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These expressions carry meaning only in the non-truth-conditional dimension (−2d) and they do not require an argument either (−f). This category includes all kinds of interjections (e.g. Kaplan’s ‘ouch’ and ‘oops’, but also ‘alas’, ‘argh’, ‘hurray’, ‘yikes’, etc.), as well as items such as greetings (e.g. ‘hello’, ‘goodbye’, which is mentioned by Kaplan) and we should also add onomatopoeic elements which have not evolved into full-blown lexical items (e.g. ‘kerching’ or ‘da-bum tss’, but not items like ‘fizzy’ or ‘to purr’).

As Gutzmann (2013: 30) explains, isolated expletive UCIs ‘do not interact with the rest of the sentence in any non-trivial way. When an interjection like ‘ouch’ is used together with a sentence, the truth-conditional content of the sentence is not affected by the presence of that interjection, whereas its use-conditional content is given by the emotion conveyed by ‘ouch’ itself.’ But as noted above, given that these expressions do not take any argument but are not used as arguments themselves either, it is not clear why we should represent them in semantic composition. In fact, exactly because of their lack of interaction with anything else, they can only appear in peripheral positions (Gutzmann 2013: 6):

(83) Oops, I’ve lost my keys. (84) *I’ve lost my oops keys.

They do not appear mid-sentence unless in quotation, which is of course a case of mere mention rather than use:

(85) You’ve made such a terrible mess and all you had to say was ‘oops’.

However, one could say that there are cases in which isolated expletive UCIs do in fact interact with other components, such as the sentence-final expression ‘man’ (McCready 2010: 35):

society, whereas pretty much in any language typical expressives such as cursewords are usually explained in terms of how the speaker feels when using them.

62 _{However, pace Gutzmann & McCready (2016), the Japanese verbal suffixes ‘-chimau’ and ‘-}

yagaru’ (as well as ‘-shimau’ and ‘-chau’) are not verbal pejoratives like ‘begaffen’ which would make them isolated mixed UCIs, but functional expletive UCIs, exactly because they are not verbs but suffixes. They will be discussed further below in the category of functional expletive UCIs.

76 (86) Ouch, man!

(87) Man, ouch!

In these cases ‘ouch’ appears to be modified by ‘man’, so this would be an argument that isolated expletive UCIs can interact compositionally with other expressions in some cases. But as noted before for isolated expletive UCIs in general, in both the examples ‘ouch’ appears in a peripheral position: either in the beginning, or in the end of the utterance. Because of this, it is possible to say that no modification is taking place, and this is merely a speech act comprising two utterances which do not interact compositionally but just appear consecutively, such as the following:

(88) Oh, hello!

(89) Hey, good morning!

So if the particle ‘man’ constitutes indeed a separate part, something like an utterance of its own, we expect it to be able to appear after almost any kind of (intentional) verbalisation, which is in fact the case:

(90) Hurray, man!63 (91) Argh, man.64 (92) Shh, man.65 (93) Pff, man.66 (94) Boo hoo, man.67

McCready (2010) examines and rejects the idea that the relation in such cases is mere adjacency on the basis that ‘Ouch, man’ is felicitous in a scenario where the speaker has suffered a slight misfortune caused by the interlocutor (e.g. he stepped on her foot) but not in a scenario where the interlocutor has nothing to do with it (e.g. she tripped and fell on her own), while ‘Ouch’ alone is felicitous in both. For McCready, the contrast between these two scenarios makes it ‘clear that ‘man’ is in fact doing something to the meaning of ‘ouch’ […] and so some kind of composition is at work’ (2010: 36). However, I am not sure the argument is convincing enough, as mere adjacency is also able to explain the infelicity. For example, let’s contrast two scenarios:

The speaker meets a baby girl in the park: (95) Hello!

(96) Hello, princess!

The speaker meets an old and distinguished male professor in a book presentation: (97) Hello!

(98) # Hello, princess!

There is clearly a felicity contrast, but it is not clear how this constitutes an argument for compositional interaction, as the greeting ‘hello’ on its own is felicitous in both scenarios and the infelicity is only caused by the addition of the term of address in the second case. 63_{https://www.reddit.com/r/Voltron/comments/5pk3k2/my_attempt_at_the_classic_pose/} 64_{https://twitter.com/MannyNorte/status/19364186425397248} 65_{https://archive.org/details/jamendo-033919} 66_{https://social.shorthand.com/Village_DORP/j2Xoc1RYnn/solartaxi} 67_{http://gawker.com/dave-grohl-accidentally-berates-grieving-son-for-crying-1725145495}

77 As a result, adjacency is able to account for the infelicity and there is no sufficient evidence that composition is at play.

If the above discussion is on the right track, then ‘man’ is shown to be an isolated expletive UCI, just like ‘ouch’ and others, and not a functional shunting UCI as claimed by both McCready (2010: 34) and Gutzmann (2015: 84)68_{. The reason it was claimed to be} a functional shunting UCI was because of its alleged interaction with a proposition p to display that ‘the speaker has some kind of emotional reaction toward p (that it is good or bad)’ (McCready 2010: 34). Under this analysis of ‘man’ as a functional shunting UCI, the idea is that it takes a proposition as an argument and consumes it entirely, leaving nothing at the truth-conditional dimension. As McCready observes, ‘this analysis disallows the assertion of p itself, as desired’ (2010: 34). In fact the reason this is ‘desired’ because of the following example:

(99) What’s the weather like outside? Man!

McCready claims that in this example the interlocutor can only infer that the speaker finds the weather extreme in some way, and the proposition modified by ‘man’ (which would clarify whether it’s too hot or too cold) is not recoverable in any way, therefore it is not asserted.69 _{The alternative analysis would be that the speaker only communicated} that he is in an excited state, and that this is somehow related to the weather would follow merely from inference. Although McCready says that there seems to be no empirical way to choose between these alternatives, she finds that both of them support ‘man’ to be of a shunting type. However, it is not clear why this is so; if we take the second alternative that the speaker merely used an interjection to express his excited state (which was ‘man’ in this case, but could also have been ‘ouch’), then there would be no argument (−functional), which would make the expression a typical isolated expletive UCI. As shown with the examples above, this analysis is even compatible with cases where ‘man’ appears alongside other expressions as in above examples, where co- occurrence was shown to be mere adjacency.

Therefore it seems that so-called isolated expletive UCIs are not really modified even though it might seem so, which strengthens the argument against representing them in the compositional semantics. The same goes for examples such as the following (from Predelli 2013: 75):

(100) Tomorrow, alas, it will rain.

68 _{Although in earlier work Gutzmann (2013) classifies ‘man’ in a different category. Specifically}

he says that ‘an example of a functional mixed UCI is given by the interjectional use of English man when combined with a sentence that contains a gradable adjective. On the truth-conditional layer, man intensifies the property predicated in the propositional content, i.e., Man, it’s hot! means that it is very hot (McCready, 2009). On the use-conditional layer, man expresses that the speaker is somehow affected by that high degree of heat.’ (2013: 31).

69 _{Actually McCready admits that this criterion is not always reliable: ‘the question of how}

extensively we should take particle meanings to be analyzable in terms of shunting types is left for another occasion; it turns on the empirical question of whether or not the propositional content of sentences modified by particles can serve as answers to questions. In many cases it is clear that they can, in others, perhaps not.’ (2010: 34).

78 Although here ‘alas’ appears mid-sentence, it literally interjects: its position is not related to taking any argument, as it can appear in any position between different phrases just not inside them, which confirms its peripheral character:

(101) Alas, tomorrow it will rain. (102) Tomorrow it will rain, alas.

(103)The rain, alas, has ruined the party. (104) *The, alas, rain has ruined the party.

Of course, there is some kind of interaction taking place between ‘alas’ and the rest, as well as ‘man’ and what precedes or follows it. But what we should note here is what the interjection or particle interacts with is not a proposition, but an utterance. The criticism by Amaral, Roberts & Smith (2008) against Potts’ (2005) treatment of adverbials like ‘frankly’ in an upper layer of meaning language (ℒU) is illuminating in this case:

‘We might say that ℒU simply introduces yet another dimension of meaning, that in which utterances, as opposed to propositions or other truth conditional entities, may be modified. But in what sense is this dimension merely a reflection of compositional semantics? What is modified is not the sentence or its compositionally derived parsetree in the meaning language, but the utterance, and the latter is a fundamentally pragmatic entity, as everyone from Bar-Hillel (1971) on has agreed. […]Their treatment arguably requires a theory of the relationship between compositional semantic interpretation and the pragmatics of speech acts.’ (2008: 727, 729).

That is to say, although there can be interaction between so-called isolated expletive UCIs and other units of meaning, since these are essentially utterances, this interaction cannot be captured merely in terms of compositional semantics, even if that would be hybrid semantics; it urgently needs to be complemented by pragmatic considerations of how discourse works, or as Amaral, Roberts & Smith (2008) note, be accounted for by a dynamic theory, as such approaches ‘are designed to model the interaction of syntactically-driven compositional semantics with contextually-enriched pragmatics in the course of interpretation.’ (2008: 745).

4.1.2.4. Elucidating functional UCIs