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Journal ArticleDOI

The expressive dimension

Christopher Potts
- 19 Oct 2007 - 
- Vol. 33, Iss: 2, pp 165-198
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.

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Journal ArticleDOI

Advérbios em –mente modificando adjetivos em português brasileiro: modificação gradual e conteúdo expressivo

TL;DR: In this article, the authors present an analysis of adverbs in the position of adjectival modification, restricted to two subclasses: degree modifiers and non-restrictive modifiers.
Journal ArticleDOI

Semantic Dimensions of Slurs

TL;DR: The authors argue that the pejorative dimension of a slur is non-cancellable and that ignorance of the dimension should be counted as ignorance of literal, linguistic meaning, as opposed to a mistake about conditions for appropriate usage.

Matching faces across rotations in view and lighting

TL;DR: This work investigated identity matching performance across 45° rotations of the light source or the face about pitch or yaw with all images shown either upright or inverted, finding that image differences are not sufficient to explain performance.
Journal ArticleDOI

The transparency of expressivism

Wolfgang Freitag, +1 more
- 01 Apr 2022 - 
TL;DR: In this paper , the authors argue that Gareth Evans' argument for transparent self-knowledge is based on a conflation of doxastic transparency with ascriptive transparency, which is ill-motivated.
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

Association with focus

Mats Rooth
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.