Expressive Presuppositions

When new phenomena are discovered, the semanticist may account for them by enriching his formal framework, or by reducing them to the complex interaction of some of its existing components. The first option may be more exciting; but the second may be more explanatory. Potts provided some welcome excitement with his groundbreaking study of expressives (Potts, to appear). Can a more conservative account be adopted? In this note, we explore a presuppositional analysis of expressives, along the lines of Macià 2002, 2006, Sauerland 2007, and Schlenker 2003. As we will see, most of the action is in the complex interaction of existing components of the semantics and of the pragmatics. Our hypothesis is simple: expressives are lexical items that carry a presupposition of a particular sort, namely one which is indexical (it is evaluated with respect to a context), attitudinal (it predicates something of the mental state of the agent of that context), and sometimes shiftable (the context of evaluation need not be the context of the actual utterance). To make the discussion concrete, we provide in (1) lexical entries for two prototypical expressives, the ethnic slur ‘honky’ (Kaplan 2001), and the French familiar pronoun tu. Our framework is two-dimensional, and thus we evaluate each lexical entry with respect to a context (c) and a world (w). As usual, # indicates presupposition failure: