Normative
In a wider sense, a norm tends to mean some standard for evaluating or making judgments about behavior or outcomes.
That's a lotta abstract words in a row.
It usually amounts to talking about how something should be.
There is an occasionally-useful distinction between
- evaluative standards - we should do what seems to be good, for the reason that its effect seems to be good
- descriptive standards, which are more the "do what is standard/typically done" sort
- which is sometimes even fairly prescriptive
(Confusingly, both can be called 'normative', because both are still about judging what you should do)
Normativity has few specialized meanings in specific fields
In philosophy and law, normativity mostly refers to what society collectively considers good, desirable, or permissible.
In philosophy's ethics, normative ethics is about telling us the things that should or shouldnt be done.
In linguistics (and also e.g. law),
normative language refers to text that endorses a certain course of action.
For example, "I think you should keep your promise" is a normative expression in the above sense.
(formulations using 'should', 'will', etc. tend to be pretty normative)
In linguistics, normativity isn't just a topic being discussed, but is often also encoded via phrasing that we might call its own modality (making it a little more than a topic or stylistic choice).
(For context, modality roughly means 'is about permissibility, desirability, likeliness, and/or truthfulness' - and a little more concretely, examples of modalities include deontic modality meaning you want a certain action, epistemic modality expresses what is argued to probably be true, intrinsic modality and disposition modality are more about what options there are)
For example, laws (and to a lesser degree jurisprudence) contain ample normative language, because a good part concerns itself with expressing normative ethics (what should or shouldn't be done) - or what that turns into when you apply that in everyday life.
Legal texts are typically largely normative, and are potentially interesting to language research in that they are also relatively precise at expressing
See also: