Project description: Expressive content and the semantics of contexts

movement There are often curious misalignments between an expressive’s syntactic position and its semantic argument. To what extent is this like well-known scope-shifting phenomena? Intervention effects Expressives often induce strong interventions effects, though the reasons for this are only beginning to be understood (Kratzer 1999; von Fintel 2003; Kaufmann 2004). Theory design Expressives raise foundational questions about theory design (Kaplan 1999), particularly in the context of resource-sensitive approaches (Jacobson 1999, 2000; Asudeh 2004; Potts 2004). Evidentiality Evidentials are generally characterized as perspective-dependent particles that convey something about the speaker’s attitude towards the content she is offering. What exactly they convey can be difficult to specify using language not drawn from the evidential system itself (descriptive ineffability; see Faller 2002:3). But to what extent do they manifest the independence property? That is likely to be the central question, and there is no better place to explore it than UMass Amherst, where Linguistics Professors Margaret Speas and Tom Roeper (with Jill de Villiers, Jay Garfield, and Evangeline Parsons-Yazzie) have NSF funding to work on evidentials crosslinguistically.13 With our project and theirs going in tandem, important, largescale results can be obtained. Dynamics If the above theoretical treatment is on the right track, then expressives are dynamic at the subsentential level and thus count as a new form of support for the full-fledged dynamics of Bittner (2001, 2003). Such approaches can also make good on the intuition behind procedural meanings, as discussed within the context of Relevance Theory (see especially Blakemore 2001).