ABSTRACT

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is about the ways in which people use language to communicate moral judgements, questions, uncertainties, descriptions, and so on. It uses the term 'moral talk' to label such uses of language, and they are an important but - in linguistics at least - relatively under-investigated variety of evaluative language. The book outlines the analytical distinction between the social, ethical and political lives of language. It addresses a distinction made by many authors between morality and ethics. The former is the domain of universal codes and directives that tell us what it is right and wrong to do. The book shifts attention from the traditional focus of critical discourse analysis on the producers of language, those who choose what to say, to the interpreters, and those who choose how to take the language of others.