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The inference of affective meanings: an experimental study

par Rossi, Daniela ;Dominicy, Marc ;Kolinsky, Régine
Référence Language and Cognition, 7, page (351-370)
Publication Publié, 2015

Article révisé par les pairs

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Résumé :

Communicating information about our affective states is an important aspect of utterance meaning. Affective meanings can be expressed either explicitly or in an implicit way, for example by using particular linguistic structures like Creative Total Reduplication (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 affective meaning reflecting the speaker’s evaluation of the world as good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant (“It’s a cute little cat”). The experiment reported here used a verification task with judgments of consistency. It aimed at verifying two hypotheses: first, CTR works as a trigger for valued affective inferences; second, affective inferences are generated faster with CTR than with the simplex (i.e. non-reduplicated) form. Results strongly confirm the first hypothesis and disconfirm the second.