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You Hoboken! Semantics of an expressive label maker

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Abstract

‘You bastard’ is insulting because ‘bastard’ is an expletive, but what’s wrong with ‘You Hoboken’ or ‘You big wet noodle’? This paper explores the semantics of a vocative construction that is particularly efficient at coining what I call ‘expressive labels’; these are affect-transmitting expressions that present themselves as apt for identifying their discourse target via speaker affect. Building on work by Portner (in Schwab and Winkler (eds) On information structure, meaning and form. Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2007) and Gutzmann (The grammar of expressivity, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2019), I show how discourse properties direct and constrain the conversion to expressive label, and offer a semantics for this construction that unifies these cases with more conventional evaluative vocatives, like ‘you bastard’.

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Notes

  1. The sense in which I mean construction for the purposes of this paper is: formulaic string. Although this data is amenable for treatment in terms of construction grammar, e.g. as a formal idiom in the sense of Fillmore et al. (1988), I will not commit to that framework here.

  2. Cf. Gutzmann (2015). Thanks to John Goldsmith for pointing me to the ‘oh’ cases.

  3. These are Gutzmann’s (2015) observation that expressive modifiers can target expressives, and Potts’ (2007) descriptive ineffability property respectively.

  4. But see Corver (2008), Shormani and Qarabesh (2018) and Gutzmann (2019).

  5. This is not to say that \(\phi \) cannot contain determiners, the data will display many such cases, but that its maximal projection cannot be a DP.

  6. Though embedding failure is not so widespread in German, in which this construction can form a normal DP cf. Gutzmann (2019).

  7. The appositival reading here is not the intended structure, and is to be ignored.

  8. Postal offers plural \(\phi \) cases as evidence that pronouns are a subtype of determiner—a proposal threatened by the ungrammaticality of most singular PRO + CN constructions. For discussion see Huddlestone (1984), Elbourne (2001), Delorme and Dougherty (1972) and Quirk et al. (1985). Note that for reasons of space and scope, I will not discuss the plural case here.

  9. For a similar analysis cf. Corver (2008). Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for alerting me to the possibility that this is a form of the vocative.

  10. This admits crosslinguistic variation. As Gutzmann (2019) points out, there are ‘integrated’ uses in which ‘du \(\phi \)’, the German equivalent, embeds.

  11. Indeed, as he points out, d’Avis and Meibauer (2013) call these forms ‘pseudo vocatives’. I take this to support my general line that this is a functionally unique construction generated outside of core grammar.

  12. As Zwicky (1974) points out, the availability of evaluative nouns for vocative use is a general feature of vocatives.

  13. Though as one reviewer notes, these cases can also be easily interpreted ironically.

  14. Cf. Shormani and Qarabesh (2018) for overview.

  15. The semantics/pragmatics border is contentious and the line I draw follows Lewis (1975), but I will not pause to defend my division here. See, e.g. Armstrong (2019) for an approach on which conventions are contextually generated.

  16. As Horn employs it, reanalysis proceeds by broadly Gricean reasoning. The term itself, however, originates in diachronic linguistics where it is not commital with respect to the way in which reanalysis unfolds. I use it here in this broader sense to cover any form of pragmatic reinterpretation.

  17. Though this section is targeted at free enrichment as defended by Recanati, it also concerns any proposal that makes use of optional, unconstrained pragmatic meaning supplementation, as in Carston (2002, 2004) and Wilson and Sperber (2004).

  18. Though free enrichment and related approaches do not currently contain resources for introducing expressive meaning as part of construction meaning, I leave it open, however, that defenders could supplement in this way.

  19. Underconventionalisation is in the same conceptual ballpark as the overgeneralisation criticisms raised by Stanley (2000) since it shares in the root of that problem, namely a lack of motivated constraint on the application of the rewriting rules.

  20. Note that this point requires only that be available, not that there be no other possible reading.

  21. The Pottsian (2005) embargo on use-conditional input types is intended to prevent expressive embedding. But as Gutzmann (2015) points out, this cannot be quite right as expressives can easily modify other expressives, as in ‘bloody fucking keys’.

  22. In the Pottsian tradition, these affective relations are sets of triples <A I B> where A represents the subject and B the object of affect, and I is a value on an interval between − 1 and 1 that is manipulated by use-conditional meaning.

  23. In the Pottsian tradition, this value will be the middle coordinate of a triple <A I B> where A represents the subject and B the object of affect, and I is a value on an interval between − 1 and 1.

  24. He considers only nouns in the \(\phi \) slot here, though the general line could be extended to other expressions.

  25. This comparison is merely exegetical, and is not intended to be a total identification of labels with epithets. See Patel-Grosz (2015).

  26. This is not to say that the construction cannot be used discourse initially, but that such uses are felicitous only if some such event can be accommodated.

  27. It may however be a commentary on that question!

  28. My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this kind of case.

  29. If the story is made up, however, and merely a piece of slander, however, the construction should not be licensed (provided the speaker knows it is mere slander). Such cases will be scored out by the second felicity requirement: the addressee will not have exemplified ‘linguist’-ness by any lights, since it is understood that the offending event never in fact occurred.

  30. Though agent or experiencer seem to be the more common roles, in certain cases, e.g. in slanging matches and trash talking, states are more natural satisfiers of the felicity condition.

  31. Note that if John did not in fact drink the whole keg, the event existential in the presupposition is not satisfied and the construction is apt to be challenged.

  32. Although its failure to embed as a DP in English indicates that it is not a small clause as Potts and Roeper (2006) suggest.

  33. This makes the analysis more similar to the proposal of Eckardt (2014) in that there is an obligatory second personal pronoun in vocatives. It differs from Gutzmann’s (2019) proposal, however, in proposing that it is not a feature that attaches to the determiner generally, since the felicity of the construction in English does not extend beyond the second person, e.g. to the definite article construed second personally, or the to the first person, as in German.

  34. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing on the feature interpretation route!

  35. I commit a minor notational violence here by allowing states to be included as atelic events with subjects, rather than representing them separately. I have not included grounds as a primitive notion, but analysed it out as the salient event and the addressee’s role in it.

  36. If (intentionally) amusing, given the ridiculousness of the vehicle of euphemism.

  37. https://tinyurl.com/gmsmdnp.

  38. As noted above, this is negative affect by default.

  39. To see this note that positive cases like ‘you darling’ are entirely unmarked.

  40. One could build in a negative default affect, for example a negative default position on a Pottsian expressive interval, but I have not included this here.

  41. It is worth noting here that, whilst I have adopted the free variable route here it is by no means the only route, and not without strong contenders. McCready (2012a) introduces a game theoretic account of the mechanism for locally enriching expressive content. This approach is somewhat complex to introduce substantially here, but the reader is recommended to consult it for an alternative approach.

  42. ‘Neg’ here may be replaced with the Pottsian account of the contribution of negative affect to the context cited above, but may also be replaced with a competitor semantics.

  43. There may also be an emasculating undertone that I will not consider here. The mechanics of euphemistic inheritance and meaning substitution are outside of the scope of this paper, but for relevant discussion see Davidson (1986), Armstrong (2019).

  44. Context free, ‘me bastard’ is not possible. It is curiously available only as an echoic construction. There is no space to treat this issue here. A further surprise, which there is no space to treat here, is that echoic re-use of the frame, switching out the pronoun offers a way to target expressive content, which is notoriously difficult to get at (Potts, 2007).

  45. This use of Gunlogson builds on Gutzmann and Henderson’s (2019) use of the commitment slate in accounting for expressive updates with the x-much construction.

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Acknowledgements

My thanks to Larry Horn, Zoltàn Gendler-Szabò, Jason Stanley, and two anonymous reviewers, who provided many insightful suggestions. This material benefitted from the insights of audiences at Yale,University of Pittsburgh, and University of Chicago. My thanks also goes to the many name-calling people of the internet.

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Correspondence to Kate Hazel Jain.

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Appendix

Appendix

Methods:

200 participants were recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk (51% female, mean age= [38], SD = [18.3]). Each participant saw the following vignette:

figure ap

Order of the glosses was randomised. Each gloss was rated on a seven point scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree).

Results

Results were analysed using a single sample t-test. The Expressive (negative) reading and the expressive (positive) reading received strongly statistically significant approval (M = [5.00], SD = [1.5]) than the mean response t(254)= [12.3], p = [0.000]

Discussion

The results confirm the prediction: that the expressive reading is available for ‘you dwffxigta’, and this supports the more general conclusion that it is available in general for a ‘you \(\phi \)’ string with a nonsense \(\phi \).

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Jain, K.H. You Hoboken! Semantics of an expressive label maker. Linguist and Philos 45, 365–391 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-021-09333-y

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