It should be remarked that functional categories occur in all human languages and that there is no evidence –to the best of our knowledge– that they occur in animal languages. Therefore, functional categories represent one of the most interesting aspects of linguistics studies. The new project we present here will focus on the meaning of functional categories and their semantic contribution to language, communication and cognition, with a particular attention to the codification and interpretation of expressive meanings.

It is widely accepted that syntax guides the construction of semantic representations compositionally: the meaning of a complex expression is derived from the meaning of their immediate syntactic parts and their particular syntactic combination. In the compositionality of meaning the bricks are lexical categories (N, V, A) and the mortar are functional categories (D, Num, Tens, Asp, v, Neg, Top, Foc, etc.). In this respect it is wise to entertain that, while lexical categories contribute to the propositional content of a sentence, functional categories constrain it by articulating the relations that lexical categories may have. In INTERCAT (FFI2017-82547-P) we focused on the semantic and pragmatic properties of a variety of functional categories at the nominal, verbal/sentential, and peripheral domains, and although there is still a lot to investigate concerning the identification of the featural make-up of the large set of functional categories proposed in the theory of language, we foresee that functional categories play an even more crucial role at the time of utterance interpretation. We hypothesize that functional categories also contribute to the expressive meaning associated with sentences/utterances, and therefore contribute to the grammar of speech acts. In this way functional categories can be claimed to make a semantic contribution beyond the sentence radical, something that is unexpected from the point of view of standard research in the field of functional categories within Generative Grammar, and also from the point of view of current research on Speech Acts (SA) and Discourse Semantics.

Recall that within syntax the focus has been on identifying which functional categories form part of the universal inventory of morphosyntactic categories (Cinque 1999, Wiltschko 2014), and which functional categories act as phases (D, v, C) and define impenetrable domains to movement (Chomsky 2008). Within Speech Act Semantics the main line of research consists in identifying the set of lexical items (verbs, adverbs, response particles) that encode SA information or that modify SA. However, other phenomena also exist in natural languages that support the claim that functional categories encode expressive meanings. We consider in this respect phenomena of the sort exemplified by: (1) polydefinites in Greek, (2) high negation in English, (3) overt first person pronouns with psychological verbs and impersonal sentences in Catalan, and (4) deverbal discourse markers in Spanish, among others to be listed below. What these constructions all have in common is that the use of a repeated definite article, of a negative marker in a peripheral sentential position, of an apparent and unexpected subject pronoun in a prodrop language, and of second person (imperative) deverbal discourse markers conveys expressive meanings, that is, the emotions and attitudes of the speaker at the time of performing a speech act.

The main goal of this research project is to investigate what makes a functional category a good candidate for conveying expressive meanings that do not contribute to/constrain the meaning of the sentence, but rather contribute to/constrain the speaker’s involvement in specific Speech Acts (SA). This idea goes back to Szabolcsi (1982) and to more recent work by Krifka (2015, 2019, 2020) and Geurts (2019): SA are not interpreted with respect to world-time indices (such as propositions), but trigger a change in the commitments and judgements of the participants in the conversation. This approach is particularly interesting to account for a dynamic interpretation of SA: SA are not true or false at <w,t> pairs, but rather create new commitments, new ways of perceiving, understanding and shaping the world, according to which the common ground is updated and the world itself is approached differently.

Our proposal raises the hypothesis that expressive meanings interact with SA already at the syntactic level in an articulated and complex way, in sharp contrast with the original insights by Potts (2004, 2007) (see also Gutzmann 2015, 2019). While Potts makes a case for analyzing expressive meaning as a conventional implicature, and places it in a separated level from at-issue meaning (i.e. Grice’s “what is said”), we will contend this view, and integrate expressive meaning as an important piece of the process of updating the common ground and operating on the commitments by the participants in the speech act.

Our secondary goal continues a line of research already present in INTERCAT and aims to answer whether functional categories can introduce specific constraints and meaning hierarchies. Recall that some significant constraints have been postulated in linguistic theory that identify the role of a number of functional categories and their contribution to the building of meaning hierarchies: the partitive constraint (Jackendoff 1972), the definiteness effect (Milsark 1974, 1977), person-number hierarchies (Zwicky 1977, Ritter & Harley 1991, 2002), the definite kind constraint (Borik & Espinal 2015), to mention a few of them. Following this line of research we want to investigate a number of concepts that seem to be encoded by means of syntactic functional categories: (1) the relationship between indefiniteness and partitivity in Romance and in Basque; (2) the relation of definiteness with uniqueness, familiarity, anaphoricity, maximality, and saliency, both in languages with and without articles (namely Catalan, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese on the one hand, vs. Russian on the other); (3) the relation of topichood and definiteness, namely in languages that can omit the article such as Brazilian Portuguese, and in languages without articles such as Russian; (4) the relation between the existence of polar items and single negation readings (which appears to be the case of Basque) and the existence of negative concord items and the emergence of double negation readings (which appears to be the case of Catalan and Spanish); and (5) the relation of exclamative and interrogative Force with Topic and Focus projections, and the encoding and interpretation of particular prosodic patterns associated with different uses of exclamative and interrogative sentences.