Expressivity

Abstract This introductory chapter discusses the early contributions to the notion of expressivity by Bühler and Jakobson, who view expressivity as the language function that expresses something about the speaker, and draws a connection to Frege’s remarks on the notion of coloring. As some early modern textbooks in semantics show, the contrast between descriptive and expressive content became part of the linguistic terminology, but it was the ideas laid out by David Kaplan that sparked the subsequent expressive turn in semantics and later on in other disciplines of linguistics. This chapter elaborates on Kaplan’s core ideas of expressivity and use-conditional semantics and presents the important properties of expressives and the kinds of expressives that have been assumed in the subsequent literature. It concludes with a few words on the structure and aims of the handbook.