Journal ArticleDOI
The expressive dimension
TLDR
The authors developed a general theory of volatile, indispensable meanings of expressives and developed a multidimensional theory of descriptives and expressives, based on a class of expressive indices that determine the expressive setting of the context of interpretation.Abstract:
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. Expressives morphemes act on that context, actively changing its expressive setting. The theory is multidimensional in the sense that descriptives and expressives are fundamentally di erent but receive a unified logical treatment.read more
Citations
More filters
Proceedings Article
Learning Word Vectors for Sentiment Analysis
TL;DR: This work presents a model that uses a mix of unsupervised and supervised techniques to learn word vectors capturing semantic term--document information as well as rich sentiment content, and finds it out-performs several previously introduced methods for sentiment classification.
Book
The logic of conventional implicatures
TL;DR: In this paper, a preliminary case for Conventional Implicatures and a logic for conventional implicatures are presented, together with a syntactic analysis of Grice's definition.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Utility and Ubiquity of Taboo Words
TL;DR: The uniquely human facility for swearing evolved and persists because taboo words can communicate emotion information more readily than nontaboo words, allowing speakers to achieve a variety of personal and social goals with them (utility).
Journal ArticleDOI
Advances in the Cross‐Linguistic Study of Ideophones
TL;DR: This review surveys recent developments in ideophone research and reveals new insights about their interactional uses and about their relation to other linguistic devices like reported speech and grammatical evidentials.
Journal ArticleDOI
Toward a Taxonomy of Projective Content
Abstract: Projective contents, which include presuppositional inferences and Potts's (2005) conventional implicatures, are contents that may project when a construction is embedded, as standardly identified by the FAMILY-OF-SENTENCES diagnostic (e.g. Chierchia & McConnell-Ginet 1990). This article establishes distinctions among projective contents on the basis of a series of diagnostics, including a variant of the family-of-sentences diagnostic, that can be applied with linguistically untrained consultants in the field and the laboratory. These diagnostics are intended to serve as part of a toolkit for exploring projective contents across languages, thus allowing generalizations to be examined and validated crosslinguistically. We apply the diagnostics in two languages, focusing on Paraguayan Guarani (Tupi-Guarani), and comparing the results to those for English. Our study of Paraguayan Guarani is the first systematic exploration of projective content in a language other than English. Based on the application of our diagnostics to a wide range of constructions, four subclasses of projective contents emerge. The resulting taxonomy of projective content has strong implications for contemporary theories of projection (e.g. Karttunen 1974, Heim 1983, van der Sandt 1992, Potts 2005, Schlenker 2009), which were developed for the projective properties of particular subclasses and fail to generalize to the full set of projective contents.
References
More filters
Book
Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language
TL;DR: A theory of speech acts is proposed in this article. But it is not a theory of language, it is a theory about the structure of illocutionary speech acts and not of language.
Journal ArticleDOI
A theory of focus interpretation
TL;DR: A range of semantic and pragmatic applications of the theory are examined, and a unitary principle specifying how the focus semantic value interacts with semantics and pragmatic processes is extracted.
Book
Foundations of Illocutionary Logic
TL;DR: John Searle presents the first formalised logic of a general theory of speech acts, dealing with such things as the nature of an illocutionary force, the logical form of its components, and the conditions of success of elementary illocutions.
Book
The logic of conventional implicatures
TL;DR: In this paper, a preliminary case for Conventional Implicatures and a logic for conventional implicatures are presented, together with a syntactic analysis of Grice's definition.