Expressive APs and expletive NPs revisited: Refining the extant relevance-theoretic procedural account

Abstract

In the third stage in the development of the notion of procedural meaning, relevance theorists analysed expressive devices like intonation, interjections, expressive APs, expletive NPs, slurs and paralanguage. This paper revisits expressive APs and expletive NPs by arguing that the emotional-state descriptions they trigger only take within their scope a propositional constituent. Such shorter-ranging mental structure does not fit neatly in the definition of higher-level explicature, so two possible solutions are proposed in order to accommodate it within the relevance-theoretic notional apparatus, the second of which could involve a refinement of the distinction between lower- and higher-level explicatures. Moreover, that type of constituent-directed description is shown to be also enacted by other expressives and other linguistic expressions, and to be constructed in other communicative acts. Finally, since the words functioning as expressive APs and expletive NPs come from various lexical categories, an account of the lexical-pragmatic processes enabling their transfer is given.