Affect (linguistics)

In linguistics, speaker affect is 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 choices may frame speaker affect. Examples are slender (positive affect) vs scrawny (negative affect), thrifty (positive) vs. stingy (negative), freedom fighter (positive) vs. terrorist (negative), etc. (Murphy 2003)

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 (masculin) or -ita (feminine) may be a term of endearment, but señorito "little mister" for señor "mister" is 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 (1984), 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 oishii "it's delicious" or mazui "it's bad" with various particles for nuance:

Oishii yo (making an assertion; explicitly informing that it is good)

Oishii wa! (expressing joy; feminine)

Oishii kedo ("it's good but ...")

Mazui ne ("it's bad, isn't it?" -- eliciting agreement)

Mazui mon (exasperated)

In English and Japanese, the passive of intransitive verbs may be used to express an adversative situation:

	English	Japanese
Active voice (neutral affect)	It rained.	ame-ga	fut-ta	雨が降った。
		rain-NOM	fall-PFV
Passive voice (negative affect)	I was rained on.	ame-ni	fu-rare-ta	雨に降られた。
		rain-DAT	fall-PASS-PFV

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" (patientive case) reflects empathy or emotional involvement on the part of the speaker (Mithun 1991):

ʔaː=tʼo	béda=ht̪ow	béː=yo-w	dá-ːʔ-du-w	tʃʰó-w.
1.AGT=but	here=from	away=go-PFV	want-REFL-IMPV-PFV	not-PFV

béda	ʔaː	qʼlá-w=ʔkʰe.
here	I.AGT	die-PFV=FUT

"(But) I don't want to go away from here. I (agentive) will die here." (said matter-of-factly)

ʔaː	tʃá=ʔel	ʔtʃí=hla	t̪oː	qʼlá=hla	tʼo?
I.AGT	house=the	get=if	I.PAT	die=if	but

"(But) what if I (patientive) died after I got the house?" (given as a reason not to buy a new house)

References

• Duranti, A. 1984. "The social meaning of subject pronouns in Italian conversation." Text 4(4): 271–311.
• Mithun, M. 1991. "Active/agentive case marking and its motivations." Language 67(3):510–546.
• Murphy, M. L. 2003. Semantic relations and the lexicon. Cambridge University Press.