‘I would never…’: Deictic shift and moralizing in anti-immigration reader comments

Abstract

This paper studies how readers respond to a counterfactual request inviting them to imagine themselves in the shoes of an immigrant in a corpus of online reader comments to a Yahoo article on Latino immigration. We initially considered 7,000 comments and for our corpus and analysis selected those in which the commenters perform a deictic shift, i.e. assume the deictic center of the immigrant using the first-person pronoun I and the adjective my, which totalled to 452 comments. The discourse of the comments, however, turned out to be very moralizing – i.e. while managing to assume the spatial and the temporal position of the immigrants, they refused to share the same moral grounds as them, which resulted in a series of I would… and I would never… propositions, which frame the commenters as vastly morally superior to the immigrants. The commenters occupy the legality, good parenting, patriotism and gratitude moral high grounds and often revert to moral grandstanding.