In this talk I will discuss the use of expressive adverbs as adverbs
of degree. For instance, when combined with adjectives, expressives
like English "bloody", as in "bloody expensive", have an intensifying
effect on top of their expressive effect. This observation suggests
that expressive intensifiers are so-called mixed content expressions
(McCready, 2010, S&P 3.8): their lexical semantics specifies at the
same time an expressive affective content and a descriptive
intensifying one.

Starting point for this talk is the observation that expressive
emotive content appears to systematically co-occur with a
(degree-)intensifying function in the descriptive realm. This raises
the question why we would consistently see these two types of content
in two segregated dimensions. I will show that the degree modification
function of these adverbs can be seen to follow from their expressive
content. This raises a dilemma: if we want to account for the
systematic double role of expressives as descriptive intensifiers,
then we should not only allow mixed content but also what may be
called expressive intrusion into the compositional descriptive
semantics of the sentence containing the adverb.

The upshot is that expressive intensifiers force us to look critically
at the relation between expressive and descriptive contributions to
the overall sentence meaning. In the talk I will go through several
theoretical options in order to ascertain whether the
expressive/descriptive dichotomy is tenable for this class of
expressions.