Modifier position in computing expressive meaning - Expressive meaning

Crucial to what needs to be captured in building an account of these facts is the sense of “double assertion.” A natural way to do this is to take the nonrestrictive modifiers at issue here to involve a species of expressive meaning (Kratzer 1999; Potts 2005, and references there), as nonrestrictive relative clauses and numerous other constructions do.

Among the identifying characteristics of expressive meaning are:

It is speaker oriented, in the sense that it conveys the speaker’s commentary on what is being said.

It always takes maximally wide scope. That is, an expression that contributes expressive meaning cannot occur under the scope of any scopebearing expression. Thus the expressive meaning contributed by hopefully cannot be incorporated into a sentence such as ∗Every monkey that hopefully is housebroken can sleep in the living room, in which hopefully would have to occur inside the scope of every – this sentence cannot be used to convey a desire that all relevant monkeys be housebroken.

Unlike conversational implicatures, expressive meaning does not arise from the context of use and principles such as the Gricean maxims. Indeed, it is often associated with a particular lexical item. At least for current purposes, one can identify expressive meaning with conventional implicature.