Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-j824f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T09:09:28.203Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A note on interpreting damn expressives: transferring the blame*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 September 2014

LYN FRAZIER ,
BRIAN DILLON  and
CHARLES CLIFTON JR
LYN FRAZIER*
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts Amherst
BRIAN DILLON
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts Amherst
CHARLES CLIFTON JR
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts Amherst
*
†Address for correspondence: Lyn Frazier, Linguistics, UMass, Amherst MA 01003.e-mail: lyn@linguist.umass.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Expressives like damn convey a negative attitude toward an entity or toward a situation. What is particularly interesting about such expressions is the looseness of the relation between their syntax, which is the syntax of normal attribute adjectives, and their interpretation (Potts 2005, 2007). An experiment on various negative expressives manipulated the placement of the expressive as a prior utterance, or inside the subject or inside an object of the verb or preposition. Experimental participants were asked what the speaker was most likely to have a negative attitude towards − the subject, the object, or the entire situation. The test items were of two types, ‘non-causal’ and ‘causal’, exemplified by The holiday is on the damn weekend and The dog is on the damn couch. In the non-causal items, the subject (holiday) cannot plausibly be taken as being responsible for the state of affairs described. However, in the causal items, the subject might be responsible for the state of affairs described. The same range of interpretations was observed for all placements of damn. The prior utterance condition (Damn. The dog is on the couch.) yielded more entire situation interpretations than the sentence-internal damn items. Overall, subject damn items yielded more subject interpretations than object damn items. However, as predicted by the hypothesis that blame would devolve on a potentially responsible agent (the culprit hypothesis), there were more subject interpretations in the causal items than in the non-causal items. The results suggest that considerable pragmatic inferencing is involved in the interpretation of expressives, consistent with a proposal that an expressive constitutes a separate speech act.

Keywords

expressivesprocessing not at issue contentpragmatic inferencesspeech actscausal reasoning
Type
Research Article
Information
Language and Cognition , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , June 2015 , pp. 291 - 304
Copyright
Copyright © UK Cognitive Linguistics Association 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

This work was supported by Grant HD18708 from the National Institutes of Health to the University of Massachusetts. Thanks to Shayne Sloggett, Josh Levy, Matt du Pont, Adina Galili, Marysa Mezzetti, Jennifer Dimiyan, and Chidima Oranekwu for help collecting and analyzing the data. We are very grateful to Chris Potts, Bernard Fradin, and Kyle Rawlins for discussion of the issues here, and to Chris Potts and an anonymous reviewer for comments on the manuscript.

References

references

Barker, Chris (2004). Continuations in natural language [extended abstract]. In Thielecke, Hayo (Ed.), Proceedings of the Fourth ACM SIGPLAN Continuations Workshop. ACM.Google Scholar
Dillon, B., Clifton, C. Jr., & Frazier, L. (2014). Pushed aside: parentheticals, memory & processing. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 29, 483−498.Google Scholar
Hall, Jr., Robert, A. (1973). The transferred epithet in P. G. Wodehouse. Linguistic Inquiry, 4, 92−94.Google Scholar
Harris, J., & Potts, C. (2009). Perspective-shifting with appositives and expressives. Linguistics & Philosophy, 32 (6), 523–552.Google Scholar
Hobbs, J. R. (1979). Coherence and coreference. Cognitive Science, 3, 67−90.Google Scholar
Janssen, T. M. V. (1997). Compositionality. In Benthem, Johan van & Meulen, Alice ter (Eds.), Handbook of logic and language (pp. 417−473). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press & North-Holland.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kehler, A. (2002). Coherence, reference, and the theory of grammar. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Kratzer, A. (1999). Beyond ouch and oops: how descriptive and expressive meaning interact. Online: <http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/WEwNGUyO/Beyond%20%22Ouch%22%20and%20%22Oops%22.pdf>..>Google Scholar
Lasersohn, P. (2005). Context dependence, disagreement, and predicates of personal taste. Linguistics and Philosophy, 28, 643−686.Google Scholar
Lauer, S. (2011). Varieties of compositionality: loose talk. Online: <http://www.sven-lauer.net/output/Lauer-Frankfurt-LooseTalk.pdf>..>Google Scholar
May, R. (1977). Logical form and conditions on rules. In Kegl, J., Nash, D., & Zaenen, A. (Eds.), Proceedings of Northeastern Linguistic Society VII (pp. 189−207). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Potts, C. (2005). The logic of conventional implicatures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Potts, C. (2007). The expressive dimension. Theoretical Linguistics, 33, 165−198.Google Scholar
Schlenker, P. (2010). Supplements within a unidimensional semantics II: epistemic status and projection. Proceedings of Northeastern Linguistic Society, 2009. Amherst, MA: Graduate Linguistic Student Association.Google Scholar
Zimmermann, M. (2000). Pluractional quantifiers: the occasional-construction in English and German. In Jackson, Brendan & Matthews, Tanya (Ed.), Proceedings of the 10th Conference on Semantics and Linguistic Theory (pp. 290−306). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University.Google Scholar