Expressive Meaning and Speech Acts
Volume Editors: Xavier Villalba and M.Teresa Espinal
Brill : Leiden : Boston, 2026
In addition to introducing a denotational meaning, utterances often convey an expressive meaning, that provides information about the speaker or the judger. This volume collects original research papers on the semantics and pragmatics of expressive meaning in interaction with speech acts, and on the way that these two domains are encoded in syntax. By covering a broad variety of well-known and new expressive phenomena –including non-lexical datives, tense, modality, expletive negation, minimizers, conditionals, or mood– the contributions uncover the pervasive presence of expressive meaning across speech acts, while providing new insight into the old and new issues at the semantics-pragmatics interface.
Biographical Note
Xavier Villalba, is Professor of Catalan Linguistics at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, where he is a member of the Center for Theoretical Linguistics. His core research interests are the interface of syntax with information structure and with semantics and pragmatics. He has published in indexed journals such as Discourse Processes, International Review of Pragmatics, Journal of Pragmatics, Language Variation, Syntax, and The Linguistic Review, and he has contributed to Exclamatives). He is the co-editor of Expressive meaning across linguistic levels and frameworks (Oxford University Press, 2021) and of the series Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface (Brill).
M.T eresa Espinal, Professor of Linguistics at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, where she is a member of the Center for Theoretical Linguistics. Her main research interests are the theory of language, the syntax-semantics and the syntax-pragmatics interfaces, and their relationship with a general theory of cognition. Her work has been published in multiple journals including Language, Annual Review of Linguistics, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, Language and Speech, Journal of Pragmatics, Journal of Linguistics, Glossa, Lingua, The Linguistic Review, Probus, Frontiers in Psychology, Sign Language & Linguistics, and Studia Linguistica. She is the editor of Semántica (Akal, 2014) and the co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Negation (OUP, 2020).
