That bloody so-and-so has retired: Expressives revisited

• The paper reviews the literature on expressive meaning.
• The paper compares formal and relevance theoretic analyses of expressives.
• A new account of expressives is proposed.
• The paper assesses the cognitive status of ‘emotional procedures’.
• ‘Meaning’ may not be the right term to use when exploring expressive communication.

In this paper, I revisit my own work (2003a,b, 2009) on interjections and non-verbal behaviours and build on Blakemore's (2011) account of the descriptive ineffability of expressive meaning. Whilst I agree with Blakemore's claim that expressives are best explained through an analysis that uses, on the one hand, procedural meaning, and, on the other, the idea that they show one's emotions, rather than meanNN anything in the Gricean sense, I ask two questions by way of developing the account further. Firstly, what is the relationship between the procedural meaning in Blakemore's account of expressives and the kind encoded by discourse connectives? Secondly, to what extent do we want to say that expressives mean anything at all? In answering these questions I aim to shed light on what expressive meaning is, and how it works.