Expressivity and Sentence Types

Abstract This chapter investigates the role of expressive meaning in the semantics of sentence mood, the semantic correlate of sentence type. The chapter begins with an overview of the expressive/descriptive divide, and an overview of sentence type and the related notion of sentence mood. A variety of sentence types are considered, with a core division made between the major sentence types (declarative, interrogative, imperative) and the minor sentence types, the latter including exclamatives and optatives as well as a variety of other, more idiosyncratic types. A core thesis explored is that the minor sentence types are characterized by a purely expressive semantics, while the major sentence types have also a descriptive meaning component at their root node. The chapter ends with a consideration of how the sentence types and associated sentence moods might be decomposed and modified.