The Oxford Handbook of Expressivity

This handbook offers a detailed and wide-ranging account of expressivity, the essential property that allows natural language to not just describe something in the world, but to directly express or display the speaker's attitudes or emotions. It provides critical surveys of existing research as well as new insights and innovative perspectives.

This handbook offers a detailed and wide-ranging account of expressivity, the essential property that allows natural language to not just describe something in the world, but to directly express or display the speaker''s attitudes or emotions. Following the editors'' introduction, which outlines the expressive turn in linguistics, the volume is divided into five parts. Part I lays out the historical background and foundations of expressivity in philology, philosophy, semiotics, and rhetoric, before Part II shows how it plays a major role in all linguistic domains, fields of research, and frameworks, from syntax and semantics to corpus linguistics and neurolinguistics. Chapters in Part III explore specific linguistic phenomena such as slurs, interjections, honorifics, and metaphor, while those in Part IV show how the concept of expressivity is valuable in domains beyond traditional linguistic boundaries, including in pedagogy, law, and music. Finally, Part V presents a cross-linguistic perspective, revealing how expressivity manifests differently across a range of languages, from French and German to Japanese and Mandarin. Providing critical surveys of existing research as well as new insights and innovative perspectives, The Oxford Handbook of Expressivity will be an indispensable resource for linguists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists.