Studies in Language. International Journal sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language” - Volume 42, Issue 1, 2018

This volume presents nine chapters dealing with emotionally loaded morphology over four continents. The collection is the result of a workshop on “morphology and emotions” (MorphÉm) held by the first author at Dynamique du Langage (CNRS) in Lyon on 29–30 April 2015. In this introduction, we first discuss our definitions of the terms “emotions”, “morphology”, and the intersection between the two ( Section 1 ). In Section 2 , we contextualize the study of the morphological encoding of emotions within semantic typology and semantic ecology, and spell out some of the cross-linguistic generalizations that can be made about the morphological encoding of emotions on the basis of the contributions in this volume. In Section 3 , we summarize the findings of the volume on the more specific topic of evaluative morphology, the most widespread type of emotionally loaded morphology. Finally, Section 4 offers a chapter-by-chapter outline of the volume.

This article presents a preliminary typology of emotional connotations in evaluative morphology, starting with diminutives and augmentatives. I inventory the emotional meanings and connotations found in a sample of nineteen languages for diminutives, and nine languages plus a few additional regional studies for augmentatives. Given the small size of the samples, this typology can only remain preliminary, but it does highlight a number of points. Across languages and continents, diminutives can express positive emotions such as compassion, love and admiration, as well as negative emotions such as contempt. The emotional connotations of augmentatives are more limited, but display a blend of positive and negative emotions including contempt and repulsion, admiration and respect, endearment and compassion. Diminutives and augmentatives do not contrast sharply with respect to emotional valence (positive or negative), but while diminutives are anchored in intimacy, the emotions conveyed by augmentatives more often relate to broader social contexts.

The evaluative morphology of Beja consists of four devices: gender shift to feminine on nouns, and sound change (r>l) on nouns, verbs and adjectives form the diminutives. A suffix -loːj on adjectives, and -l on Manner converbs, form the augmentatives. The analysis focuses on the evaluative, emotional and other pragmatic values associated with these morphemes, size, endearment, praise, romantic love, contempt, politeness and eloquence. When relevant, the links to the general mechanism of semantic change, lambda-abstraction-specification proposed by Jurafsky (1996) , is discussed. This paper also discusses productivity, cases where the evaluative device has scope over an adjacent noun instead of its host, the distribution of values across semantic domains and genres, and cases of lexicalization. The corpus analysis shows that the proportional frequency of pragmatic expressive connotations compared to the denotational meaning is higher for diminutives than for augmentatives. Further, with diminutives, positive emotional values are more frequent than negative ones, while with augmentatives attested pejorative values are very rare. The analysis is set within a typological framework.

Old Arabic had many expressive derived forms: firstly, the forms with radical repetition, consonant reduplication and/or vowel lengthening; secondly, the forms with prefixes, suffixes or infixes. Most of these formatives survived in the Arabic dialects, but Arabic scholars generally focus on diminutive noun forms (nominal and adjectival forms) named taṣġīr in Arabic. This article presents the rules of formation of the diminutive in the Ḥassāniyya Arabic dialect, in which this derivation applies to the whole lexicon, including verbal forms. The derivational morphology of the diminutive constitutes a kind of double derivation, characterized mainly by the infixation of -(a)y- – the position of which varies depending on the patterns and on the nature of the base lexeme. The article then analyzes the use and meaning of diminutives in context, studied within two corpora: a corpus of traditional tales and a corpus of courteous poems. The study of these corpora shows that in Ḥassāniyya, pejorative uses of the diminutive are as prominent as meliorative ones. Finally, the article discusses the “root-and-pattern” mode of formation in Arabic and the diverse derivations attested in Arabic dialects, comparing their values with those reported for other languages in the world. Evaluative morphology is shown to be particularly prevalent in Ḥassāniyya, and it is hypothesized that this correlates with the pragmatic function endorsed by the diminutive in this language. This function allows for both positive or negative interpretations of diminutive forms, depending on the context, so that diminutives can express a broad range of emotions.

This paper studies four grammatical markers of emotions in Tacana, an Amazonian language from the Takanan family spoken in Northern Bolivia. Two markers express positive emotions, chidi ‘affection’ and ichenu ‘compassion’. The other two express negative emotions: base ‘depreciation 1’ and madha ‘depreciation 2’. The paper also provides a historical-comparative study of similar morphemes in the other Takanan languages (Araona, Cavineña, Ese Ejja and Reyesano). The Tacana affection morpheme is probably reconstructible to a diminutive marker in proto-Takanan. The compassion and two depreciation morphemes are not reconstructible but recent grammaticalizations of lexical items still used in the different Takanan languages. Interestingly, these lexemes do not display any synchronic or diachronic link with the expression of “diminutivization” or “augmentativization”. Therefore, this paper suggests that the morphological expression of emotions should be studied in its own right, and not necessarily as a subtype of the evaluative field of research.

This paper investigates the diachrony of diminutives in Mojeño across four centuries. First, it shows that the three Mojeño diminutives have two lexical sources: ‘child’ and ‘seed’. This constitutes a counterexample to Jurafsky’s (1996) theory concerning the universal source of diminutives. Second, the paper investigates the grammaticalization process of diminutives and their further distributional and functional changes. It shows that the extension of the distribution onto verbs and grammatical parts of speech correlates with the gain of emotional connotations. It describes the evolution of emotional connotations of the diminutives and the pragmaticalization of their interactional functions until the eventual shift to purely expressive morphemes when diminutives lose their core meaning of ‘smallness’. Third, since each of the three language varieties has one ‘true’ diminutive only, two successive cycles of diminutive renewal are hypothesized, whereby an old diminutive is replaced by a new one.

Kakataibo (a Panoan language spoken in Peru) encodes emotional meanings by means of various morphological and prosodic devices. Some of them may be related to pragmatic implications (like the expression of affection by the diminutive), but others constitute dedicated emotional markers (as is the case of the illocutionary suffixes, augmentative nominalizers and nasalized imperatives). The fact that almost all the emotional markers carry nasalization is interpreted here as a possible case of language-internal sound-symbolism between nasalization and (negative) emotional meanings. This paper also shows that in Kakataibo we find a systematic pattern according to which dedicated emotional markers express negative emotions and never positive ones. Both the phonological and the semantic systems described in this paper may reveal patterns relevant for the cross-linguistic research on the grammar of emotions.

So far, evaluative morphology has received less attention in the verbal domain than in the nominal and adjectival ones. This paper shows that – besides frequentative morphemes like -gAt and preverbs like tele- ‘full’, le- ‘down’, fel ‘up’, etc. – in Hungarian events can be evaluated by means of the verbalizer suffix -kVdik. This formation is unusual in evaluative morphology since it is a category-changing operation. The suffix -kVdik can be attached to adjectives and to nouns expressing a profession or an occupation. Depending on the speaker’s intention, the morphologically complex verb suffixed with -kVdik can attribute to the activity an evaluative, mostly pejorative meaning. The paper suggests that this phenomenon goes beyond evaluative morphology and can be better analyzed in terms of morphopragmatics.

This article describes the semantic values of reduplication in Barunga Kriol – an English-based creole of northern Australia –, with a focus on its expressive functions. Barunga Kriol reduplication has two types of functions. Its most frequent meaning is aspectual atelicity. In addition, it has a number of expressive meanings and connotations: hypocoristic usages; descriptions of children’s games and imitations; and a softening role in imperatives and reprimands. Contrary to the aspectual value of reduplication which is iconically motivated, expressive values are motivated by the pragmatic association of reduplication with children.

Expressive uses of reduplication in Borunge are rarer and less regular than the grammaticalized aspectual uses, which are very frequent. Aspectual reduplication is optional most of the time, so that explaining its actual distribution in discourse is a complicated matter. This article shows that this distribution can often be explained in the view of the expressive values of reduplication (some of them also conveyed by affixal evaluative morphology in the Australian languages that have been replaced by this creole). Thus, taking into account the expressive dimension of reduplication contributes significantly to the linguistic analysis of the grammaticalized aspectual function of reduplication.

Grammatical morphemes dedicated to emotions have been little described so far, except for surprise, which may be instantiated in a mirative category. It has even been suggested that an equivalent grammatical encoding for other basic emotions does not seem to occur crosslinguistically. This paper examines three grammatical morphemes in the Amazonian language Ese Ejja (Takanan), namely the apprehensive, the avertive and the timitive, and argues that all three morphemes express fear or its milder version apprehension, i.e. an emotion triggered by an undesirable, (highly) possible event. The morphemes essentially diverge in their syntactic scope (main verb, subordinated verb, or NP), their perspective (that of the speaker or the subject), and the possible absence vs. obligatory presence of a precautionary situation, i.e. the precautions taken to avoid the (consequences of the) feared event. After describing these features in Ese Ejja, the article outlines a crosslinguistic framework for the study of these categories.