Jeremy is a... Expressive-relativism and expressives in predicative positions

Abstract

Expressives are words that convey speakers’ attitudes towards a particular object or situation. Consider two examples: Attributive: That f**khead Jeremy forgot the turkey. Predicative: Jeremy is a f**khead. In both examples the word f**khead communicates some expressive content - the negative attitude of the speaker. However, only in Predicative does it appear to contribute to the truth-conditional content. The task is to explain the semantics of the word f**khead when it seemingly behaves wildly differently in different syntactic positions. In this paper I consider several good candidates for dealing with f**khead occurring in Predicative position: Expressivist and Descriptive approaches that treat f**khead in Predicative as purely descriptive; and Expressive-Contextualism that treats Predicative as communicating to both expressive and descriptive dimensions. I show that none of the options fully capture the meaning of f**khead. Treating Predicative as purely descriptive leaves out the highly important expressive element, whilst Contextualist semantics does not seem as a suitable descriptive theory for expressives. I finally present a novel hybrid account that combines Expressivist semantics with Relativism. I call this view Expressive-Relativism. I show that by adopting Expressive-Relativism we can not only explain the relationship of f**khead in Attributive and Predicative, but also give a suitable descriptive theory that captures the truth-conditions of Predicative.

The Ineffable Case of Expressives

“…These properties are not universally accepted. In particular, the status of independence has been widely challenged (seeGeurts 2007, Gutzmann 2015, Berškytė 2021, Berškytė and Stevens 2023. Since my goal in this paper is to explore descriptive ineffability, I will leave the credibility of other properties to one side.4 I will question the adequacy of this definition of descriptive ineffability in the next section.…”