For the Cornell workshop on philosophy of language for metaethicists
April 28, 2008

The pragmatics of expressive content
Christopher Potts
UMass Amherst Linguistics

Abstract

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 make a wealth of
information available to you.  You might still feel unsure of why I am
saying this, but I do provide a window into my emotive state.

While it can be fruitful to ask about the conventionalized content of
expressive items (Potts 2007), this might miss what's really special
about these morphemes and constructions: they guide the pragmatic
enrichment of the utterances that contain them.  In choosing "Sam's
goddam car is in the friggin driveway" over its expressive-free
counterpart, I help convey to you how you should understand what I am
saying and why it is important.  Kaplan (1999) urges us to think about
expressives in terms of what they do to the contexts that contain
them.  This paper pursues that idea and what it means for linguistic
meaning studies.

The approach has ramifications for how we think about expressive
content in the context of questions about the law and the media.  If
the theory I develop is on the right track, then uttering an
expressive is an irrevocable act that can reverberate through the
entire context and, viscerally (Jay 2000) through its discourse
participants.  We know it's powerful stuff.  I aim to help us better
understand the nature of this power.

References

Jay, Timothy. 2000. Why We Curse: A Neuro-Psycho-Social Theory of
Speech. Philadelphia/Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Kaplan, David. 1999. What is meaning? Explorations in the theory of
Meaning as Use. Brief version --- draft 1, Ms., UCLA.

Levinson, Stephen C. 2000. Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of
Generalized Conversational Implicature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Potts, Christopher. 2007. The expressive dimension. Theoretical
Linguistics 33(2):165--197.