ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about what kinds of linguistic behaviour count as doing moral talk. Identifying moral talk also means assessing the moral charge of situations against whatever moral background people bring to bear. It discusses the specificity of moral talk, arguing that some moral talk is general and some is specific, and that this relates to two distinct kinds of indeterminacy. Given the variability and contest associated with morality itself, accounting for such indeterminacy is important. The chapter presents a list of phenomena with some theoretical hesitancy as indexing moral concerns such as deontic modality, narrative, and markers of affect. These phenomena might be used to index general normative concerns, specifically moral ones, or yet more specific concerns with 'justice' or 'courage', say. They may be quite indeterminate about what kind of concern they index. Such phenomena perhaps spell out their normative concerns most clearly, but moral talk is not reducible to these phenomena.
