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The inference of affective meanings: an experimental study

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 October 2014

DANIELA ROSSI ,
MARC DOMINICY  and
RÉGINE KOLINSKY
DANIELA ROSSI*
Affiliation:
Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique-FNRS, Belgium, Centre de Linguistique, Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres, Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium, and Unité de Recherche en Neurosciences Cognitives (UNESCOG), Center for Research in Cognition & Neurosciences (CRCN), Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium
MARC DOMINICY
Affiliation:
Centre de Linguistique, Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres, Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium
RÉGINE KOLINSKY
Affiliation:
Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique-FNRS, Belgium, and Unité de Recherche en Neurosciences Cognitives (UNESCOG), Center for Research in Cognition & Neurosciences (CRCN), Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium
*
†Address for correspondence: Daniela Rossi, Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Avenue F. Roosevelt, 50, CP 175, 1050 Brussels, Belgium. e-mail: drossi@ulb.ac.be
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Abstract

Communicating information about our affective states is an important aspect of utterance meaning. Affective meanings can be expressed either explicitly or in an implicit way, for example by using particular linguistic structures like Creative Total Reduplication (CTR), the intentional and immediate repetition of a word (“It’s a little little cat”). We claim that, in addition to its explicit meaning (‘very little’), CTR conveys an affective meaning reflecting the speaker’s evaluation of the world as good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant (“It’s a cute little cat”). The experiment reported here used a verification task with judgments of consistency. It aimed at verifying two hypotheses: first, the presence of CTR generates valued affective inferences; second, affective inferences are generated faster with CTR than with the simplex (i.e., non-reduplicated) form. Results strongly confirm the first hypothesis and disconfirm the second.

Keywords

affective evaluationaffective meaningsCreative Total Reduplicationexperimental pragmaticsinference
Type
Research Article
Information
Language and Cognition , Volume 7 , Issue 3 , September 2015 , pp. 351 - 370
Copyright
Copyright © UK Cognitive Linguistics Association 2014 

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