Composure and composition
Maria Esipova
December 2022 

In this paper, I argue that non-truth-conditional affective meanings (i.e., expressive meanings) are architecturally (i.e., cognitively) distinct from truth-conditional affective and affect-related meanings—in ways that warrant complete separation of the two types of meaning in our formal semantic theories. In particular, I show that expressive meanings do not have to interact semantically with their syntactic surroundings, but truth-conditional meanings do even when they are affect-related and not-at-issue. This contrast holds even when the two types of meaning are contributed by uncontroversially the same type of morphosyntactic objects, as is the case for affection-expressing diminutive suffixes (non-truth-conditional) vs. derogatory/pejorative suffixes (truth-conditional) in Russian. I, thus, propose that, while modeling expression of immediate affect as direct altering of the expressive parameter of the context in Potts 2007b is already a good way to capture its performative and non-truth-based nature, we should furthermore abandon the attempt to establish a compositional link between such performative context-altering effects of producing the form of a given item and the meaning contribution said item makes in its syntactic context. In addition, I demonstrate that we observe some of the same typology of affective and affect-related meanings as conveyed through “secondary” channels, such as prosody, facial expressions, and non-face gesture, as we do for fully conventionalized segmental morphemes (i.e., “words”). I furthermore show that we routinely make use of a productive mechanism of going from performative, non-truth-conditional expression of affect to demonstrations of such expression within pieces of truth-conditional meaning of the general form ‘(such that) it would make me/one go “DEMONSTRATION” ’, which we can then combine as supplements or modifiers with other truth-conditional content. We observe this process at work both for “words” (e.g., in at least some instances of spoken word expressives used for degree intensification) and for other types of meaning–form mappings (e.g., facial expressions and/or prosody conveying some form of surprise-related or negative affect)—and we can, thus, apply the same formal analysis to all these cases. [Note: While the July 2021 and subsequent versions of the paper relies on some of the same data as the January 2020 manuscript, it has been written entirely from scratch, with a new framing, proposal, and structure.]

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/005003 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	In stasis
keywords:	composition, expressives, attitudinal expressions, non-restricting modifiers, supplements, degree modifiers, facial expressions, gestures, prosody, semantics
previous versions:	v2 [July 2021] v1 [January 2020]
Downloaded:	1373 times

 

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