Expressive adjectives or expressive expletives have been argued to voice the speaker’s attitude towards the referent of the noun with which they co-occur, even though the attitude may be felt to be expressed about the referent of another sentential constituent or the state of affairs alluded to in the sentence where they are inserted. A previous pragmatic approach suggests that this is possible because these expletives perform an individual speech act, while a syntactic approach posits a feature whose detachment from a particular constituent enables the speaker’s attitude to target the referent of another sentential constituent or even on the entire proposition expressed. This paper proposes an alternative relevance-theoretic account of the interpretation of utterances containing expressive expletives, which considers pragmatic factors and the cognitive processes in comprehension. It is grounded in contributions on the output of lexical pragmatic processes and the role of paralinguistic clues in utterance comprehension.
Bayard, Donn & Sateesh Krishnayya. 2001. Gender, expletive use, and context: Male and female expletive use in structured and unstructured conversation among New Zealand university students. Women and Language 24(1). 1–15.
Blakemore, Diane. 1987. Semantic constraints on relevance. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Blakemore, Diane. 1992. Understanding utterances. An introduction to pragmatics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Blakemore, Diane. 2002. Relevance and linguistic meaning. The semantics and pragmatics of discourse markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Blakemore, Diane. 2011. On the descriptive ineffability of expressive meaning. Journal of Pragmatics 43(14). 3537–3550.
Blakemore, Diane. 2015. Slurs and expletives: A case against a general account of expressive meaning. Language Sciences 521. 22–35.
Börjars, Kersti & Kate Burridge. 2001. Introducing English grammar. London: Arnold.
Bross, Fabian. 2021. On the interpretation of expressive adjectives: Pragmatics or Syntax?Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 6(1). 1–13.
Carston, Robyn. 2000. Explicature and semantics. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 121. 1–44.
Carston, Robyn. 2002. Thoughts and utterances. The pragmatics of explicit communication. Oxford: Blackwell.
Carston, Robyn. 2013a. Word meaning, what is said and explicature. In Carlo Penco & Filippo Domaneschi (eds.), What is said and what is not, 175–204. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Carston, Robyn. 2013b. Implicature, explicature, and truth-theoretic semantics. In Maite Ezcurdia & Robert J. Stainton (eds.), The semantics-pragmatics boundary in philosophy, 261–283. Peterborough: Broadview Press.
Clark, Billy. 2007. “Blazing a trail”: Moving from natural to linguistic meaning in accounting for the tones of English. In Randi A. Nilsen, Nana A. Appiah Amfo & Kaja Borthen (eds.), Interpreting utterances: Pragmatics and its interfaces. Essays in honour of Thorstein Fretheim, 69–81. Oslo: Novus.
Collins, Peter & Carmella Hollo. 2000. English grammar. An introduction. London: Palgrave.
Daly, Nicola, Janet Holmes, Jonathan Newton & Maria Stubbe. 2004. Expletives as solidarity signals in FTAs on the factory floor. Journal of Pragmatics 36(5). 945–964.
De Klerk, Vivian. 1991. Expletives: Men only?Communication Monographs 58(2). 156–169.
Frazier, Lyn, Brian Dillon & Charles Clifton. 2015. A note on interpreting damn expressives: Transferring the blame. Language and Cognition 7(2). 291–304.
Greenbaum, Sidney & Randolph Quirk. 1993. A student’s grammar of the English language. London: Longman.
Grice, Herbert P.1957. Meaning. Philosophical Review 661. 377–388.
Gutzmann, Daniel. 2019. The grammar of expressivity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Haegeman, Liliane & Jacqueline Guéron. 1999. English grammar. A generative perspective. Oxford: Blackwell.
Hall, Alison. 2017. Lexical pragmatics, explicature and ad hoc concepts. In Ilse Depraetere & Raphael Salkie (eds.), Semantics and pragmatics: Drawing a line, 55–100. Cham: Springer.
Hopper, Robert, Larry G. Coleman & John A. Daly. 1980. Expletives and androgyny. Anthropological Linguistics 22(3). 131–137.
Huddleston, Rodney. 1988. English grammar. An outline. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hughes, Susan E.1992. Expletives of lower working-class women. Language in Society 21(2). 391–303.
Ifantidou, Elly. 1992. Sentential adverbs and relevance. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 41. 193–214.
Jay, Timothy B.2005. American women: Their cursing habits and religiosity. In Allyson Jule (ed.), Gender and the language of religion, 63–84. London: Palgrave.
Kaye, Barbara K. & Barry S. Sapolsky. 2004. Offensive language in prime-time television: Four years after television age and content ratings. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 48(4). 554–569.
Kendon, Adam. 1988. How gestures can become like words? In Fernando Poyatos (ed.), Cross-cultural perspectives in nonverbal communication, 131–141. Toronto: Hogrefe.
Madella, Pauline. 2020. Prosodic pointing: From pragmatic awareness to pragmatic competence in Chinese hearers of L2 English. PhD dissertation, University of Brighton.
Mazzarella, Diana. 2013. ‘Optimal relevance’ as a pragmatic criterion: The role of epistemic vigilance. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 251. 20–45.
McCloskey, Laura A. & Lerita M. Coleman. 1992. Difference without dominance: Children’s talk in mixed- and same-sex dyads. Sex Roles 27(5–6). 241–257.
McNeill, David. 1992. Hand and mind. What gestures reveal about thought. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Murphy, Bróna. 2009. ‘She’s a fucking ticket’: The pragmatics of fuck in Irish English – an age and gender perspective. Corpora 4(1). 85–106.
Padilla Cruz, Manuel. 2009a. Towards an alternative relevance-theoretic approach to interjections. International Review of Pragmatics 1(1). 182–206.
Padilla Cruz, Manuel. 2009b. Might interjections encode concepts? More questions than answers. Łodź Papers in Pragmatics 5(2). 241–270.
Padilla Cruz, Manuel. 2013. Understanding and overcoming pragmatic failure in intercultural communication: From focus on speakers to focus on hearers. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching 51(1). 23–54.
Padilla Cruz, Manuel. 2017. Interlocutors-related and hearer-specific causes of misunderstanding: Processing strategy, confirmation bias and weak vigilance. Research in Language 15(1). 11–36.
Padilla Cruz, Manuel. 2018a. Expressive APs and expletive NPs revisited: Refining the extant relevance-theoretic procedural account. Lingua 2051. 54–70.
Padilla Cruz, Manuel. 2018b. Pragmatic competence injustice. Social Epistemology. A Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Policy 32(3). 143–163.
Wharton, Tim. 2009. Pragmatics and non-verbal communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wharton, Tim. 2012. Pragmatics and prosody. In Keith Allan & Kasia Jazczolt (eds.), The Cambridge handbook of pragmatics, 567–584. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wharton, Tim. 2016. That bloody so-and-so has retired: Expressives revisited. Lingua 175–1761. 20–35.
Wilson, Deirdre. 2016. Reassessing the conceptual-procedural distinction. Lingua 175–1761. 5–19.
Wilson, Deirdre & Robyn Carston. 2006. Metaphor, relevance and the ‘emergent property’ issue. Mind & Language 21(3). 404–433.
Wilson, Deirdre & Robyn Carston. 2007. A unitary approach to lexical pragmatics: Relevance, inference and ad hoc concepts. In Noel Burton-Roberts (ed.), Pragmatics, 230–259. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Wilson, Deirdre & Robyn Carston. 2019. Pragmatics and the challenge of ‘non-propositional’ effects. Journal of Pragmatics 1451. 31–38.
Wilson, Deirdre & Dan Sperber. 1993. Linguistic form and relevance. Lingua 90(1–2). 1–25.
Wilson, Deirdre & Dan Sperber. 2002. Relevance theory. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 141. 249–287.
Wilson, Deirdre & Dan Sperber. 2004. Relevance theory. In Larry Horn & Gregory Ward (eds.), The handbook of pragmatics, 607–632. Oxford: Blackwell.
Wilson, Deirdre & Tim Wharton. 2006. Relevance and prosody. Journal of Pragmatics 38(10). 1559–1579.
Cited by (4)
Cited by four other publications
Ifantidou, Elly
2024. Pragmatics and Cognition. In The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, ► pp. 1 ff.
Padilla Cruz, Manuel
2023. Paralanguage and ad hoc concepts. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) 33:3 ► pp. 343 ff.
Padilla Cruz, Manuel
2024. Irina T. Pandarova, Revisiting sentence adverbials and relevance (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 334). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2021. Pp. ix + 254. ISBN 9789027213730.. English Language and Linguistics► pp. 1 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.