Avoiding emotivism: A sociolinguistic approach to moral talk

•A sociolinguistic approach to moral talk helps to avoid an emotivist reification of its function.•Language users put in metapragmatic work to negotiate what moral talk is and what it can do.•Paying attention to metapragmatic work is a way in to understanding the social uses of moral talk.

The ways in which people use language to make moral judgements have long been the focus of debates in moral philosophy. But, despite the recent turn in socially and functionally oriented approaches to linguistics towards the study of evaluative language, little has been said within the linguistic tradition about morally evaluative language. The argument of this paper is that we can use the concept of register (as recently deployed by Agha, 2007) to explore linguistic attempts to index the activity of moral judgement – moral talk. In so doing, we might also be able to resist the reification of the idea that moral talk is a necessarily expressive, emotive, or interpersonal thing, and to view it as a multifunctional resource.