Meaning beyond Truth Conditions: Expressives, Personas, Affect

Elin McCready is professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Aoyama Gakuin University. Her research is particularly focused on phenomena such as evidentials, honorifics and slurs. She is an associate editor of Semantics and Pragmatics, and was the 2021 recipient of the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

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Abstract

Three kinds of meaning are considered: expressive meaning, social meanings in the sense of indexation of personas, and the generation of affect. She presents a characterization of each meaning type together with the kind of formal analysis that’s been proposed and some empirical motivation: slurs and honorifics (for expressive content), social personas as indexed in speech overtly or covertly (via dogwhistling), and the interpretation of literary text.

This is a joint event between ILN's Departmental linguistics seminars and IFIKK's The future of pragmatics lecture series.

Published Aug. 28, 2023 5:16 PM - Last modified Dec. 22, 2023 10:54 AM