On the Locus of Expressivity. Deriving Parallel Meaning Dimensions from Architectural Considerations

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The main claim of this chapter is that certain non-truth conditional meanings are exclusively triggered by properties of vocabulary items (in the sense of Halle & Marantz 1993 and subsequent work). In other words, those meanings arise ?late? and are not part of the syntactic-semantic derivation. Thus, we capture the notion of parallel meaning dimension from architectural considerations without the need of any metalogical operator (e.g., the ● symbol in Potts 2005 and McCready 2010, among others) especially designated to separate meaning dimensions. This proposal finds interesting support from certain interactions involving biased words and ellipsis. Our basic expressive paradigm involves pairs of mixed words whose contribution to truth-conditional meaning is equivalent: They are only differentiated by register (e.g., comer "to eat" vs. morfar "to eat(informal)") or by register plus a derogative dimension (e.g., slurs: boliviano "Bolivians" vs. bolita "Bolivians(pejorative)"). A crucial property of both informal and slur terms is that they form doublets. In this respect, my initial conjecture is that at least some forms of expressivity are the direct result of (lexical) free variation; i.e., competition in the paradigmatic space among truth-conditionally identical terms gives rise to expressive meanings. I model the expressive dimension of mixed terms as set of propositions. Thus, the lexical item bolita will denote at PF a set of the form {that Bolivians are poor, that Bolivians are ugly, that Bolivians are indigenous, etc.}. Finally, we compare this particular way of modeling expressive content with other proposals in the literature, i.e., expressive meanings are a bias on contexts of use (Predelli 2013), stereotypes (Orlando & Saab 2017), or conventional implicatures (Potts 2005 and, especially, McCready 2010). Información suministrada por el agente en SIGEVA