Morphology and emotions across the world's languages

This volume presents nine chapters dealing with emotionally loaded morphology over four continents. The collection is the result of a workshop on “morphology and emotions” (MorphÉm) held by the first author at Dynamique du Langage (CNRS) in Lyon on 29-30 April 2015. In this introduction, we first discuss our definitions of the terms “emotions”, “morphology”, and the intersection between the two (Section 1). In Section 2, we contextualize the study of the morphological encoding of emotions within semantic typology and semantic ecology, and spell out some of the cross-linguistic generalizations that can be made about the morphological encoding of emotions on the basis of the contributions in this volume. In Section 3, we summarize the findings of the volume on the more specific topic of evaluative morphology, the most widespread type of emotionally loaded morphology. Finally, Section 4 offers a chapter-by-chapter outline of the volume.