Gutzmann, Daniel. 2013. Expressives and beyond. An introduction to varieties of use-conditional meaning. To appear in: Gutzmann, Daniel & Hans-Martin Gärtner (eds.): Beyond Expressives. Explorations in Use-Conditional Meaning. Current Research in the Semantics Pragmatics-Interface (CRiSPI) 28. Leiden: Brill. 1–58.
Abstract
This paper provides an descriptive and terminological overview of the varieties of use-conditional meaning. Use-conditional meaning and expressions that convey it can be found across all layers of natural languages, ranging from the word level down to the phonological level and up to the syntactic one, and even beyond that. I will present examples of all these varieties and introduce three features according to which use-conditional items (UCIs) can be classified into five different types. The feature of functionality [± f ] concerns the question of whether a UCI needs an argument in order to express complete use-conditions. The feature of 2-dimensionality [±2d] tells us whether a UCI also expresses truth-conditional content, whereas the feature of resource-sensitivity [±rs], which is only applicable for [+f, −2d] expressions, accounts for the fact that some functional UCIs do not pass their argument back. The distribution of these three features leads to 5 kinds of UCIs, called isolated expletive UCIs [−f, −2d], isolated mixed UCIs [−f, +2d], functional expletive UCIs [+f, −2d, −rs], functional shunting UCIs [+f, −2d, +rs], and functional mixed UCIs [+f, +2d]. Finally, I discuss the properties that Potts (2007b) suggested as characteristic features of expressive UCIs and show that only a subset of them holds for UCIs in general.