Pursuing the meaning of expressiveness: a holistic, radical contextualist account of lexical expressives

Abstract

While lexical expressives are a widely recognised linguistic category of expressives, the debate continues as to what items are included under this label and what their contribution to utterance and discourse meaning is. In my search to disentangle and shed light on this debate, I adopt a holistic approach and take a broad definition of ‘lexical expressives’ to include any lexical item that systematically and predominantly conveys expressive meaning, regardless of whether it is the only meaning it conveys or not. From this starting point, I conduct a corpus study that serves as the foundation for a novel typology of lexical expressive items based on three parameters: (i) lexico-syntactic, (ii) at-issueness and (iii) functional role. The empirically derived categories of lexical expressives obtained in the new typology are then used to investigate their contribution to meaning in discourse through a questionnaire-based study. The results reveal, firstly, that lexical expressives can contribute descriptive meanings, expressive meanings, a combination of both or none, and secondly, that this contribution is influenced by their expressive type. I supplement this experimental exploration with a theory of meaning that can account for all the different potential contributions. I argue that a radical contextualist theory, which focuses on the main communicated meanings irrespective of whether they are within or beyond the constraints of the logical form, is the most suitable approach to the different potential meaning contributions of expressives. In particular, I apply Jaszczolt’s Default Semantics (2005, 2010, 2021) framework to the study of lexical expressives in discourse and show how descriptiveness, expressiveness, a combination of both or a joint construction of them can all be part of the primary meanings. Overall, this dissertation provides a holistic classification of lexical expressives, a deeper understanding of their contribution to utterance and discourse meanings and a cognitively real theory of meaning that can systematically account for the nuances across expressive types.