The Oxford Handbook of Expressivity

Abstract Expressivity is the essential property of natural language to not just describe something in the world, but to directly express or display the speaker’s attitudes or emotions. This handbook provides fifty comprehensive chapters that approach expressive meaning from a plethora of angles. Following the editors’ introduction, which sketches the expressive turn in linguistics, the book is divided into five parts. The chapters in Part I lay out the historical background and foundations of expressivity. Part II shows how expressivity plays a major role in all linguistic domains and fields of research, including morphology, syntax, semantics, and across linguistic frameworks and linguistic theories, like relevance theory, construction grammar and discourse analysis, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, computational and corpus linguistics. Part III presents dedicated studies concerning specific linguistic phenomena (like slurs, interjections, or vocatives, but also sentence types or information structure), demonstrating how a focus on expressivity enhances our understanding of them. Part IV shows how the concept of expressivity can be used in further domains and applications in interdisciplinary contexts, showcasing its relevance beyond traditional linguistic boundaries, including pedagogy, the law, or music. Finally, Part V of the handbook presents a cross-linguistic perspective, revealing how expressivity manifests differently in a collection of languages. The chapters, all written by leading experts and emerging scholars in their respective fields, not only provide critical and opinionated surveys of the current state-of-the-art, but in many cases also provide new insights and innovative perspectives.