Expressive commitments: A normative approach to exclamations

Pragmatics has made a Copernican shift from Gricean intentional approaches to
normative approaches based in commitments. This has been good news for
assertions, and questions of several stripes, but we still don’t know whether the
commitment approach can be extended to expressive speech acts in general, and
exclamations in particular. In this article, I will show that an approach to exclamations based on commitments at different levels of meaning, namely, the descriptive and expressive level, can be devised and it can offer interesting answers to old issues, like the contribution of exclamations to discourse, or their at-issue status, while raising new theoretical and empirical questions on lying and deceiving and commitment strength.