“It was just so hard”: ineffability just as a mixed expressive

Abstract

A highly productive debate has arisen over the past two decades concerning the division of labor between semantics and pragmatics in building meaning (Potts 2005; Kennedy and McNally 2005; Sauerland 2012; Roberts 2012; Coppock and Beaver 2014; Gutzmann 2019 i.a.). In this article we illustrate the depth of integration of context-independent and context-dependent meaning through a close analysis of the exclusive operator (EO) just. Recent accounts of the many distinct guises of EO just have proposed a unified shared function: quantification over sets of alternatives (Horn 2000; Orenstein 2015; Wiegand/Windhearn 2017; 2021; Beltrama 2021). We identify here an entirely new surface manifestation of just in the StoryListening Corpus (a set of bereavement narratives elicited during the COVID-19 pandemic), which we term ‘ineffability just’ and argue it serves as a mixed expressive (McCready 2010; Gutzmann 2012; Beltrama and Lee 2015). It encodes both descriptive content as a new flavor of exclusive operator (Beltrama 2021), and simultaneously expressive content (Potts 2005; 2007) signaling that the speaker is at a loss for words in the moment to describe an experience more completely because of their affective response to its profound nature.