Abstract
The literature on expressives (“bastard”, “jerk”, etc.) converges on two claims.
First: to use expressives felicitously, the context doesn’t need to entail that the target of the expressive is bad, as long as the speaker feels negatively about them.
Second: the content associated with expressives is speaker-oriented (“The speaker feels negatively about the target”) rather than target-oriented (“The target is bad/has done something wrong”).
In this talk I present some studies focused on predicative rather than referential uses of the Italian expressive “stronzo” (tr. “jerk”) which challenge both claims. Our results speak against the first claim: in the absence of information as to whether the target is bad, expressives are judged less acceptable than other negative evaluative terms (e.g., “unbearable”). They also challenge the second claim: using expressives is more acceptable in the target-oriented condition (“X is an underhanded and deceitful person”) than in the subjective or intersubjective conditions (“The speaker dislikes X”, “The speaker and others dislike X”). These results open new questions about how to characterize espressive content.