On the descriptive ineffability of expressive meaning

By D. Blakemore. 2011

115 citations recorded by the source corpus.

On the descriptive ineffability of expressive meaning This paper addresses the question of whether there can be a unitary account of expressive meaning by considering the descriptive ineffability of expressives such as damn or bastard, on the one hand, and certain kinds of repetition, on the other. Drawing on Blakemore’s (2002) work on the semantics of discourse markers and Wharton’s (2009) work on the pragmatics of non-verbal communication, I show first, that Blakemore’s notion of procedural meaning can provide an explanation for the descriptive ineffability of expressives such as damn; and, second, that why linguistic expressives are similar to non-linguistic expressive behaviour such as gesture and tone of voice. Finally, I show that the descriptive ineffability of expressive meanings conveyed by repetition must be given a different sort of explanation: it follows from the hearer’s assumption that the processing effort entailed by the repetition can be offset by weakly communicated cognitive effects – effects which the speaker trusts the hearer to derive for himself on the basis of his memory and imagination. The paper concludes by speculating on why these two different sorts of expressive meaning are not distinguished in work on free indirect style (cf Banfield 1982, Fludernik 1993). Keywords Descriptive ineffability Expressive Expletive Free indirect style Interjection Non-verbal communication Procedural meaning Relevance Repetition Weak communication

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Language and Linguistics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ad13f58ba8fcaa841bb89f938e37af5d2613585d

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In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

1. Robyn Carston
2. Deirdre Wilson
3. Michael Haugh
4. Gerard Steen
5. Elly Ifantidou

In Language and Linguistics

1. Robyn Carston
2. Deirdre Wilson
3. Elly Ifantidou
4. Gerard Steen

Citations in the corpus

• The heterogeneity of procedural meaning (2016, background): “595 The big move for the notion of procedural meaning/encoding is its application 596 beyond the clearly linguistic to other kinds of codes, natural and conventional, as 597 developed by Tim Wharton.”