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
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Journal ArticleDOI
Expressive N+N Combinations in Polish and the Coordination/Attribution Cline
Abstract: In this paper I will examine N+N juxtapositions in Polish, such as kobieta anioł (woman angel) ‘an angel of a woman’, praca marzenie (job dream) ‘dream job’, dziecko geniusz (child genius) ‘prodigy child’, and kierowca cham (driver lout) ‘a lout of a driver’. I will demonstrate that they exhibit properties of expressive combinations, as discussed for English by Potts (2007) and for German by Meibauer (2013). It will be proposed that Polish expressive N+N juxtapositions under analysis fall into two groups. Juxtapositions belonging to the first group, e.g. kierowca cham ‘a lout of a driver’, behave like coordinate compound-like units. Juxtapositions which form the second group of expressive complexes, such as kobieta anioł ‘an angel of a woman’ and praca marzenie ‘dream job’, can be treated as attributive-appositive (ATAP) combinations (in Scalise and Bisetto’s 2009 classification). The occurrence of a cline between coordinate and attributive multi-word units is postulated.
Book ChapterDOI
Discourse-Level Politeness and Implicature
Eric McCready,Nicholas Asher +1 more
TL;DR: This paper considers politeness at the discourse level in terms of strategic choice in an infinitely repeated game by analyzing a much wider range of kinds of politeness strategies, together with their positions in the Borel hierarchy.
Gradability and intensification of the language quantity (on the materials of English, Russian and Japanese)
TL;DR: The role of context is by all means of paramount importance when defining positive or negative types of evaluation as mentioned in this paper, which is the case in English, Russian and Japanese, which possess numerous lexical as well as grammatical groups of quantity representation.
References
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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.