Linguistic Inquiry
Spring 2009, Vol. 40, No. 2, Pages 356-366
(doi: 10.1162/ling.2009.40.2.356)
Expressives and Identity Conditions
Article PDF (142.75 KB)
Abstract
We present diverse evidence for Pullum and Rawlins’s (2007) claim that expressives behave differently from descriptives in constructions that enforce a particular kind of semantic identity between elements. Our data are drawn from a wide variety of languages and construction types, and they point uniformly to a basic linguistic distinction between descriptive content and expressive content (Kaplan 1999, Potts 2007).