Expressive meaning

Abstract

The term expressivity or expressive meaning has a long tradition in linguistics. Roman Jakobson, building on an earlier proposal by Bühler (1934), coined the term expressive or emotive for one of the functions of language. He describes it as “focused on the ADDRESSER [speaker], aims a direct expression of the speaker’s attitude toward what he is speaking about” (Jakobson 1960: 354) and gives interjections as the prime example of this function. The separation between emotive language and referential (or descriptive) language is clear in his characterization of interjections: “they are not components but equivalents of sentences” (Jakobson 1960: 354). Although there is significant overlap between this definition and later ones, later proposals, starting with Cruse (1986), focus on diagnostics that underlie the distinction between expressive meaning and descriptive or truth conditional meaning, i.e. meaning that can be explicitly denied and objectively verified in the actual world (Lyons 1977).