Expressive Meanings and Expressive Commitments. A Case of Meaning as Use
Leopold Hess · 2019
Expressives, i.e. words such as ‘damn’ or ‘bastard’, seem to convey a specific kind of content, different from, or on top of, “regular” descriptive meaning. Following the seminal work of Chris Potts (2005), the meaning of expressives is often conceptualized within a two-dimensional semantic framework, in which descriptive and expressive contents are separated as a result of special rules of semantic composition (cf. Gutzmann 2015). This approach is successful in accounting for some interesting semantic properties of expressives, e.g. their projective behavior, and has also been extended to other classes of expressions, such as racial slurs or honorifics. However, it does not offer any actual insight into the nature of expressive meaning (the two-dimensional formalism operates on dummy values, independently of what they may stand in for). The present paper offers an alternative, pragmatic account of expressives based on the observations that expressive meanings seem to involve directly the speaker (her states, emotions or attitudes) rather than just abstract (e.g. truth-conditional) contents, and that the utterer of an expressive is responsible for the choice of loaded, often taboo vocabulary. The account is developed in a commitment-based scorekeeping model of discourse (inspired by Lewis 1979 and Brandom 1994), in which hearers interpret speakers’ utterances by attributing commitments to them. Besides assertoric commitments (and potentially other kinds), expressive commitments can be distinguished. These are commitments to the appropriateness or applicability of a given expression, which also can be attributed to speakers based on their utterances (separately from assertoric commitments). What characterizes expressives as a lexical class is that they always raise the issue of speaker’s expressive commitment. In short, expressive meanings are commitments to the appropriateness of strongly charged (often vulgar or taboo) vocabulary - which, in turn, can signal a speaker’s heightened emotional state, negative attitude etc.