Grammatical Effects of Affect A contrastive corpus analysis of the use and meaning of infant and baby

Abstract

This thesis aims at (1) outlining a basic understanding of how affective, or expressive, meaning can be understood relative to linguistic meaning and language at large, and (2) analysing how affective meaning may relate to epistemological status and reference type in actual language use. The thesis' theoretical framework is largely situated within the paradigm of cognitive linguistics, and in particular drawing from the work of Langacker (2008). The analysis combines basic qualitative and quantitative methods in deconstructing clausal instantiations from transcripts of spoken English from the COCA corpus. The clausal instantiations are analysed according to three parameters: Semantic prosody (positive – inconspicuous – negative); Epistemological status (extensional – intensional); and Reference type (specific – non-specific). The results can be said to point to indications of correlative patterns between affective meaning and epistemological status, whilst finding close to no indications of such patterns between affective meaning and reference type. The results also point to the necessity of not only considering written text, but also other nonlexical means of communication (such as tone of voice and gestures), in order to successfully study affective meaning relative to language and linguistic processing.