Beyond Expressives: Explorations in Use-Conditional Meaning

Beyond Expressives: Explorations in Use-Conditional Meaning offers empirical and theoretical studies of expressions whose meaning falls outside the standard realm of truth-conditional semantics. Aspects of meaning that are better captured by their use-conditions instead came into the spotlight of formal semantics recently, mainly due to the raised interest in expressions like interjections or swear words. Going beyond such expressives, the contributions provide detailed semantic analyses of a broad range of use-conditional items, including particles, non-inflectional constructions, personal datives and interpretational effects of focus. This volume thereby proves that the empirical domain of use-conditional meaning is as diverse as the truth-conditional one, equally amenable to systematic semantic treatments.

This book is an exciting, eye-opening collection of novel and challenging data from English, German and Japanese. For anyone who needs persuading that there is more to language expressivity than informational content, this book is a must. For those who need no persuading, this book will be no less a treat. It offers to all not merely sets of entrancing new observations, but also analyses which feed one’s imagination as to how best to extend current methodologies to make these data tractable for formal modelling. Ruth Kempson, King’s College

Daniel Gutzmann is postdoc at the Institute of Linguistics at the University of Frankfurt. He has worked on the semantics of use-conditional meaning, including expressives, modal particles, datives, sentence mood and verum focus, as well as on the pragmatics of quotation.

Hans-Martin Gärtner is research advisor at the Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He has mainly worked on grammar formalisms as well as on the syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and typology of clause types.

Contributors include Daniel Gutzmann, Sebastian Bücking and Jennifer Rau, Sophia Döring, Markus Egg, Laurence Horn, Eric McCready and Yohei Takahashi, Sophie Repp, Yasutada Sudo, and Henk Zeevat.