Abstract
Expressives are words that convey speakers’ attitudes towards a particular object or situation. Consider two examples:Attributive: That f**khead Jeremy forgot the turkey.Predicative: Jeremy is a f**khead. In both examples the word f**khead communicates some expressive content - the negative attitude of the speaker. However, only in Predicative does it appear to contribute to the truth-conditional content. The task is to explain the semantics of the word f**khead when it seemingly behaves wildly differently in different syntactic positions. In this paper I consider several good candidates for dealing with f**khead occurring in Predicative position: Expressivist and Descriptive approaches that treat f**khead in Predicative as purely descriptive; and Expressive-Contextualism that treats Predicative as communicating to both expressive and descriptive dimensions. I show that none of the options fully capture the meaning of f**khead. Treating Predicative as purely descriptive leaves out the highly important expressive element, whilst Contextualist semantics does not seem as a suitable descriptive theory for expressives. I finally present a novel hybrid account that combines Expressivist semantics with Relativism. I call this view Expressive-Relativism. I show that by adopting Expressive-Relativism we can not only explain the relationship of f**khead in Attributive and Predicative, but also give a suitable descriptive theory that captures the truth-conditions of Predicative.
Highlights
Mark and Jeremy are preparing Christmas dinner1
Expressive-Relativism allows for the expressive content to be captured via the Expressivist semantics, whilst the descriptive content is captured via Relativism
I put forth a hybrid account which combines Expressive semantics with Assessment-Sensitive Relativism, like that presented in Lasersohn (2005, 2017)
Summary
Mark and Jeremy are preparing Christmas dinner. To Mark’s horror, it becomes clear that Jeremy has forgotten to provide the turkey that they had agreed he would acquire. (ii) Early Expressivism/Emotivism (Stevenson 1937)—borrowing ideas of how one might deal with ethical language (e.g. good, bad), this option would deny that Predicative has any truth-conditional content and rather means something like “Boo to Jeremy!". Note that such account would deny that there’s any descriptive content in the case of Attributive as well. (iv) Hybrid accounts (Gutzmann 2015, 2016), and the one presented in this paper— reject the idea that expressive and descriptive contents are independent Such accounts give a treatment of Predicative that accounts for both descriptive and expressive elements, normally, through a combination of Expressivist semantics with some descriptive theory. Expressive-Relativism allows for the expressive content to be captured via the Expressivist semantics, whilst the descriptive content is captured via Relativism
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