Clima de aula

At this point it is important to address a possible complication for the present account, i.e. the seeming lack of projection observed when expressives are in non-veridical predicative positions, as shown in the contrast below:

(172) John believes that that bastard Kresge is rich. (173) Kresge is not a bastard.

As mentioned right above, the projection in (172) signals that it’s the speaker who finds Kresge a bastard, and not John. However, in (173) where we have a denial of the expressive, there seems to be no projection of the associative meaning: it’s not just that no inference that the speaker finds Kresge a bastard projects out, in fact it is explicitly said that this is not the case. What are the options here to rescue the associative meaning hypothesis from a potentially devastating counterexample? As mentioned in chatper 4, Zimmerman (2007) suggested two possible solutions for Potts (2007), who faced a similar problem by predicative uses of expressives: type-shifting or lexical ambiguity. Given the compositional irrelevance of associative meaning, the first is unavailable for the present account. So it seems that we’re stuck with the second one, which is not necessarily untenable (it was worked out and argued in chapter 4), yet it comes at a cost as we will be forced to concede that expressions that feel intuitively the

embedded contexts where there is a chance of their content ‘‘leaking’’ – except, of course, if the speaker does agree with the content of the expressive and is willing to make this agreement public. But if this caution means that speakers systematically refrain from using (14) unless they are willing to publicly agree with the description of Kresge as a bastard, (14) will come to imply a speaker commitment to this description – in other words, the presupposition will project, despite the usual classification of believe as a plug. This, I suspect, is the correct explanation for why expressive content normally projects, rather than any theoretical distinction between presupposed and expressive content.’ I think that although this explanation is towards the right direction, it doesn’t go far enough to be explanatory. What does it mean exactly that ‘expressives are so emotionally charged’? How is this property defined and how does it manifest? Unless the property of being ‘emotionally charged’ is clarified, one might claim that it is precisely this property which imposes a theoretical distinction between presupposed and expressive content, contrary to what Lasersohn (2007) sets out to argue. In fact, it seems to me that this was the main claim in Potts (2007). I think that as the current account successfully pins down the distinct property of expressives as their associative meaning component, it allows Lasersohn’s (2007) explanation to go through.

88 _{Of course, there is also the possibility that this is a case of mixed quotation (Kuno 1988, Maier}

2009), i.e. that the speaker said John believes that the “bastard” Kresge is rich. Such a case can be straightforwardly explained, but we assume that it is not always the case.

89 _{Sauerland (2007: 233) was the first to note the ‘obligatory de re effect’ of expressives, and}

pointed it out as a problem for Potts (2007) as his proposal could not account for it.

90 _{I thank Yasutada Sudo for pointing out this complication and for stimulating and constructive}

103 same are distinct, something that feels uncomfortable especially in examples such as the above, where (173) could in fact be an immediate response to (172).

But it turns out that there is a way to explain the difference noted above without resorting to lexical ambiguity: it has to do with the precise lexical content of the associative component of expressives. Conveniently, by clarifying it we will also be able to pin down an important difference between different expressives: as noted by Zimmerman (2007), some expressives can appear in predicative positions (such as ‘bastard’ above), but others cannot (e.g. ‘damn’ or ‘fucking’).

The explanation consists in proposing that there are two different kinds of expressives: one which combines a compositionally relevant component together with an associative one, such as ‘bastard’, ‘motherfucker’, Japanese honorifics etc, and one which consists only of associative meaning, such as ‘damn’, ‘fucking’, etc. Merely for ease of discussion, let’s label the first category ‘complex’ and the latter ‘simplex’ expressives. The proposal is that complex expressives have the following two properties: first because of their compositionally relevant component (which may be as generic as ‘person’ or even ‘sentient entity’, given that they can be used to talk about animals too) they can appear in predicative positions, and second their associative meaning is specific, in the sense that the attitude expressed by the associative meaning is directed specifically towards a specific entity. In particular, this means that the associative meaning of a complex expressive such as ‘bastard’ is that the speaker is angry at the referent of the expression, if a referent exists.

On the other hand, simplex expressives have the opposite two properties: they cannot appear in predicative positions (at the absence of a compositionally relevant component, predication is impossible), and the attitude expressed is not tied to any specific referent. The latter means that they can be employed to express the speaker’s anger either towards a specific referent, if s/he so wishes, or in general, as seen in the examples below:

(174) The fucking kids scratched my car. (175) They scratched my fucking car.

In (174), the speaker is angry at the kids for having scratched his car. But in (175), the intuition is not that the speaker is angry at his own car (even though ‘fucking’ appears right before ‘car’) but at the fact that his car got scratched. So specifically, the idea is that the associative meaning of a simplex expressive such as ‘fucking’ is that the speaker is angry, but the target of this attitude is left unspecified.

So the problem about the lack of projection in (173) is to be explained as follows: because complex expressives express an attitude towards a specific entity, in non- veridical contexts such as (173) it so happens that there is no specific entity in question; as a result, the attitude encoded in their associative meaning is not consummated and thus it does not project. Apart from negation which was seen in (173), the same phenomenon is observed in other non-veridical contexts such as the antecedent of a conditional:

104 (176) If he really is a bastard, he won’t offer to give us a helping hand.

An interesting implication of the different lexical semantics of simplex and complex expressives is that they can explain the so-called ‘repeatability’ property (Potts 2007). According to Potts (2007: 182), repeatability is a distinctive property of expressives: (177) Damn, I left my damn keys in the damn car.

(178) # I’m angry! I forgot my keys. I’m angry! They are in the car. I’m angry!

Although Potts’ (2007) intuition is towards the right direction, I would like to claim that the repeatability property is mostly manifested by simplex expressives because of the non-specificity they afford:

(179) # Bastard, I left my bastard keys in the bastard car. (180) Damn, I left my damn keys in the damn car.