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Expressive Updates, Much?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

Daniel Gutzmann  and
Robert Henderson
Daniel Gutzmann*
Affiliation:
University of Cologne
Robert Henderson*
Affiliation:
University of Arizona
*
[mail@danielgutzmann.com]
[rhenderson@email.arizona.edu]
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Abstract

This article investigates a novel use of much in a construction that has not yet been recognized in the theoretical literature—as in 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. In doing so, we present the first example of a shunting expression in English and provide, based on Gunlogson 2008, a new model of the discourse context that allows us to account for the different ways that expressive and nonexpressive content enters the common ground.

Keywords

expressivesdegree semanticsmuchrising intonationshunting expressionsmultidimensional semanticscommon-ground updates

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 95 , Issue 1 , March 2019 , pp. 107 - 135
Copyright
Copyright © 2019 Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

For valuable discussion on previous iterations of this work, we thank the audiences at Sinn und Bedeutung 19 (2014, Göttingen) and the workshop ‘The Intonation and Meaning of (Non-)Canonical Questions across Languages’ (DGfS 2015, Leipzig) 19 at Göttingen, as well as all of the discussants at colloquia at Cologne, Frankfurt, Göttingen, Tübingen, and Tucson. For helpful comments along the way, we are thankful to Michael Adams, Heidi Harley, Elin McCready, Jessica Rett, Heide Zeijlstra, Ede Zimmermann, and, last but not least, David Turgay, who sparked our interest in this topic. Language associate editor Chris Kennedy was very supporting and had very helpful remarks, and three anonymous referees helped us settle on the final form of this paper.

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