The expression of affect

Abstract

AbstractIbero-Romance affective que constructions implement a conversational move associated with the speaker’s affective perspective. The speaker simultaneously asserts the truth of their utterance—whence the requirement of the indicative in such clauses—realized through c/overt V-to-Fin movement, whilst the complementizer insertion mitigates the extent to which the utterance performs an extensional truth. The affective contribution of the construction involves a greater degree of intensity relative to complementizer-less sentence exclamations, indicating that it is the complementizer itself that acts as a syntactic conduit for the construction’s expressive (Potts 2007a) value, the interpretative result of which is the bootstrapping of the speaker’s affective stance to the complementizer’s overt realization. Affective que utterances thus perform a ‘double duty’ insofar as they are configured with the referential potential of a truth-denoting deictic act whilst additionally providing instruction on how that clause should be interpreted in the external world, viz. through an affective lens.