Affect (linguistics)


In linguistics, affect is an attitude or emotion that a speaker brings to an utterance. Affects such as sarcasm, contempt, dismissal, distaste, disgust, disbelief, exasperation, boredom, anger, joy, respect or disrespect, sympathy, pity, gratitude, wonder, admiration, humility, and awe are frequently conveyed through paralinguistic mechanisms such as intonation, facial expression, and gesture, and thus require recourse to punctuation or emoticons when reduced to writing, but there are grammatical and lexical expressions of affect as well, such as pejorative and approbative or laudative expressions or inflections, adversative forms, honorific and deferential language, interrogatives and tag questions, and some types of evidentiality.

Lexical affect

Lexical choices may frame speaker affect. Examples are slender vs. scrawny, thrifty vs. stingy, freedom fighter vs. terrorist, etc.

Grammatical affect

In many languages of Europe, augmentative derivations are used to express contempt or other negative attitudes toward the noun being so modified, whereas diminutives may express affection; on the other hand, diminutives are frequently used to belittle or be dismissive. For instance, in Spanish, a name ending in diminutive -ito or -ita may be a term of endearment, but señorito "little mister" for señor "mister" may be mocking. Polish has a range of augmentative and diminutive forms, which express differences in affect. So, from żaba "a frog", besides żabucha for simply a big frog, there is augmentative żabsko to express distaste, żabisko if the frog is ugly, żabula if it is likeably awkward, etc.
Affect can also be conveyed by more subtle means. Duranti, for example, shows that the use of pronouns in Italian narration indicates that the character referred to is important to the narration, but is generally also a mark of positive speaker attitude toward the character.
In Japanese and Korean, grammatical affect is conveyed both through honorific, polite, and humble language, which affects both nouns and verbal inflection, but also with clause-final particles that express a range of speaker emotions and attitudes toward what is being said. For instance, when asked in Japanese if what one is eating is good, one might say 美味しい oishii "it's delicious" or まずい mazui "it's bad" with various particles for nuance:
The same can be done in Korean:
In English and Japanese, the passive of intransitive verbs may be used to express an adversative situation:
In some languages with split intransitive grammars, such as the Central Pomo language of California, the choice of encoding an affected verb argument as an "object" reflects empathy or emotional involvement on the part of the speaker: