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Emotion in Language: Theory – research – application
Edited by Ulrike M. Lüdtke
[Consciousness & Emotion Book Series 10] 2015
► pp. 241–256

Word valence and its effects

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.

Keywords: emotion-laden words, intensifiers, language processing, negativity bias, positivity bias
Published online: 16 December 2015
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ceb.10.12foo
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