Expressives and Expressivity

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 im...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Open Linguistics 2015-01, Vol.1 (1)
Main Author: McCready, Eric
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
expressive content
expressive power
translation
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Summary: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.
ISSN:2300-9969
2300-9969
DOI:10.2478/opli-2014-0004