Speech-act SO in English: A Lexicalist, Construction-based Approach

This paper investigates the use of so-called speech-act SO, as in You are SO missing the point, where the pitch-accented SO occurs with a non-gradable expression and conveys the speaker’s strong commitment to the proposition. To account for the unique properties of speech-act SO, Irwin (2014) proposes that the DegP headed by speech-act SO involves ellipsis of the gradable, speaker-oriented adverb totally. While this deletion analysis has the advantage of accounting for various grammatical features of speech-act SO, it also faces some analytical and empirical challenges. As an alternative, this paper proposes a lexicalist, construction-based analysis in which speech-act SO is treated as an illocutionary degree modifier that serves as a functor selecting a non-gradable phrase as its head, forming a well-formed Head-Functor Construction. (Kyung Hee University)