ABSTRACT
This chapter is about critique, and about the value of moral talk. It focuses on the value of ways of interpreting moral talk. The chapter argues that practices of linguistic interpretation can be understood as agentive, just like practices of use. It then seeks to demonstrate that such an agentive understanding of interpretation is presupposed by some existing approaches to language ideologies, especially the critique of 'standard language ideologies'. The chapter also focuses on the institutionalised interpretative practices involved in 'sentiment analysis' and 'psychographic' surveys. Psychographic or lifestyle research is a technology used in 'market segmentation'. Sentiment analysis gathers naturalistic data on the evaluative claims of internet users from their 'user-generated' online comments. The political communications consultants, psychographers and sentiment analysts discussed an emotivist ideology of moral talk. The emotivist position might therefore be seen, and defended, as an aspect of the liberalism of neutrality that, in linguistics, also underpins such things as campaigns to save endangered languages.
