Metaethical Expressivism

I consider what it might mean for an utterance to "express" an attitude in a way that differentiates expressive from descriptive speech, and how individual words might have the conventional function of performing such acts of expression. Drawing on recent work in formal semantics, I argue that while there are promising models for implementing the intuition that certain expressions and constructions, for instance, deontic and epistemic modals, pejoratives like "damn", and slurs, express non-cognitive states and/or have dynamic non-truth-conditional effects, these models are not easily extended to the classic case of "thin" ethical terms.