Expressivity in European Languages

Providing extensive data on a range of European languages, this book highlights the key role expressivity plays in all language.

Jeffrey P. Williams (Edited by)

9781108834032, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 7 September 2023

410 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.7 cm, 0.47 kg

There is an emerging perspective in the discipline of linguistics that takes expressivity as one of the key components of human communication and grammatical structure. Expressivity refers to the use of grammar in natural languages to convey sensory information in a creative way, for example through reduplication, iconicity, ideophones and onomatopoeia. Expressives are more commonly associated with non-European languages, so their presence in European languages has so far been under-documented. With contributions from a team of leading scholars, this pioneering book redresses that balance by providing copious, detailed information about the expressive systems of a set of European languages. It comprises a collection of original surveys of expressivity in languages as diverse as Hungarian, Finnish, Turkish, Scots, German, Greek, Italian, Catalan, Breton and Basque, all with the common goal of challenging structuralist assumptions about the role of syntax, and showing how expressivity is both typologically diverse and universal.

1. Introduction Jeffrey P. Williams
2. Hypocoristic reduplications and embellished clippings in Hungarian (and elsewhere) Mario Brdar, Rita Brdar-Szabó, Nikolett F. Gulyás and Laura Horváth
3. Reduplication in Finno-Ugric languages Iwona Piechnik
4. Expressivity in Scots: a study of echo words Jeffrey P. Williams
5. Reduplication as expressive morphology in German Gerrit Kentner
6. Expressives in Modern Greek: some morphological/morphosyntactic mechanisms for the expression of emotions Haritini Kallergi, Georgia Katsouda and Magdalene Konstantinidou
7. Repetition and reduplication in Italian Anna M. Thornton
8. Analysing expressives in a spoken corpus in Majorcan Catalan Nicolau Dols 
9. A survey of Breton expressive words Mélanie Jouitteau 
10. Vindicating the role of ideophones as a typological feature of Basque Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano
11. Expressive constructions in Georgian and other Caucasian languages Thomas R. Wier
12. Parameters of variation in the syntax of expressive size suffixes: case studies of Russian, German, Spanish, and Greek Olga Steriopolo, Giorgos Markopoulos and Vassilis Spyropoulos.

Subject Areas: Grammar, syntax & morphology [CFK]