The centrality of expressive indices ∗

Without exception, the commentaries on my paper help further develop and refine the theory of expressives. They approach the expressive dimension from diverse theoretical perspectives, and they leave us with important new data. There is not space in this reply to do justice to all the points raised, so I instead highlight and reexamine the main themes. This reply is structured around expressive indices. All the descriptive properties discussed in section 2 of my paper are explained in terms of these objects and their contextual roles. All the important denotations manipulate them, and all the supplementary definitions work primarily to ensure that they behave in an intuitively correct way. Because these indices are so much in the spotlight, the commentaries largely emerge as commentaries on them, and we see a range of reactions: calls to enrich them, calls to handle them differently, calls to reject them. Thus, I use this reply to clarify the role of expressive indices, to defend them against their detractors, and to further articulate their place in meaning composition. I suggest that they might play a role in theories of presupposition and quotation, and I use them to help explicate why judgments about expressives are subject to so much variation and uncertainty. I close by articulating some of the pressing questions that remain unanswered and suggesting paths towards resolving them.