A first dedicated study of how language expresses emotions by means of morphology

What is it about?

This volume is a special issue on the morphological expression of emotion. It consists of 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 in April 2015.

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Why is it important?

The volume advances our knowledge of the linguistic encoding of emotions, analyzing a diversity of ways in which morphology takes charge of emotional meanings in various languages across several continents. Although morphological resources often take charge of emotional meanings (e.g. evaluative morphology, see Jurafsky (1996), Grandi & Kortvelyessy (2015); apprehensives, see Lichtenberk (1995)), it is the first study on this question. So far, the descriptions of the morphological features considered in the volume have never focused on their emotional dimension, and there exists no comprehensive study of the role of morphology with respect to the description of emotion. This volume represents a novel contribution to semantic typology and to our understanding of semantic ecology in particular, for the semantic domain of emotions.