Morphology and emotions: A preliminary typology

What is it about?

This introduction discusses our definitions of the terms “emotions”, “morphology”, and the intersection between the two. It then contextualizes the study of the morphological encoding of emotions within semantic typology and semantic ecology, and spells 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. The last parts present the findings of the volume on the more specific topic of evaluative morphology, the most widespread type of emotionally loaded morphology, and offer a chapter-by-chapter outline of the volume.

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Why is it important?

An imporatant conclusion of the volume is that morphology can express most or all basic emotions, but endearment and affection are the most frequent. The introduction also identifies four profiles of emotionally loaded morphological devices, including prototypical evaluative morphology, category-changing, usually pejorative devices (often labelled augmentatives), verbal evaluative morphology, and finally emotion markers that belong to TAM paradigms (e.g. apprehensives). An important contribution of the volume consists of detailed descriptions of the emotional values of evaluative morphological devices, for a significant number of languages across most continents. The articles cover geographical areas and/or types of phenomena on which we previously had very little knowledge.