Formalising Expressive Morphology

Expressivity - the signalling of the speaker's perspective on the utterance - has long been considered a secondary function of

language, but recent work shows that it is far more structured than previously thought. A prominent proposal argues that expressive

meaning is conveyed by 'marked morphology' (MM), i.e. functional morphemes which appear in a deviant (marked) structural

position. However, the scarcity of systematic investigations is a serious obstacle for our understanding of the exact encoding of

expressivity in human language. The goal of the FEMOR-project is two-fold, namely i) conduct an in-depth comparative study on

expressivity strategies, and b) couch the theoretical analysis of this new empirical knowledge in the recently taken highly promising

theoretical direction towards the formalization of expressive meaning in morphosyntax. Afrikaans and Dutch form an ideal empirical

domain for this research as a) they share two clear manifestations of MM with expressive meaning, and b) only Afrikaans also displays

expressivity in a common (language-internally unmarked) morphological process, i.e reduplication (RE). By i) systematically collecting

data on the morphosyntax of MM and RE, and ii) analysing the data with exploratory statistical techniques prior to developing a

detailed formal analysis, the FEMOR-project will make significant progress in the formalization of expressive meaning in morphosyntax, and deepen our understanding of the pragmaticalization and grammaticalization of expressive elements.