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PRAGMATIC ENRICHMENT VIA EXPRESSIVE CONTENT
Chris Potts UMass Amherst Friday, May 23, 3:30 PM MJH Rm 126 Pragmatics is central to the theory of linguistic meaning because, to paraphrase Levinson 2000, the encoded content of the sentences we utter is only the barest sketch of what we actually intend with those utterances. If I say to you, "Sam's car is in the driveway", the propositional content is straightforward to recover. But what do I *mean*? Without guidance --- from me, from the context, from your general knowledge of the world --- you might be left mired in pragmatic indeterminacy. Suppose I say instead "Sam's goddam car is in the friggin driveway". In peppering my utterance with expressives, I provide clues as to what I am saying and why it is important. This talk is about the nature of this extra information and the role that it plays in pragmatic enrichment. In the first part of the talk, I attempt to come to terms with the diversity of expressive meanings, both across languages and within the range of readings for specific items. I argue that this seemingly disparate linguistic domain is united by the properties described in Potts 2007, and I present a wide range of new evidence for those properties, drawing on recent work on memory (Jay et al. 2007), on linguistic matching constructions (Potts et al. 2007), and on sentiment analysis (Pang and Lee 2004, 2005). Expressives are emotionally charged, inextricably linked with their conditions on use, and highly variable in their discourse contributions. There is no tougher combination for the semanticist. Thus, ever the pragmatist (and pragmaticist), I attempt to make an end-run around meanings, focussing entirely on use (Kaplan 1999). Inspired by van Rooy 2003, I study expressives in the context of conversational signaling games. The approach reveals that certain pragmatic enrichments are naturally stable discourse strategies. If the theory I develop is on the right track, then uttering an expressive is an irrevocable act that can reverberate through the discourse and, viscerally, through its participants. I close the talk by addressing some of the ways in which this theoretical understanding can inform issues and debates outside of linguistics. References: Jay, Timothy, Catherine Caldwell-Harris and Krista King. 2008. Recalling taboo and nontaboo words. American Journal of Psychology 121(1): 83-103. Kaplan, David. 1999. What is meaning? Explorations in the theory of Meaning as Use. Brief version --- draft 1, Ms, UCLA. (For a video recording of Kaplan delivering a newer version: http://www.uctv.tv/search-details.asp?showID=8593.) Levinson, Stephen C. 2000. Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pang, Bo and Lillian Lee. 2004. A sentimental education: sentiment analysis using subjectivity summarization based on minimum cuts. In Proceedings of the ACL. Pang, Bo and Lillian Lee. 2005. Seeing stars: exploiting class relationships for sentiment categorization with respect to rating scales. In Proceedings of the ACL. Potts, Christopher. 2007. The expressive dimension. Theoretical Linguistics 33(2): 165-197. Potts, Christopher, Luis Alonso-Ovalle, Ash Asudeh, Rajesh Bhatt, Seth Cable, Christopher Davis, Yurie Hara, Angelika Kratzer, Eric McCready, Tom Roeper and Martin Walkow. 2007. Expressives and identity conditions. URL http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/Tc5NjlkN/. Ms., UMass Amherst, UMass Boston, Carleton University, Kyoto University, and Aoyama Gakuin University. van Rooy, Robert. 2003. Being polite is a handicap: towards a game theoretical analysis of polite linguistic behavior. In Moshe Tennenholtz (ed.) Proceedings of TARK 9, 45-58. URL http://www.tark.org/proceedings/tark_jun20_03/proceedings.html. 
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