Cristina Soriano 23 Affective meaning in language 1 Introduction 2 Affective meaning 3 Affective meaning in sounds 4 Affective meaning in morphemes 5 Affective meaning in syntax 6 Affective meaning in the lexicon 7 Conclusions 8 References Abstract: Affective meaning is pervasive in language. In this chapter we discuss its pres- ence at multiple levels of linguistic analysis, with special attention to the lexicon. In a first introduction to the phenomenon, we explain and illustrate two types of affective meaning (denotative and connotative) and three ways to account for it (categorical, dimensional and feature-based approaches) transversal to all levels of analysis. We then illustrate how affect is communicated in phonology, morphology, the lexicon, and syntax, with examples from different languages. The discussion of the lexicon is further organized around two vari- ables: (a) the word’s grammatical class, where we discuss emotion concepts such as nouns (e.g., joy), verbs (e.g., to embarrass), adjectives (e.g., sad) and adverbs (e.g., surprisingly); and (b) the word’s figurativeness, where we analyze affective meaning in literal (e.g. to rage) and figurative expressions (e.g., to erupt) and discuss the privileged link between figurative language and emotion. 1 Introduction This chapter presents an overview of the ways in which language communicates affective meaning. Affective meaning is here understood in a broad sense as affective information either encoded or perceived in language. This meaning is assumed to stem from extra- linguistic as well as linguistic experiences, i.e., both from our interactions with the world and with the linguistic context in which words (or other linguistic constructions) are used (cf. Vigliocco et al. 2009). Affective meaning can be hard to study and describe. One of the reasons may be that the affective meaning of many units is often only (fully) specified in context (Besnier 1990: 429; White 2015). A second reason may be that the nature of emotion and other affective phenomena (moods, attitudes, etc.) is not yet fully understood. We currently lack a consen- sual definition of emotion within psychology or across disciplines, and in linguistics the phenomena studied as “affect” are many and diverse (e.g., subjectivity, engagement, atti- Cristina Soriano, Geneva, Switzerland https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110347524-023