Full Description
Beyond Expressives: Explorations in Use-Conditional Meaning offers empirical and theoretical studies of expressions whose meaning falls outside the standard realm of truth-conditional semantics. Aspects of meaning that are better captured by their use-conditions instead came into the spotlight of formal semantics recently, mainly due to the raised interest in expressions like interjections or swear words. Going beyond such expressives, the contributions provide detailed semantic analyses of a broad range of use-conditional items, including particles, non-inflectional constructions, personal datives and interpretational effects of focus. This volume thereby proves that the empirical domain of use-conditional meaning is as diverse as the truth-conditional one, equally amenable to systematic semantic treatments.
This book is an exciting, eye-opening collection of novel and challenging data from English, German and Japanese. For anyone who needs persuading that there is more to language expressivity than informational content, this book is a must. For those who need no persuading, this book will be no less a treat. It offers to all not merely sets of entrancing new observations, but also analyses which feed one's imagination as to how best to extend current methodologies to make these data tractable for formal modelling. Ruth Kempson, King's College
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of contributors
Expressives and beyond: An introduction to varieties of use-conditional meaning
Daniel Gutzmann
German non-inflectional constructions as separate performatives
Sebastian Bücking and Jennifer Rau
Modal particles and context shift
Sophia Döring
Discourse particles, common ground, and felicity conditions
Markus Egg
I love me some datives: Expressive meaning, free datives, and F-implicature
Laurence R. Horn
Good reasons
Eric McCready and Yohei Takahashi
Common ground management: Modal particles, illocutionary negation and VERUM
Sophie Repp
Biased polar questions in English and Japanese
Yasutada Sudo
Expressing surprise by particles
Henk Zeevat
Index
