined partitions, (i.e., at a diachronic level, or on the
basis of the papers’ political orientation, or across individual newspapers).
Since, as Lakoff (2002) notes, politics is about morality, political leaning is a
very important variable, and it would be interesting to compare newspapers
comprehensively on the basis of their orientation. This study’s primary
focus is diachronic, but I will try where possible to involve the specificity
of each newspaper and of its readership. For the sake of clarity, as well
as space, a decision was made not to crowd the analysis with too many
variables – although it is important to emphasise that when undertaking
discourse analysis we deal with a complexity that goes beyond the boundaries
of discourse. It is sometimes useful, therefore, to ‘step out of’ the texts and
to take into account contextual variables such as social, cultural and political
aspects, elements of media production (e.g., news values) or reception (e.g.,
readerships).

4. moral* versus ethic*

The Oxford English Dictionary defines moral as:

of or relating to human character or behaviour considered as good or

bad; of or relating to the distinction between right and wrong, or good
and evil, in relation to the actions, desires, or character of responsible
human beings; ethical.

Its definition of ethical is, ‘of pertaining to morality or the science of

ethics’. Morality is, in turn, defined as, ‘ethical wisdom, knowledge of
moral science’. These dictionary definitions are somewhat circular, taking the
reader back and forth between morals and ethics. However, they suggest that
any corpus-assisted analysis of morality would also, perhaps, benefit from an
examination of ethics, since the two terms appear to be so strongly connected.
So before focussing on words relating just to morality, I wanted to
understand whether the two groups of words are treated as synonyms in the
corpus and, if not, how they differ. In which contexts do journalists refer to
morality rather than ethics? And has the usage changed over time?
Figure 1 shows the absolute frequencies of moral*9 and ethic*,
respectively, in SiBol 93 and in SiBol 05. In both corpora, the incidence of
moral* is much greater (in the figure the size of the columns corresponds to
the weighted frequencies within the corpora: 99.1 per million words (pmw)
moral* versus 28.1 pmw ethic* in SiBol 93 and 67.8 pmw versus 41.1 pmw
in SiBol 05), just as moral* is much more frequent in language in general,

9
The asterisk represents a wild card. The simplification was adopted in order to be able to
make quick comparisons between SiBol and the BNC.
166 A. Marchi

Figure 1: Frequency of moral* and ethic* in the two corpora

Figure 2: Frequency of moral* and ethic* in the BNC

compared to ethic* (see Figure 2, which shows the absolute frequencies

found in the BNC).
While the relative frequency of moral* decreased in SiBol 05
compared to SiBol 93, ethic* is nearly twice as frequent in the 2005 data
than it was twelve years before.
Having noted the growing popularity of ethic*, rather than
comparing the two sets of terms diachronically I decided to focus on
the differences between the two sets (moral, morally, morality, immoral,
immorally and immorality versus ethical, ethically, ethics, unethical and
unethically). All concordance lines containing the target words were
retrieved, and then saved in two XML files (one for each set). Wordlists
Lexicalised morality in the UK press 167

were created for each file and then compared using WordSmith Keywords,
in order to access the different usage of the two sets of terms and their
‘aboutness’ (Scott, 1999). Taylor (2010), who adopts a similar procedure in
her contribution to this issue, has called the output ‘concordance keywords’.
Concordance lines containing the ETHICAL set elicit keywords
which suggest that ethics is referred to when news is about:

• Business, economy and finance: fund(s), investment(s), invest,

companies, investors, company, bank(s), corporate, business,
trading, financial, managers, market, supplier, management,
industry, sector, services, brand(s), business, marketing, workers,
portfolio, profits, employees, income, money, firms, pension,
savings, stocks, multinational, prices, supplier and sales
• Behaviour and life-style: consumer(s), living, products, buy(s), fair,
fairtrade, coffee, fashion, food, buying, using, clothing, shopper,
tourism, jeans, cook, supermarkets, shopping, Tesco and choosing
• Environment(alism): green, environmental, organic, animal(s),
PETA, sustainable, growth, eco, fur, renewable, environment,
recycled, ecology, recycling, environmentally and energy
• Science: research, medical, cells, embryos, transplant(s), stem,
testing, technology, science, scientists, medicine, doctors, cloning
and genetic

The MORAL set is preferred when news is about:

• Religion: church, authority, Pope, spiritual, God, Catholic, truth,

encyclical, faith and belief
• Feelings and virtues: values, courage, sense, fibre, duty and
obligation
• Communication: story, play, tale, character, book, writer, novel,
judgements, art, film(s), words, theatre, hero and history
• People: man, family, boys, children, men, father and women
• Time or age: young, modern, old and century
• Political sphere: war, conservative, political, terror, torture,
Bosnia, Tory and state
• Moral panics: panic and crime
• Sexuality: sexual and sex

Interestingly, the keywords for the MORAL set also include a variety of
personal pronouns, as shown in Table 1.
The two sets of words are quite clearly different: they belong to
different spheres and to different discourses. ETHICAL tends to relate to
things that are created (commodities, inventions, discoveries, solutions, etc.)
or chosen (behaviours and attitudes) by humans, while MORAL is applied
more to intrinsic aspects of human life – identity, tradition, values, various
fundamental institutions of society (religion and politics) and to fears.
168 A. Marchi

Keyword Keyword MORAL Percent ETHICAL RC Keyness

Rank set set Percent
2 his 4,250 0.57 627 0.29 285.12
4 he 4,707 0.63 849 0.4 172.86
10 him 910 0.12 114 0.05 85.97
30 her 1,364 0.18 251 0.12 46.23
54 us 1,128 0.15 214 0.1 33.74
77 our 1,489 0.2 310 0.15 28.27

Table 1: Keywords pronouns in the MORAL set text compared to the

ETHICAL set text

Breaking down the frequencies of ETHICAL for the individual

newspapers, we notice that it is relatively more popular in the left-leaning
Guardian and in the centrist Times, compared to the right-leaning Telegraph
(24.3 pmw in the Guardian, 20.8 pmw in the Times and 12.7 pmw in the
Telegraph). But while we must note that the increased usage of one term
over the other sets the political and ideological tone of an issue, we cannot
conclude that the liberal press substitutes the use of MORAL with ETHICAL.
It is true that the Guardian seems increasingly to prefer to express the idea
of right and wrong by using a term that is less charged with traditional
and religious values, (hence their choice of ETHICAL over MORAL), but the
lexical choice is also related to the constraints of the topic. When dealing
with the categories listed for the ‘moral set’ above, the Guardian sticks to the
same rules or habits as the Telegraph.
The portrait presented here is just one possible interpretation – a
generalisation based on the grouping of words – and, as with all
classifications, it is subjective. But being based on and supported by data,
the interpretation can be checked and reformulated by a return to the dataset.
This first step of the analysis allows us to obtain a rough idea of
the discourse surrounding morality in the press, but it also opens up a series
of possible paths. We must once again, though, acknowledge that to select
and follow one thread is a subjective choice, with associated implications,
benefits and limitations.

A corpus approach is not a neutral one, selection comes into play

throughout the process and early stages of analysis (e.g., the choice
of the lexical items to investigate) can heavily determine the progress
of the research. The patterns we identify and the findings we generate
implement and shape subsequent questions; each previous step informs
the next, possibly excluding other threads.
(Marchi and Taylor, 2009: 4)

The categories identified above will inform subsequent analysis and some of
the issues that have been related to the sphere of ‘morality’ (such as religion
Lexicalised morality in the UK press 169

or sex) will be pursued in greater detail as a result of the accumulation of

patterns throughout the investigation.

5. The moral sphere

Figure 1 showed a considerable decline in the use of moral* in 2005,

compared with 1993, (–31.3 pmw), whilst this is compensated for by the
increase of ethic* (+13 pmw). However, as we have seen, the two sets tend
to refer to different kinds of news, contributing towards different types of
discourses. From this point onwards, the analysis will be focussed only on
three MORAL words, (moral, morally and morality), which will be examined
individually.
An initial analysis of collocates for moral in the two time periods
revealed more regularities than striking differences. An initial exploration
consisted of looking at items preceding or following moral and (or and
moral), using a procedure similar to that adopted by Baker (2005), in
identifying groups associated with gay(s) and homosexual(s) by means of
the co-ordinating conjunction and. The aim, here, was to obtain insights into
what other qualifications are related to issues defined as being moral. As
Table 2 shows, the picture in 1993 and 2005 is analogous, with just minor
variations in terms of relevance. This initial exploration of the term, moral,
was undertaken in order to gain insights into what other qualifications are
related to issues qualified as being moral.

SiBol 93 Freq. z-score SiBol 05 Freq. z-score

political 89 95.6 political 77 87.8
social 84 106 social 58 77.5
spiritual 81 323.7 ethical 53 253.9
ethical 57 257.2 spiritual 36 152.6
legal 43 63.5 religious 29 72.7
intellectual 33 113.7 intellectual 27 98.7
religious 22 51.8 physical 27 70.2
economic 20 27.7 legal 22 34.2
emotional 19 53.1 financial 19 24.8
physical 16 39 economic 18 26.5
psychological 15 57.7 emotional 16 47.4
cultural 13 33.2 psychological 13 53.1
material 13 30.6 material 11 27.4
financial 13 15.7 cultural 10 27

Table 2: Words following or preceding moral + and

170 A. Marchi

Amongst the top collocates (within a span of L5 to R5) there is

also considerable correspondence; but a closer examination points to some
interesting differences, too. A general point is, again, the high presence
of pronouns found in SiBol 05, although, as Partington (2010) notes,
the increased presence of personal pronouns has to be seen as a general
trend of the so-called quality press which is going through a process of
informalisation that is sometimes referred to as ‘tabloidisation’10 (Curran and
Sparks, 1991; Connell, 1998; and Esser, 1999).
The next step was to investigate the differences in usage of these
items over the two periods. Collocates of the word moral were retrieved,
and then ranked by frequency. A number of cut-off points were then applied
in order to reduce the amount of data to a manageable size, as well as to
remove weaker collocates. First, all collocates co-occurring only once (4,706
words for SiBol 93 and 4,939 for SiBol 05) were eliminated. Then, any
collocates with a z-score lower than two were removed. Finally, grammatical
collocates were excluded. As with all cut-off decisions, the process is
based on subjective judgment, but these judgments are consistent and thus
replicable. This procedure resulted in the lists shown under Table 3, which
represents the collocates that are significantly more present in each of the two
periods. The words in bold are unique collocates of the word moral in that
particular reference period (taking into consideration the top 150 collocates
for each period).
Some words in the lists suggest the presence of dominant semantic
fields. Going through the list while checking against the broader context of
concordance lines, two potentially interesting groups were indentified for
each period. In SiBol 93 there are a number of words relating to religion
(values, spiritual, intellectual, church’s, theology and theologians) and to
normativity (values, principles, standards, guidance, norms and doctrine).
What seems to characterise SiBol 05, instead, is the reference to personal
virtues (courage, fibre and seriousness), which, once again, possibly echoes
the focus on the individual sphere that was noted with the increased presence
of personal pronouns. What interested me most in SiBol 05 is a group that
could be labelled relativism versus universalism (or absolutism) with a long
list of items: dilemma, dilemmas, equivalence, relativism, ambiguities and
certainty.
A similar result emerged by looking at R1 collocates of the word
morally. Once again, collocates are largely shared between the two periods
(for example, wrong, bankrupt, reprehensible, dubious, right, repugnant,
superior, repugnant and acceptable). It remains to be seen ‘what’ is morally
wrong, acceptable or unacceptable and whether that has changed over time. It
is in fact ‘important that we do not over-interpret collocational data’ (Baker,

10
Tabloidisation ‘is precisely that kind of journalism in which the personal is not only the
starting point but also the substance and the end point’ (Sparks, 1998: 9).
Lexicalised morality in the UK press 171

SiBol 93 Freq. z-score SiBol 05 Freq. z-score

values 227 130.6 high 319 52.5
spiritual 112 97.8 ground 282 83.3
intellectual 56 41.4 courage 81 63.8
principles 55 43.5 dilemma 74 77.7
crusade 52 89.7 dilemmas 59 127.2
judgments 50 73 fibre 55 77.9
framework 40 43.8 equivalence 48 268.9
decay 24 44.3 relativism 48 219.2
rectitude 23 95 seriousness 22 33.5
suasion 8 131.7 ambiguities 13 50.5
standards 95 38.8 compass 96 139.8
judgment 55 30.6 purpose 55 31.3
vacuum 51 68.5 universe 35 35.9
stance 40 37.9 ambiguity 32 74.2
guidance 39 34.1 certainty 27 31
church’s 35 57.7 hazard 17 28
justification 28 35.4 intrinsic 13 33.8
theology 27 47.4 crusader 12 35.9
theologians 22 70.7 laxity 10 65
norms 20 59.2
doctrine 19 28.7
certainties 18 44.4

Table 3: Selection of collocates for moral (span of L5 to R5)

2006: 118–9) and no conclusion should be reached before we have checked

the context of the extended concordance lines.
Evidence for a growing reference to relativism is provided by a group
of collocates of the adverb morally in SiBol 05 – ambiguous, questionable,
ambivalent, complex, equivalent, indistinguishable and confused – all words
that could be classified as tokens of the relativism versus absolutism
debate. When progressive findings fit in well with previous ones, we
should particularly guard against potential ‘corroboration drive’ – that is,
the tendency to advance the research through steps that confirm previous
findings, while disregarding other paths of analysis. The phenomenon is
similar to confirmation bias, but it is not limited to confirmatory evidence: it
also refers to the analytical process itself – ‘a systematic search for elements
that validate previous findings’ (Marchi and Taylor, 2009: 4).
172 A. Marchi

6. Moral relativism

The data discussed above only give a picture of frequencies and not of
relevance, and the two are, of course, rather different beasts. To use an
aphorism that has been attributed to Einstein, and to paraphrase a common
criticism raised against Corpus Linguistics, ‘not everything that can be
counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted’. It has
emerged that in SiBol 93 explicit MORAL discourse is more present than in
2005; statistics also tell us that in SiBol 05 the association of morality with
relativism is prominent.
It was decided, then, to analyse the unit moral relativism (occurring
altogether twenty-eight times in SiBol 93 and forty-five times in SiBol 05),
taking into consideration how the individual newspapers treat the issue, who
the actors involved are, and whether the tone was positive or negative. In the
Guardian data for 1993 there are only three occurrences of moral relativism,
and they are all positive. This is shown as in Example 1, where moral
absolutism is portrayed as definitely bad and, by contrast, moral relativism
takes on a positive aura:

(1) If we are going to talk morality, then – to some of us – valuing a

female life as less than an eight-week embryo is in itself immoral.
Yet the battle between the pro-choice lobby and anti-abortionists is a
thoroughly modern one between moral relativism and moral absolutism.
(SiBol 93, Guardian)

The Telegraph data for 1993 also contains three occurrences, but they
are consistently negative – as in Example 2, where by association moral
relativism is as bad as a lie:

(2) Compassion requires the suspension of censoriousness, but does

not require either the propagation of lies (‘Aids is not prejudiced’) or
complete moral relativism – according to which, one kind of behaviour
is as good as another.
(SiBol 93, Telegraph)

The much smaller sub-corpus of the Sunday Telegraph for 1993 has
twelve occurrences, and, much the same as its conservative sister paper,
the evaluation assigned to the concept is unequivocally negative, as in
Example 3:

(3) The application of moral relativism to sex and family life leads to
the modern welfare slum.
(SiBol 93, Sunday Telegraph)

The Times contains seven occurrences of the item and also sees the concept
as a bad thing:
Lexicalised morality in the UK press 173

(4) In teaching our children moral relativism we have placed them in

the world without a moral compass, even hinting that there is no such
thing.
(SiBol 93, Times)

In most cases the reference to moral relativism is made within a single

topic, such as family, single parents or the religious authority’s views on
the concept; the following example is about the publication of the Papal
Encyclical Veritatis splendor:

(5) The Pope stands for absolute values in a world penetrated by moral
relativism, and is thus a hate-figure for the intellectual elite who offer
us guidance through the pandemonium they have created.
(SiBol 93, Times)

The liberal Guardian seems to be the only voice to legitimise moral

relativism. The fact that all occurrences of moral relativism are positive in
this newspaper, does not imply, though, that relativism itself is seen as good
by the progressive press. Looking at relativism on its own, among the twenty-
two occurrences in the Guardian for 1993, we find a considerable number of
examples with negative connotations, as here:

(6) The trouble with “pure” relativism, however, is that it leaves no room
for any kind of moral vision.
(SiBol 93, Guardian)

What characterises the Guardian in 1993, then, is not a pro-relativist attitude,

but the fact that a pro versus anti debate is still conceivable. This has changed
by 2005, when the fifteen occurrences of moral relativism in the Guardian
are all negative. It seems to have become an expression used by conservatives
to label liberals, and, consequently, for liberals to be charged with moral
relativism is undesirable:

(7) The first thing to say is that these putative British neocons sometimes
have a point. The left can be reluctant to assert the superiority of liberal
democracy, thereby laying itself open to the charge of moral relativism.
(SiBol 05, Guardian)

However, Guardian writers can still view moral relativism as acceptable

provided that it is not named explicitly as such. In the following
example, (derived from the concordance lines retrieved when analysing the
collocates for moral in the category previously defined as ‘relativism versus
universalism’), moral relativism is not mentioned, but it is paraphrased as
non-absolutist ethics:
174 A. Marchi

(8) Morality is based on the natural sympathy we have for our fellow
creatures, nothing more and nothing less. We all have reasons to be good
and to seek accommodations with each other. His case cannot be made
quickly because it is neither simple nor simplistic. But the mere fact that
these, and countless other non-absolutist ethics exist is enough to show
that there are plenty of principled alternatives to moral absolutism.
(SiBol 05, Guardian)

As a general methodological point, it is interesting to take into consideration

omissions as well as occurrences, acknowledging, of course, that it is far
more difficult to see what is not there.
Basing an interpretation on empirical data, no matter how
generalisable, does not guarantee objectivity; one should be careful not
to overestimate the findings, and it is always important to reinscribe
findings in their broader extra-linguistic context. In this case, for instance,
it should be noted that both 1993 and 2005 were potentially sensitive
years for ‘moral relativism’. In 1993, Pope John Paul II issued the famous
encyclical about moral truths. In 2005, that Pope died, and the press gave
him considerable coverage and tribute. To guard against the risk of over-
interpretation (O’Halloran and Coffin, 2004) we should, therefore, wonder
whether the discourse around moral relativism would be different in another
‘season’?11

7. Morality and sex

Unusual or unique events which contribute to making a particular ‘season’

uncommon might be problematic in terms of representativeness, but it is also
interesting, since the response to such events (and the selection of events
to which to respond) is emblematic of an era. Speaking of newsworthiness,
Hartley (1982: 75) notes that, ‘Events don’t get into the news simply by
happening, no matter how frantically. They must fit in with what is already
there [. . . ]. Events need to be known and registered’. The year 1993 was
a salient one for events falling under the umbrella of morality. Hunt (1994)
registers 1993 as the origin of a conflation of morality and panic. But what are
the ‘claims of moral decline leading to moral panics’ (McEnery, 2006: 20) in
1993 and 2005? In order to answer this question, I examined the collocational
patterns of morality in the two time periods; in both cases the first lexical
word to be found was sexual (see Table 4).12
Since collocation is directional (Scott and Tribble, 2006), I also
decided to check the patterns for sexual. In this case, morality ranks twenty-

11
Gabrielatos and Baker (2008) define ‘seasonal collocates’ as co-occurring words that are
related to specific events.
12
In addition sex ranks twentieth in position L2 in SiBol 93.
Lexicalised morality in the UK press 175

ninth (R1) amongst the collocates for sexual in SiBol 93 and forty-ninth in
SiBol 05.
In order to obtain a comprehensive picture of sex and morality,
the corpora were searched for all articles containing MORAL and SEX.13 In
terms of quantity, there are more articles presenting the co-occurrence of the
target words in 1993 (but we need to take into account the higher frequency
of MORAL per se in SiBol 93), and, taking the newspapers individually,
there are more in the Sunday papers and in the Guardian (at a glance in
Figure 3).
Having mapped the distribution, I repeated the operation I used for
MORAL and ETHICAL to obtain Concordance Keywords. I retrieved, using
Xaira,14 all the news items presenting the co-occurrence of MORAL and SEX,
and downloaded them all into two XML files (one for SiBol 93 and one for
SiBol 05). I then derived wordlists and compared them using WordSmith’s
Keywords, in order to access what morality and sex were discussed in relation
to in the papers in 1993 and 2005. Three main groups of keywords were
identified for each period. In SiBol 93 articles containing the terms sex and
morals, the news topics include:

• Education: education, pupils, homework, discipline, school, alumni,

curriculum and teaching
• Family: parent, child, family and families
• Cultural industry: films, television and Hollywood

The discourse of education is related to John Patten’s (then Education

Secretary) guidelines on how schools should treat sex education;
the main points of Patten’s initiative were thus synthesised by the
Times:

(9) CRUSADE to ensure that schoolchildren are taught about sex within
a clear moral framework that promotes family values was launched
yesterday by John Patten, the education secretary. Under guidelines
proposed yesterday, pupils must be told that the law forbids sexual
intercourse with girls under 16 and homosexual acts between males if
either party is under 21.
(SiBol 93, Times)

13
SEX defines a set of words including sex, sexual, sexuality, sexually, heterosexual(s),
homosexual(s), homosexuality, homosexually, gay(s), lesbian(s), lesbianism, transsexual(s),
transexuality and transexualism.
14
Xaira XML query allows us to search for words, phrases and patterns within a marked-up
portion of text – in this case individual articles, tagged as < div3 > .
SiBol 93 L5 L4 L3 L2 L1 Centre R1 R2 R3 R4 R5
176

1 THE THE THE OF OF MORALITY OF THE THE OF THE

2 A TO OF AND THE AND A OF THE OF
3 TO OF TO TO A IS IS AND IN AND
4 TO OF TO TO A IN IN A TO IN
5 IN IN AND ABOUT SEXUAL THE AND IN AND TO
6 IS IS IN A ON BUT BE TO A A
7 AND AND IS ON PUBLIC TALE TO IS IS IS
8 AS ON ABOUT IS CHRISTIAN THAT THAT AS AS THAT
9 IT FOR ON SENSE THAT TO IT BY BY WITH
10 THEIR NOT NOT IN TO AS NOT NOT WITH NOT
SiBol 05 L5 L4 L3 L2 L1 Centre R1 R2 R3 R4 R5
1 THE THE OF OF OF MORALITY OF THE THE THE THE
2 TO OF THE A THE AND A A OF OF
3 OF A A THE AND TALE AND OF A AND
4 AND TO TO ABOUT A IS OF IN AND TO
5 IS AND AND AND SEXUAL IN IS TO TO A
6 A IS IN TO PERSONAL PLAY TO AND THAT IS
7 IN IN ABOUT ON ON BUT IN IS IS IN
8 THAT ON IT IN ABOUT THAT IT AS IN THAT
9 BE WITH IS MODERN MODERN OR THAT THAT AS AS
10 HIS IT AS IS THAT TO ABOUT NOT HIS HE

Table 4: WordSmith Pattern output for morality in SiBol 93 and SiBol 05

A. Marchi
Lexicalised morality in the UK press 177

446

254
697

1,314
1,112
Frequency

Guardian 724

Telegraph

Sun. Telegraph

Times

Sun. Times
Observer

Figure 3: MORAL and SEX co-occurring in individual articles in 1993

and 2005 in the specific papers. The width of each column represents
the size of each sub-corpus, whereas the height represents the frequency
of the search term

(10) But sex education should encourage pupils to consider “the

importance of self-restraint, dignity and respect for themselves and
others”, the guidelines say. Pupils should be helped to recognise the
physical, emotional and moral risks of promiscuity. “Schools should
foster a recognition that both sexes should behave responsibly in sexual
matters. Pupils should be helped to appreciate the benefits of stable
married and family life and the responsibilities of parenthood.”
(SiBol 93, Times)

The Telegraph makes its views towards the topic quite explicit, describing the
implementation of the guidelines in terms of parents recapturing their right
to educate their children:

(11) The more successful schools were in complementing the role of

parents, the less likelihood there was of parents exercising their right
under the 1993 Education Act to withdraw their children from sex
education. Mr Patten said schools should teach pupils to appreciate the
importance of moral values. They provided ideals to live up to, were the
178 A. Marchi

hallmark of a civilised society and enabled people to live harmoniously

together.
(SiBol 93, Telegraph)

Conversely, the Guardian frames Patten’s guidelines as a form of control,

which is strengthened, in the following example, by the use of modals should
and must:

(12) Patten says parents should check on sex education

PARENTS should be able to check teaching materials related to sex
education before they are used in schools, the Education Secretary,
John Patten, said yesterday. Teaching about sex must be within a moral
framework which encouraged family values and “in no circumstances”
should advocate homosexual behaviour
(SiBol 93, Guardian)

The stress, posed by the use of scare quotes, on the ‘dangers’ of

homosexuality highlights the beliefs and values shared between the Guardian
and its liberal readership. In the same way, the relationship of the
conservative press with its readers is strengthened by expressing aversion
towards a supposedly mechanistic conception of life, based solely on
knowledge and science, rather than on solid moral values:

(13) Sex education, including lessons on HIV and Aids, will be removed
from the science curriculum and become a separate subject. Mr Patten’s
aim is to ensure that pupils learn about sex within a moral framework.
The move reflects concern that too much emphasis is currently placed
on teaching the mechanics with too little stress on the responsibilities
and consequences. Mr Major believes that traditional family values
have been subverted by a combination of liberal thinking and political
correctness. The drive also follows attacks by the Tory Right on single-
parent families.
(SiBol 93, Sunday Telegraph)

The Sunday Telegraph’s aversion to liberal thought and policies (which it

labels as Political Correctness – a pejorative term according to Cameron
(1995) and Suhr and Johnson (2003)) and their ominous consequences is
occasionally made explicit, as it is in its position towards homosexuality:

(14) The lie is not without consequences. The whole environment in

which an American child is brought up today is radically different from
that which prevailed just a decade ago. Schools now distribute condoms
to children as young as 11 without the consent of parents, actively
promoting a sort of animal copulation of the lowest kind, all in the name
of Aids prevention. Are they taught to avoid the one thing that is truly
dangerous, a homosexual affair with an older man? Teachers would lose
Lexicalised morality in the UK press 179

their job suggesting any such thing. Political Correctness demands that
they furnish pupils with a positive view of homosexual life.
(SiBol 93, Sunday Telegraph)

Moving on to 2005, in the SiBol 05 list of concordance keywords,

once again, and unsurprisingly, we find personal pronouns (I, he, you, his,
my and she). We find, in addition, keywords that may be grouped into two
categories:

• Politics: Blair, Iraq, Africa, UN, African, Bush, muslim, Rwanda,

Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo
• The Vatican: Wojtyla, pope, Paul, Krakow, evangelical, Rome,
cardinals and Benedict

It is clear at first glance that the 2005 list of concordance keywords is imbued
with references to current events – it is of course predictable that Bush and
Blair are key items in the press of 2005 compared to 1993 – but what is
interesting is that Major and Clinton are not key in the query comparing
1993 with 2005. In SiBol 05, many of the concordance keywords are also
‘seasonal’, relating, for instance, to the sexual tortures perpetuated at Abu
Ghraib. As already mentioned, 2005 was also the year of the death of Pope
John Paul II, that is Karol Wojtyla, the Pope from Krakow and the election of
the new Pope Benedict XVI. Both are newsworthy events, and so the Vatican
is a dominant topic in general in that period, and it specifically dominates
news dealing with sex and morality, because of both Popes’ commitment
towards the protection of Catholic values in the sphere of sexual and conjugal
ethics.
There is, also, a series of interesting items in the concordance
keywords lists, which characterise the two periods and, especially in SiBol
93, indicate the era’s specific concerns in the association of morality and sex
(see Tables 5 and 6).
In SiBol 93 the reference is to single mothers, birth control and
artificial insemination. The ‘moral panic’ here is the destabilisation and
disappearance of the traditional family. The frame is the political context
of the time, with Major’s ‘Back to Basics’ campaign. In 1993, the issue
of single mothers received particular attention in the media, so much so that
it has been dubbed ‘the year of the lone mother’ (Mann and Roseneil, 1999:
99).
The Back to Basics campaign, and Patten’s guidelines, echoes
(or is echoed by) the Papal Encyclical,15 which aimed to ‘reflect on
the whole of the Church’s moral teaching, with the precise goal of
recalling certain fundamental truths of Catholic doctrine which, in the

15
The English version of the encyclical is available at:
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-
ii_enc_06081993_veritatis-splendor_en.html.
180 A. Marchi

Freq. Freq.
Keyword Percent Percent Keyness
SiBol 93 SiBol 05
VIOLENCE 308 0.06 198 0.02 82.02
ADULTERY 77 0.01 25 50.5
CONTROL 167 0.03 105 0.01 46.44
WOMEN 844 0.015 920 0.12 35.19
AIDS 149 0.03 104 0.01 33.3
ACTS 101 0.02 59 32.13
INSEMINATION 21 1 30.51
PROZAC 25 3 28.84
SINGLE 185 0.03 152 0.02 26.91
PROCREATION 24 4 24.2

Table 5: Keywords for ‘sex and morality’ news items from SiBol 93

Freq. Freq.
Keyword Percent Percent Keyness
SiBol 05 SiBol 93
SURGERY 77 10 36.72 36.72
CANNABIS 53 4 33.87
PEDOPHILE 36 1 30.41
GAY 466 0.06 212 0.04 26.65

Table 6: Keywords for ‘sex and morality’ news items from SiBol 05

present circumstances, risk being distorted or denied’. Among these ‘present

circumstances’ the encyclical enumerates, ‘contraception, direct sterilization,
autoeroticism, pre-marital sexual relations, homosexual relations and
artificial insemination’. The press broadly reports the Pope’s words, but with
a stance that corresponds to their political leaning. For instance, according to
the Guardian the Pope issues rulings, he condemns and uses inappropriate
hyperboles (see Example 15), whilst, according to the Telegraph, he fights
‘evil’ (see Example 16):

(15) Rome accused of failing to understand role of sex

THE Pope’s latest ruling on morality condemns artificial birth control
and other acts forbidden by the Church as “intrinsically evil”. It
mentions sexual perversion and genocide in the same context.
(SiBol 93, Guardian)

(16) In rejecting moral relativism, the Pope is not thinking merely in

terms of sexual behaviour. He is fighting against evil in all its forms.
(SiBol 93, Telegraph)
Lexicalised morality in the UK press 181

In 2005, one government policy that bears heavily on newspapers’ moral

agenda is that concerning homosexuality. There are two reasons for this.
First, there is the Vatican’s strenuous condemnation of homosexuality, which
was defined by Pope Benedict XVI as an ‘intrinsic moral evil’. The Guardian,
the Observer, the Times and the Sunday Times mentioned this (Examples 17,
18 and 19), while the issue does not appear to have been reported in the
Telegraph and the Sunday Telegraph:

(17) His homily in St Peter’s basilica before the cardinals went into
conclave made it clear that he intends to tackle the secularism, moral
laxity and consumerism of contemporary Europe head-on. He has
described homosexuality as tending towards an “intrinsic moral evil”.
(SiBol 05, Guardian)

(18) It is hard to see how the hand of God could have guided the 115
cardinals to elect a former member – albeit involuntary – of the Hitler
Youth who believes homosexuality to be an intrinsic moral evil, other
religions to be defective and other churches – including the Church of
England – not proper.
(SiBol 05, Times)

(19) This because the Pope believes, and has constantly stated, that
homosexuality is a disordered inclination towards moral evil. Couple
that with the evident view that, because this inclination lacks the
biological imperative of procreative heterosexual relations, gay people
are more carnal and promiscuous, and you can instantly understand the
Vatican’s extraordinary antipathy towards them.
(SiBol 05, Sunday Times)

The second seasonal cause of news interest in homosexuality was the

discussion over civil partnerships, with the Civil Partnership Act 2004
coming into force in December 2005. The law enabled same-sex couples
to register as civil partners. Again the Guardian’s take on the issue embodies
the newspaper’s ideal reader (see Example 20). While the other newspapers
debate the morality of same-sex civil partnership, the Guardian considers
moral changes within the gay community:

(20) One by-product of the Civil Partnership Act is this introduction

of a new morality into gay and lesbian society, traditionally somewhat
casual in its relationships – precisely because its relationships have
hitherto been denied any social glue. Indeed, the act is dividing the
gay community, and not only between those who resent its not being
called “marriage” and those who do not wish to ape heterosexual ties so
closely.
(SiBol 05, Guardian)
182 A. Marchi

Of course, these examples provide only a partial picture: they were chosen
as representative of the individual newspapers’ views and moods. It should
be noted, though, that these choices have tended to overstress differences;
however, there are also commonalities. For instance, the papers seem to
agree that there is more to morality than sex, but this idea is interpreted and
represented differently:

(21) MORALITY is the cornerstone of all politics. [. . . ] Instead of a

history of morality, we get a history of moralising. [. . . ] morality is not
simply sexual morality [. . . ]
(SiBol 05, Observer)

(22) Secularism has become more illiberal, more persecutory, more

fundamentalist. In its response the church must no longer be defensive,
but try to set its own agenda. It must argue that modern Christian
societies compare more than favourably with secular ones. The task of
doing God’s will has been interpreted too narrowly, exclusively in terms
of sexual morality.
(SiBol 05, Times)

8. Moral compass

To finish, I want to illustrate one of the ideas I derived from this exploration
by means of a metaphor. We have seen that SiBol 05 was characterised by a
discussion about moral relativism and we have also seen how the term was
characterised by negative semantic prosody.
In SiBol 05, there is also a considerable increase in the number
occurrences of the expression moral compass:16 it appears just eight times
in SiBol 93 but ninety-six times in SiBol 05. The metaphor ‘moral compass’
implies the idea of a unique, objective morality – the purpose of a compass is
to point in one single direction: ‘A compass has a true north that is objective
and external, which reflects natural laws or principles, as opposed to values
that are subjective and internal. Because the compass represents the eternal
verities of life’ (Covey, 1990: 94). Just as there is one ‘true’ north, the term
moral compass could imply that ‘good’ morality is in a single direction and
must be ‘found’. Those who do not have a working moral compass will,
therefore, get lost.
This interpretation fits with our earlier discussion of relativism and
its perceived negativity. The threat of relativism corresponds to the need for a
moral compass. An examination of the concordance lines reveal, indeed, that
most occurrences are about the lack or the loss of it, where lacking and losing
reinforce the idea that a moral compass pointing north is something good. It

16
Case sensitive.
Lexicalised morality in the UK press 183

is also a concept which is often personalised – it is something one can carry

around in one’s pocket:

(23) Mr Blair did not strive to become Prime Minister just so he could
tell the Sun that he makes love to his wife five times a night. He does
have a moral compass, even if he doesn’t always take it to work with
him. He genuinely means it when he says he wants to end world poverty
or improve literacy, or when he says he feels the hand of history on him.
He gets side-tracked by gimmicks and he does, as Brian Sedgemore,
says, “Tell big porkies as easily as he tells small porkies”, but he is
trying to make a difference.
(SiBol 05, Telegraph)

That moral compass is something to be owned is made clear by the

abundance of possessive pronouns among its collocations: his (13), its (10),
her (4), our (2), my (2) and their (2); see Examples 24 and 25:

(24) We are in dangerous waters here, and nobody knows how Clinton
will navigate when his moral compass can no longer guide him.
(SiBol 93, Telegraph)

(25) [speaking of Gordon Brown] By the end, he also went back in time
to take credit for ending slavery and child labour. The really bad news
is that he has found his moral compass and he wants us to find ours too.
(SiBol 05, Times)

We do things with a compass: we can lose it, break it, leave it on the
counter, it is something we hold and in this sense it represents a metaphor
of ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman, 2000), an era of flexibility and movement
and an era of consumerism. Bauman claims17 that the metaphor that best
suits the contemporary citizen is an ‘anchor’, (while before post-modernity
and its end it was ‘roots’), where the anchor – like the compass – stands for
something we carry around, and we use according to our needs: we choose
where to throw it, and when to lift it and leave. It is not something that we
belong to, but something that belongs to us.
In the corpora, the moral compass too is constructed as an instrument
and a commodity to possess. Sometimes we receive it from something or
someone:

(26) Just as Pope John Paul II’s moral compass was forged in
Cracow, with its proximity to Auschwitz and also after the war to the
communist steel-town Nowa Huta, so Pope Benedict’s compass was set
by Traunstein and its Nazi past.
(SiBol 05, Times)

17
Lectio magistralis: ‘Vite di corsa. Le sfide all’educazione della modernità liquida’,
Bologna, 13 November 2008.
184 A. Marchi

Staying within the conceptual metaphor of morality as being a journey, but

in stark contrast with the moral compass in terms of semantic implications,
the corpus contains mentions of the term moral maze. The moral maze is
also a place and, thus, external to the self and independent from it: it is
not something we have, but something we enter, are stuck in, navigate, are
dragged, pitched or plunged into, become lost in and foxtrot round.

(27) The Prime Minister’s call for the country to go ‘back to basics’ has
plunged the Conservatives into a moral maze.
(SiBol 93, Telegraph)

(28) We don’t know what we’re doing. It’s a moral maze out there. And
it isn’t even May 5 yet.
(SiBol 05, Guardian)

‘A maze normally refers to a network of pathways, which, by their

complexity, open and closed routes, and invisibility of orienting landmarks,
obstructs access to a predetermined goal or point of arrival’ (Harvey, 1999:
7). If the moral maze is the problem, the moral compass is the solution.
Interestingly, the metaphor moral maze18 is slightly more frequent in SiBol
93 (thirty-three occurrences) than is SiBol 05 (twenty-three occurrences).
The evidence here is too limited (both in terms of absolute
frequencies and of relative decrease) to allow for any real generalisation,
and it seemed worth extending the question beyond the boundaries of the
corpus. In order to test the validity of the finding, the phrases moral maze19
and moral compass were searched on Lexis Nexis database, looking at all the
British broadsheet newspapers available in a large time span (from 1989 to
2008).20 Figure 4 shows a constant increase in the number of articles making
reference to moral compass.
Newspapers have become progressively larger in size over time, so
the increasing frequency of moral compass is not revealing per se. However,
what is more interesting is how the term changes over time in comparison
with the trend for moral maze. Far from suggesting a correlation between the
rise of one item and the fall of the other, it seems interesting, nevertheless,
to highlight the growing popularity of the compass metaphor, which has
largely surpassed the use of the maze one. A simple Google search could
have told us that moral compass is far more common than moral maze, but
it would have failed to reveal that this popularity seems to be fairly recent.

18
The search term used is case sensitive in order to exclude from the search all references to
the BBC Radio 4 programme, Moral Maze.
19
All occurrences of moral maze were checked manually, in order to separate the mentions
of the BBC Radio 4 programme, from the metaphoric use of the expression.
20
The broadsheets available on Lexis Nexis for the whole time period are: Guardian,
Observer, Times, Sunday Times, Independent and Independent on Sunday. Unfortunately, the
Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph are only available from year 2002, and so had to be
excluded from the query.
Lexicalised morality in the UK press 185

Figure 4: Broadsheets’21 articles mentioning moral maze or moral

compass from 1989 to 2008

Metaphorically we could see the ‘compass’ as what we need to navigate in

the ‘maze’, and to get out of it. It goes beyond the aims of this paper to
attempt a sociological explanation, but the findings hint at an interesting area
for further investigation in our quest for an understanding of morality.

9. Conclusion

It was the intention of this article to both sketch the explicit representation of
morality in the press at twelve years distance, and also to give an impression
of the way CADS methodology can help us to explore something like
‘discourse about morality’, by opening a variety of windows on a particular
socio-cultural (and political) question. Far from being comprehensive, this
analysis does not aim to produce conclusions, but to outline processes of
analysis and to raise further productive questions.
The findings are open to interpretation; for instance, the proportional
decline of explicit reference to morality could at first sight be read in terms
of change in media language (that is, as a fashionable tendency to favour
ETHICAL terms over MORAL ones) but could also be related to broader social
or political issues. Does the fact that in 1993 there was a new Conservative
government while in 2005 there was an old Labour one influence journalists’
use of such terms (particularly in view of the fact that much of what is

21
All hits retrieved on Lexis Nexis for the broadsheets available on the database for the
whole reference time period (Guardian, Observer, Times, Sunday Times, Independent and
Independent on Sunday).
186 A. Marchi

written is reported speech from authoritative voices)? Is the discussion about

morality ‘seasonal’, that is, is it usually sparked by a specific event (such as
a papal pronouncement or the Bulger murder in 1993, see Partington, 2010)?
Is its meaning based on what happens in the real world or does it rely on a
codified agenda that makes certain events become news and labels them as
‘about morality’?
Another observation arising from the current analysis is that the
discussion surrounding morality has become more personal (see Table 3
and the discussion under Section 5). This needs to be understood within
the general trend of personalisation of news discourse; but, even then,
should our conclusion be that news discourse is registering a progressive
personalisation and the discussion about morality has also become more
personalised, or, instead, that even the discussion about morality has become
more personalised?
As concerns the methodology I employed, I started this research by
formulating some general research questions. The nature of the analysis is,
therefore, bottom up and inductive, since I did not have an initial hypothesis
to either corroborate or falsify. I looked at the data, patterns emerged that
caught my eye, and I followed them down the funnel, skimming and filtering
with closer attention and, to use Scott and Tribble’s terms, ‘imagination’:

[W]hen one examines the boiled down extract, the list of words, the
concordance. It is here that something not different from the sometimes
scorned ‘intuition’ comes in. This is imagination. Insight. Human
beings are unable to see shapes, bits, displays or sets without insight,
without seeing in them ‘patterns’. It seems to be a characteristic of the
homo sapiens mind that is often unable to see things ‘as they are’ but
imposes on them a tendency, a trend, a pattern.
(Scott and Tribble, 2006: 7)

Finding patterns, choosing paths, putting together findings, making sense

of them is necessarily partial and subjective. CADS allows us to exploit
the strengths of both quantitative and qualitative approaches, while
compensating some of the reciprocal weaknesses; but it also multiplies the
potential paths we can take and often (as in this case) there is no unequivocal
point of arrival. What we have is a series of choices, where one choice leads
to another and opens new questions or modifies the initial question. It is, in
other words, not simply about providing new answers, but, as with all valid
scientific methodology, about generating new questions. This is research
‘serendipity’, defined as a ‘not just a lucky find, but a lucky find that enables
fresh questions to be asked in the field’ (Partington, 2009: 292). This capacity
to raise new puzzles (Kuhn, 1970) and discover further complexity ‘helps
guarantee that the linguistic scientist will never be out of a job’ (Partington,
2009: 292). The problem from the researcher’s perspective might be ‘where
does it end?’, because there will always be new questions to be asked.
Lexicalised morality in the UK press 187

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