The Expressive Dimension

The Expressive Dimension Chris Potts

Some expressive meanings act as bridges between the two realms, by mapping descriptive content to expressive content.

Whenever I pour wine, the damn bottle drips.

The bottles can vary with the choice of pouring events. One might expect the meaning of damn to vary as well, so that the example would assert that in all situations s such that the speaker pours wine in s, the bottle in s drip in s and the speaker is in a heightened emotional state in s. But that paraphrase is consistent with the speaker feeling no special expressive attitude in the context of utterance, but rather only in wine- pouring situations. That is not what we intuit, though. Rather, we infer from the speaker’s use of damn that he is in a heighted emotional state right this minute.

—> Expressives are like iconic language in that the fourth wall is broken. 

In CS terms, expressives are always scoped to the namespace, and not in lexical or semantic scope. Section 2.3 clarifies that expressives need not be bound as global variables, just as global to the namespace. In other words, we might consider expressives global in a JS context, where iframes can embed other globals which are unable to reference out of their global contexts. 

This suggests expressives are useful identifiers of the context and the contextual judge. 

So expressives are indexical, in that they comprise part of the context. They are speech acts. Does iconicity fit into this framework as well? Is there a sense in which iconic language implies, entails, presumes upon the speaker’s frame of mind? 

Expressive overloading: with more expressives, you can narrow the bound of possible expressive magnitude. 

Like metaphor, repeated use of expressives makes them idiomatic and they lose their ability to bind to the context

SEMINAR WEEK 5

Look at Mary Douglas, Penny Eckert (jocks and burnouts)

expressives: lexical items that conventionalize meaning at two different levels. (Evidence that words can conventionalize meaning at different levels)

question: Is enregisterment (the process by which distinct forms of speech come to be socially recognized as indexical of speaker attributes) 

So I’ll take recordingds of students talking about their experience in high school, talk about the linguistic variation, 

— but is identity something stable?      Literary theory: people change by overhearing their own speech (Bloom)

    Becoming a marihuana user

        “explaining behavior in terms of the emergence of motives and dispositions in the course of experience.”

— growing older:      affect starts being associated with an emerging social order. You have to become emotionally engaged with the values that are 

pragmatics: a question under discussion,      iconicity flows back the other direction, characteristics of your own speech reflect who you are. 

---

    This approach can explain Michelle Friend’s account of Computer Scientists “always being a certain way.” Literacy elicits, presumes upon a conventionalized sensory field. Read Ong, 

Where do we draw the line between systematicity and true iconicity?     I have a little trouble with this distinction. The difference between (conventional) systematicity and iconicity is apparently in the way the signs are bound to sounds. But if we leave the domain of the signified completely free, the distinction collapses. Whatever inherentness there might be in iconicity can be reified in how 

Bergen Language (2004?)