Meaning and Emotion

My PhD is about affective meaning (as opposed to descriptive, cold meaning) and its communication through language (insults, praises, interjections, ...) and nonverbal behavior (laughter, frowns, sighs, ...). The goal is to adapt tools developped to analyze neutral meaning to affective meaning. In particular, in the first part of my PhD, I adapt the Gricean model of communication to take into account spontaneous emotional expressions. This has led me to develop the so-called 'Extended Gricean Model'. In the second part, I discuss what emotional signs mean, in various senses of the term 'mean' (speaker meaning, natural meaning, statistical meaning, and teleosemantics).