April 5, 2019: Robert Henderson

Time:: 5:00pm, April 5, 2019
Place:: Keio University, Mita Campus,
South Annex, 7th floor
Speaker:: Robert Henderson (University of Arizona)
Title:: Expressive updates, much?!
Abstract:: This paper investigates a novel use of much in a construction that has not yet been recognized in the literature—Angry, much?—which we dub "expressive much". Our primary proposal is that expressive much is a shunting operator in the sense of McCready 2010, which targets a gradable predicate and adds a speaker's evaluative attitude about the degree to which an individual stands out on the relevant scale. In particular, we argue that it does so in a way that allows it to perform an "expressive question", which can be understood as a counterpart to a polar question, but in the expressive meaning dimension.

Semantics Research Group Meeting, April 5, 2019