A speaker can express her attitude about the semantic content she communicates using words (e.g. alas) or intonation (as in exclamations like John won the race!). I'll argue that this expressive content is part of the illocutionary force of the sentence (Rett 2011, Rett & Murray 2013), rather than not-at-issue content, which is arguably the right way to characterize e.g. epithets (Potts 2007, McCready 2012). Because utterances containing attitude markers like alas perform the same speech acts as they would have without the marker, I'll argue that these markers should be characterized as illocutionary mood modifiers or something similar. Finally, I will explore the consequences of this expressive illocutionary mood for theories of discourse in which mood is characterized in terms of the common ground (Farkas & Bruce 2009, Murray 2013, among others). In particular, I'll address the question: if assertions and questions update the common ground, what does expressive illocutionary mood do? (Kaplan 1999)

Farkas, D. and Bruce, K. 2009. On reacting to assertions and polar questions. Journal of Semantics 27

Kaplan, D. 1999. The Meaning of Ouch and Oops, Howison Lecture in Philosophy delivered at UC Berkeley.

McCready, E. 2012. Emotive equilibria. Linguistics and Philosophy 35:243–283.

Murray, S. 2013. Varieties of update. to appear Semantics and Pragmatics .

Potts, C. 2007. The expressive dimension. Theoretical Linguistics 33:165–198.

Rett, J. 2011. Exclamatives, degrees, and speech acts. Linguistics and Philosophy 34:411–442.

Rett, J. and Murray, S. 2013. A semantic account of mirative evidentials. Proceedings of SALT 23.