Expressives and Expressivity

• Authors: Eric McCready
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This paper considers the questions of translatability and expressive power. It is argued that truthconditional content is always translatable, and does not produce differences in expressive power. Most nontruth- conditional content-presupposition, ‘side effects’ such as anaphora, and conventional implicature-is shown to not always translate successfully, but still not to produce genuine differences in expressivity. This last property appears to clearly hold only of terms which introduce expressive content: only for such content is genuine incommensurability found in natural language. Some implications of these findings are discussed.

Keywords

EN

expressive content; translation; expressive power

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Open Linguistics
• Year: 2014
• Volume: 1
• Issue: 1

Dates

received

2014-04-03

accepted

2014-09-30

online

2014-10-27

Contributors

author

Eric McCready

• Aoyama Gakuin University, Tokyo, Japan

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Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/opli-2014-0004