Composure and Composition

In this paper, I explore the distinction between non-truth-conditional affective a.k.a. expressive meanings (as in my fucking dog) and truth-conditional affective and affect-related meanings (as in my lovely/disgusting dog) from an architectural perspective. Specifically, I focus on the differences in whether and how these meanings interact semantically with their surroundings and discuss the implications of these differences for our formal theories of meaning. In particular, I show that expressive meanings do not have to interact semantically with their syntactic surroundings, but truth-conditional meanings do even when they are affect-related and not-at-issue. This contrast holds even when the two types of meaning are contributed by uncontroversially the same type of morphosyntactic objects, as is the case for affection-expressing diminutive suffixes (non-truth-conditional) vs. derogatory/pejorative suffixes (truth-conditional) in Russian. This warrants a complete separation of the two types of meaning in our formal semantic theories—contrary to theories that treat expressive meaning as some type or other of truth-conditional, but not-at-issue meaning. In addition, I demonstrate that we observe some of the same typology of affective and affect-related meanings as conveyed through “secondary” channels, such as prosody, facial expressions, and non-face gesture, as we do for fully conventionalized segmental morphemes (i.e., “words”). I furthermore show that we routinely make use of a productive mechanism of going from performative, non-truth-conditional expression of affect to demonstrations of such expression within pieces of truth-conditional meaning of the general form ‘(such that) it would make me/one go “DEMONSTRATION”’, which we can then compose with other truth-conditional content. Once again, we observe this process at work both for “words” (e.g., in at least some instances of spoken word expressives used for degree intensification) and for other types of meaning–form mappings (e.g., facial expressions and/or prosody conveying some form of surprise-related or negative affect)—and we can, thus, apply the same formal analysis to all these cases. I take the cross-channel similarities in how the expressive vs. truth-conditional distinction manifests to be an argument against the common tendency to indiscriminately label any instances of affect-related meaning conveyed through “secondary” channels as “paralinguistic” and, thus, something that we as formal linguists should not concern ourselves with.