2.6: Expressive meaning- Ouch and oops

Words like ouch and oops, often referred to as expressives, present an interesting challenge to the “denotational” approach outlined above. They convey a certain kind of meaning, yet they neither refer to things in the world, nor help to determine the conditions under which a sentence would be true. In fact, it is hard to claim that they even form part of a sentence; they seem to stand on their own, as one-word utterances. The kind of meaning that such words convey is called expressive meaning, which Lyons (1995: 44) defines as “the kind of meaning by virtue of which speakers express, rather than describe, their beliefs, attitudes and feelings.” Expressive meaning is different from descriptive meaning (also called propositional meaning or truth- conditional meaning), the “normal” type of meaning which determines reference and truth values. If someone says I just felt a sudden sharp pain, he is describing what he feels; but when he says Ouch!, he is expressing that feeling.

Words like ouch and oops carry only expressive meaning, and seem to be unique in other ways as well. They may not necessarily be intended to communicate. If I hurt myself when I am working alone, I will very likely say ouch (or some other expressive with similar meaning) even though there is no one present to hear me. Such expressions seem almost like involuntary reactions, although the specific forms are learned as part of a particular language. But it is important to be aware of the distinction between expressive vs. descriptive meaning, because many “normal” words carry both types of meaning at once.

For example, the word garrulous means essentially the same thing as talkative, but carries additional information about the speaker’s negative attitude towards this behavior.¹¹ There are many other pairs of words which seem to convey the same descriptive meaning but differ in terms of their expressive meaning: father vs. dad; woman vs. broad; horse vs. nag; alcohol vs. booze; etc. In each case either member of the pair could be used to refer to the same kinds of things in the world; the speaker’s choice of which term to use indicates varying degrees of intimacy, respect, appreciation or approval, formality, etc.

The remainder of this section discusses some of the properties which distinguish expressive meaning from descriptive meaning.¹² These properties can be used as diagnostics when we are unsure which type of meaning we are dealing with.

2.6.1: Independence

Expressive meaning is independent of descriptive meaning in the sense that expressive meaning does not affect the denotation of a noun phrase or the truth value of a sentence. For example, the addressee might agree with the descriptive meaning of (15) without sharing the speaker’s negative attitude indicated by the expressive term jerk. Similarly, the addressee in (16) might agree with the descriptive content of the sentence without sharing the speaker’s negative attitude indicated by the pejorative suffix -aco.

(15) That jerk Peterson is the only real economist on this committee.

(16) Los vecinos tienen un pajarr-aco como mascota. [Spanish]
the neighbors have a bird-pejor as pet

Descriptive: The neighbors have a pet bird.
Expressive: The speaker has a negative attitude towards the bird.¹³

2.6.2 Nondisplaceability

Hockett (1958; 1960) used the term Displacement to refer to the fact that speakers can use human languages to describe events and situations which are separated in space and time from the speech event itself. Hockett listed this ability as one of the distinctive properties of human language, one which distinguishes it, for example, from most types of animal communication.

Cruse (1986: 272) notes that this capacity for displacement holds only for descriptive meaning, and not for expressive meaning. A person can describe his own feelings in the past or future, e.g. Last month I felt a sharp pain in my chest, or I will probably feel a lot of pain when the dentist drills my tooth tomorrow; or the feelings of other people, e.g. She was in a lot of pain. But when a person says Ouch!, it must normally express pain that is felt by the speaker at the moment of speaking.

2.6.3 Immunity

Descriptive meaning can be negated (17a), questioned (17b), or challenged (17c). Expressive meaning is “immune” to all of these things, as illustrated in (18). As we will see in later chapters, negation, questioning, and challenging are three of the standard tests for identifying truth-conditional meaning. The fact that expressive meaning cannot be negated, questioned, or challenged shows that it is not part of the truth-conditional meaning of the sentence.

(17) a. I am not feeling any pain.

b. Are you feeling any pain?

c. Patient: I just felt a sudden sharp pain.
Dentist: That’s a lie — I gave you a double dose of Novocain.
(Cruse 1986: 271)

(18) a. *Not ouch.

b. *Ouch? (can only be interpreted as an elliptical form of the question: Did you say “Ouch”?)

c. Patient: Ouch!
Dentist: #That’s a lie.

2.6.4 Scalability and repeatability

Expressive meaning can be intensified through repetition (as seen in line g of Table 2.1 below), or by the use of intonational features such as pitch, length or loudness. Descriptive meaning is generally expressible in discrete units which correspond to the lexical semantic content of individual words. Repetition of descriptive meaning tends to produce redundancy, though we should note that a number of languages do use reduplication to encode plural number, repeated actions, etc.

2.6.5 Descriptive ineffability

“Effability” means ‘expressibility’. The effability hypothesis claims that “Each proposition can be expressed by some sentence in any natural language”;¹⁴ or in other words, “Whatever can be meant can be said.”¹⁵

Potts (2007c) uses the phrase “descriptive ineffability” to indicate that expressive meaning often cannot be adequately stated in terms of descriptive meaning. A paraphrase based on descriptive meaning (e.g. young dog for puppy) is often interchangeable with the original expression, as illustrated in (19). Whenever (19a) is true, (19b) must be true as well, and vice versa. Moreover, this substitution is equally possible in questions, commands, negated sentences, etc. This is not the case with expressives, even where a descriptive paraphrase is possible, as illustrated in (17–18) above.

(19) a. Yesterday my son brought home a puppy.
b. Yesterday my son brought home a young dog.

For many expressives there is no descriptive paraphrase available, and speakers often find it difficult to explain the meaning of the expressive form in descriptive terms. For example, most dictionaries do not attempt to paraphrase the meaning of oops, but rather “define” it by describing the contexts in which it is normally used:

(20) a. “used typically to express mild apology, surprise, or dismay”¹⁶
b. “an exclamation of surprise or of apology as when someone drops something or makes a mistake”¹⁷

This limited expressibility correlates with limited translatability. The descriptive meaning conveyed by a sentence in one language is generally expressible in other languages as well. (Whether this is always the case, as predicted by strong forms of the Effability Hypothesis, is a controversial issue.) However, it is often difficult to find an adequate translation equivalent for expressive meaning. One well known example is the ancient Aramaic term of contempt raka, which appears in the Greek text of Matthew 5:22 (and in many English translations), presumably because there was no adequate translation equivalent in Koine Greek. (Some of the English equivalents which have been suggested include: good-for-nothing, rascal, empty head, stupid, ignorant.) In 393 AD, St. Augustine offered the following explanation:

Hence the view is more probable which I heard from a certain Hebrew whom I had asked about it; for he said that the word does not mean anything, but merely expresses the emotion of an angry mind. Grammarians call those particles of speech which express an affection of an agitated mind interjections; as when it is said by one who is grieved, ‘Alas,’ or by one who is angry, ‘Hah.’ And these words in all languages are proper names, and are not easily translated into another language; and this cause certainly compelled alike the Greek and the Latin translators to put the word itself, inasmuch as they could find no way of translating it.”¹⁸

Whether or not Augustine was correct in his view that raka was a pure expressive, he provides an excellent description of this class of words and the difficulty of translating them from one language to another. This quote also demonstrates that the challenges posed by expressives have been recognized for a very long time.

A similar translation problem helped to create an international incident in 1993 when the Malaysian Prime Minister, Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, declined an invitation to attend the first Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit. Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating, when asked for a comment, replied: “APEC is bigger than all of us; Australia, the US and Malaysia and Dr Mahathir and any other recalcitrants.” Bilateral relations were severely strained, and both Malaysian government policies and Malaysian public opinion towards Australia were negatively affected for a long period of time. A significant factor in this reaction was the fact that the word recalcitrant was translated in the Malaysian press by the Malay idiom keras kepala, literally ‘hard headed’. The two expressions have a similar range of descriptive meaning (‘stubborn, obstinate, defiant of authority’), but the Malay idiom carries expressive meaning which makes the sense of insult and disrespect much stronger than in the English original. Keras kepala would be appropriate in scolding a child or subordinate, but not in referring to a head-of-government.

2.6.6 Case study: Expressive uses of diminutives

Diminutives are grammatical markers whose primary or literal meaning is to indicate small size; but diminutives often have secondary uses as well, and often these involve expressive content. Anna Wierzbicka (1985) describes one common use of diminutives in Polish as follows:

In Polish, warm hospitality is expressed as much by the use of diminutives as it is by the ‘hectoring’ style of offers and suggestions. Characteristically, the food items offered to the guest are often referred to by the host by their diminutive names. Thus… one might say in Polish: Wei jeszcze Sledzika! Koniecznie! ‘Take some more dear-little-herring (dim). You must!’ The diminutive praises the quality of the food and minimizes the quantity pushed onto the guest’s plate. The speaker insinuates: “Don’t resist! It is a small thing I’m asking you to do — and a good thing!”. The target of the praise is in fact vague: the praise seems to embrace the food, the guest, and the action of the guest desired by the host. The diminutive and the imperative work hand in hand in the cordial, solicitous attempt to get the guest to eat more.

Markers of expressive meaning often have several possible meanings, which depend heavily on context, and this is true for the Spanish diminutive suffixes as illustrated in Table 2.1. Notice that the same diminutive suffix can have nearly opposite meanings (deprecation vs. appreciation; exactness vs. approximation; attenuation vs. intensification) in different contexts (and, in some cases, different dialects). These examples also illustrate the “scalability” of expressive meaning, the fact that it can be intensified through repetition, as in chiqu-it-it-o.

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¹¹ Barker (2002).

¹² Much of this discussion is based on Cruse (1986; 2000) and Potts (2007c).

¹³ Fortin (2011)

¹⁴ Katz (1978: 209).

¹⁵ Searle (1969: 18); see also Katz (1972: 18–24); Carston (2002: 33).

¹⁶ http://www.merriam-webster.com

¹⁷ Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, ©HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003.

¹⁸ On the Sermon on the Mount, Book I, ch. 9, §23; http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/16011.htm