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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Book ChapterDOI
Indirect Reports, Information, and Non-declaratives
TL;DR: The study of indirect reports has gained momentum in the last few years and a variety of philosophical and linguistic proposals have provided a very intriguing picture of what appears to be a very complex phenomenon, comprising several interrelated properties as mentioned in this paper.
Offensive Uses of Language: Slurring and Synecdochical Utterances
TL;DR: In this paper, a synecdochical utterance targeting women (SUTW) is defined as one in which an anatomical part term is predicated of a woman and the speaker distances herself from the target, an act whereby she pledges to support a group that the slur she uses does not target and refuses to support the group that it does target.
Journal ArticleDOI
On the Interpretation and use of Causal Verb-first-clauses in German
TL;DR: In this paper, the grammatical properties and interpretations of a particular type of verb-first-clause in German, in passing also looking at the Wo-verb-end-CLause, are investigated.
Book ChapterDOI
Expressive Small Clauses in Japanese
Yu Izumi,Shintaro Hayashi +1 more
TL;DR: This paper modifies and extends Potts and Roeper’s (2006) analysis of what they call Expressive Small Clauses, simple uses of epithets such as You fool!, to analogous phrases in Japanese, and proposes an account that explains the differences between English and Japanese Expressive small Clauses.
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.