Volume 33, Issue 2 - The expressive dimension

Expressives like damn and bastard have, when uttered, an immediate and powerful impact on the context. They are performative, often destructively so. They are revealing of the perspective from which the utterance is made, and they can have a dramatic impact on how current and future utterances are perceived. This, despite the fact that speakers are invariably hard-pressed to articulate what they mean. I develop a general theory of these volatile, indispensable meanings. The theory is built around a class of expressive indices. These determine the expressive setting of the context of interpretation. Expressive morphemes act on that context, actively changing its expressive setting. The theory is multidimensional in the sense that descriptives and expressives are fundamentally different but receive a unified logical treatment.

Potts (this issue) claims that non-speaker-oriented expressive content may be handled by the introduction of an expressive judge to the context. Given both that expressives may express sentiments temporally and modally displaced from the utterance and that there may be multiple expressive judges per sentence, I argue that a unitary judge is insuffcient, and suggest that non-speaker-oriented expressives are more directly captured as a species of partial quotation.

The title of this note has a two-tiered interpretation. On the “use” level, it expresses my admiration for the ingenuity and elegance of Christopher Potts's paper, which is not diminished by the fact that I disagree with him practically across the board. On the “mention” level, my title denotes the key phrase in Potts's example (2), which will figure rather prominently in the following remarks.

We begin with Potts' concluding remarks: “… this paper is by no means the final word on the expressive dimension.” Certainly more work on expressives is necessary if linguistic theory is to address the role of word emotionality in language. No theory will be complete until we do so, and Potts' efforts to move the field in this direction are commendable. A more comprehensive understanding of why and how people use emotional and offensive language will make Potts' theory more complete. Scholars who study offensive expressives need to be familiar with research about why people curse and why they choose the particular words they do. We first address how and why, then we review Potts' work in the context of psycholinguistic research on taboo words.

I compare Potts' use of a “judge” parameter in semantic interpretation with the use of a similar parameter in Lasersohn (2005). The latter technique portrays the content of expressives as constant across speakers, while Pott's technique does not. The idea that the content of expressives is a kind of presupposition is also briefly defended, and a technical problem in the “dynamics” of Pott's formalism is pointed out.

Emotional expressions like damn and bastard seem to bring out the extreme not only in the speakers who use them, but also in the linguists who try to account for them: For Potts, nothing short of a new dimension of meaning can accommodate these expressions. Potts already in earlier work (Potts, 2003) provides one interesting argument for this view: the unpluggability (or nondisplaceability) of these expressions in many cases. Regardless of the position and level of embedding that that damn bastard John occurs in in a sentence, the speaker uttering such a sentence conveys that he, the speaker, does not think all too highly of John . In the present work, Potts still tries to maintain the core of his earlier theory, but slightly retreats from his earlier position accepting examples due to Kratzer and Schlenker where unpluggability is not observed. Potts' interesting work raises two related questions from my perspective: 1) What is the best account for the unpluggability of expressive content? and 2) Is expressive content a uniform phenomenon?

1. Two directions When new phenomena are discovered, the semanticist may account for them by enriching his formal framework, or by reducing them to the complex interaction of some of its existing components. The first option may be more exciting; but the second may be more explanatory. Potts provided some welcome excitement with his groundbreaking study of expressives (Potts, to appear). Can a more conservative account be adopted? In this note, we explore a presuppositional analysis of expressives, along the lines of Macià (2002, 2006), Sauerland (2007), and Schlenker (2003). As we will see, most of the action is in the complex interaction of existing components of the semantics and of the pragmatics.

1. Introduction Christopher Potts has put forward a precise formal analysis of the semantics of expressives, which accounts for their characteristic properties quite well, and which will certainly further our understanding of these expressions. In this short reaction, I concentrate on three aspects where – I think – the proposed analysis of expressives is in need of refinement, or where it is in need of complementation. The three aspects concern (i) the suggested non-accessibility of expressive content to the descriptive meaning dimension; (ii) the internal structure of expressive indices and the nature of index-changing operations; (iii) and the semantic behavior of discourse particles in relation to expressives proper.

1. Introduction Without exception, the commentaries on my paper help further develop and refine the theory of expressives. They approach the expressive dimension from diverse theoretical perspectives, and they leave us with important new data. There is not space in this reply to do justice to all the points raised, so I instead highlight and reexamine the main themes.