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 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.

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 (masculine) 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.

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