Cognitive science underwent an ‘emotional turn’ in recent years. Besides the
rational part of the brain, the ‘other half of the human mind’ (see Parisi 2011) is
now taken into consideration as well. Linguistics, with its strong orientation and
links to cognitive science, cannot neglect this development and has to ask itself
in which way emotions should play a role in theories about language (cf. Foolen
2012). The present paper intends to give an overview of recent research in psychology
and linguistics on emotive expressivity in language. In the first section,
we will discuss the emotive-expressive function of language in relation to the
descriptive, referential function. In Section 2, we will have a look at research
on emotion-laden words (‘valence’), both in L1 and L2. Then, in Section 3, we
will shift the attention from content words to function words, to intensifiers in
particular. Section 4 takes a short look at expressive elements on other linguistic
levels (phonology, morphology, syntax), and Section 5 rounds off this paper.
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