Expressivity and Dynamic Semantics

Abstract This chapter provides an overview of how expressives have been treated in the Dynamic Semantics literature. Dynamic Semantic theories come in many different flavors, which can sometimes make direct comparisons between theories difficult. For this reason, this overview is structured by looking at the heart of the matter. The critical feature of dynamic theories is that the meaning of an expression is its update potential, or how it affects an input context to yield an output context. We can thus compare dynamic theories of expressives by comparing what aspects of the context expressives update and how that update is affected. This chapter does precisely this and then raises some open questions for dynamic accounts of expressives based on the survey of the literature. Through this survey, we are also able to consider the most common phenomena treated in the expressive literature, including honorifics, interjections, expletives, mirativity, and illocutionary content.