I want it small or, rather, give me a bunch: the role of evaluative morphology on the assessment of the emotional properties of words

ABSTRACT

Evaluative markers of diminution and augmentation typically express quantity or intensity. Prior evidence suggests that they also convey emotions, although it remains unexplored as to whether this function is mediated by their role in expressing quantification/intensification. Here we investigated the effects of evaluative suffixes on the assessment of word affective properties by asking participants (N = 300) to score valence and arousal features for augmentatives, diminutives and base words with negative, positive or neutral valence. Diminutives and, to a lesser extent, augmentatives were assessed more positively than base forms in negative words and more negatively than bases in positive words. The capacity of diminution to express attenuated emotions is in line with its function in conveying quantity. By contrast, valence effects for augmentatives suggests a role in expressing pejoration and amelioration that is not mediated by quantification. With regard to arousal, negative, neutral and positive augmentatives showed higher scores than base words, which, in addition, were also rated higher than diminutives. These incremental effects suggest that suffixes which convey larger quantity are also associated with increased arousal. Thus, with the exception of valence effects in augmentatives, it seems that evaluative suffixes encode both valence and arousal through quantification.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion
• morphology
• evaluative morphology
• diminutives
• augmentatives

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge insightful comments by Pablo Gómez, Victor Kuperman and an anonymous reviewer on a previous version of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data and scripts for this study are publicly available at: https://osf.io/kq6y9/?view_only = 2cd1a0b5b1ad4df6b52e46b5c0afb453

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Consejería de Educación e Investigación : [grant number H2019/HUM-5705]; Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation: [grant number PGC2018-098558-B-I00,PID2019-107206GB-I00,RED2018-102615-T]; Universitat Rovira i Virgili: [grant number 2018PFR-URV-B2-32].