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EvalMo Special Issue_Introduction_preprint.pdf
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- Abstract
- This special issue emerges from the workshop “Unlocking evaluative morphology: Conceptual and methodological challenges” at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, March 14-15, 2024, funded by the SLE Research Grant – Joint Initiative (2022). The workshop was concerned with the morphological expression of evaluative semantics (Grandi and Körtvélyessy 2015), such as diminution (Dressler and Merlini Barbaresi 1994), intensification (Rainer 2015) or approximation (Masini et al. 2023). Evaluation is a broad concept, covering a wide array of values that are not always easy to distinguish from each other. Within approximation, for instance, we may identify privativity (Cappelle et al. 2023), vagueness (Masini and Micheli 2020), depreciation (Amiot and Stosic 2022), fakeness (Van Goethem and Norde 2020) and many others. On the formal side, evaluation can be expressed by prefixes such as pseudo- (Van Goethem et al. 2023; Vassiliadou et al. 2023), suffixes such as -ish (Eitelmann et al. 2020), prefixoids such as German Hammer- ‘fantastic, very’ (Norde and Van Goethem 2018), or reduplication such as Mädchen-Mädchen ‘girly girl’ (Frankowsky 2022). On all levels, moreover, we find overlap and competition – similar values can be expressed by different boundmorphemes and vice versa, often within one and the same language. Inspired by the contributions and discussions held during the workshop, this special issue aims to advance our understanding of evaluative morphology by addressing three central questions: 1. Which evaluative values can be expressed morphologically and how are they related to each other? 2. How do morphological expressions of evaluation compete? Can they reinforce one another? 3. What is the relationship between evaluative morphology and evaluation on other levels (e.g., free adverbials)? Again, is there competition and/or reinforcement across linguistic levels?
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