The inference of affective meanings: an experimental study

Abstract

a b st r a c tCommunicating information about our aff ective states is an important aspect of utterance meaning. Aff ective meanings can be expressed either explicitly or in an implicit way, for example by using particular linguistic structures like C r e at i v e To ta l R e d u p l i c at i o n (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 aff ective meaning refl ecting the speaker's evaluation of the [ * ] The fi rst and third authors are respectively Research Fellow and Research Director of the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifi que-FNRS, Belgium; the second author is Professor Emeritus at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). We would like to warmly thank Olivier Klein for his precious help in data analysis, in particular with the use of the statistics software R . We are also grateful to an anonymous reviewer and the editor for their careful corrections and their insightful suggestions.rossi e t al. 352[ 1 ] We leave aside the problem of determining, for TRs, which one of the two occurrences is the base and which one is the copy.world as good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant ("It's a cute little cat"). The experiment reported here used a verifi cation task with judgments of consistency. It aimed at verifying two hypotheses: fi rst, the presence of CTR generates valued aff ective inferences; second, aff ective inferences are generated faster with CTR than with the s i m p l e x (i.e., nonreduplicated) form. Results strongly confi rm the fi rst hypothesis and disconfi rm the second.

Tracing The Development Of AnOld Old Story: Intensificatory Repetition In English

“…A follow‐up empirical study (Rossi et al. ) provides further support to the suggestion, showing that affective implicatures are generated in significantly higher numbers for syntactic repetitive strategies than for the corresponding simplex forms. These claims have however been questioned by other scholars.…”

“…Note, in this respect, the use of the terms SYNTACTIC REDUPLICATION or CREATIVE TOTAL REDUPLICATION to refer to non‐morphological repetitive patterns such as adagio, adagio; coffee‐coffee or petit petit [chat] (Rossi et al. : 351; Wierzbicka ). In this paper, the term INTENSIFICATORY (SYNTACTIC) REPETITION will, together with INTENSIFICATORY (ADJECTIVE) REPETITION, be used to refer to the structure that interests me here (e.g.…”

“…Mattiello ; Merlini‐Barbaresi ; Rossi ; Rossi et al. ; Wierzbicka ). Syntactic repetition is pragmatically a marked option: the juxtaposition of two tokens of the same lexical element renders the structure superficially uninformative (i.e.…”

“…Cases such as C'est un petit petit chat (‘it's a little little cat’) feature both degree and affective intensification: the cat in question is ‘of a very small dimension’ ( little little ), which in turn makes it a ‘very cute’ exemplar that deserves the speaker's affective response (Rossi et al. : 352).…”

“…In addition, some previous sources associate syntactic repetition (regardless of their functional type) with particular procedural implicatures (see Rossi ; Rossi et al. : 353; Schwarz : 649). Rossi (: 163) for instance advocates a dual functionality of syntactic repetition, whereby the explicatures noted above (intensification / identity / expansion) are complemented by affective implicatures that enable the speaker ‘to partially orientate the interpretive process … and thus influence the … hearer's beliefs’.…”