Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Sprach- und literaturwissenschaftliche Fakultät - Nordeuropa-Institut

This workshop – funded by the SLE Research Grant – Joint Initiative scheme – is concerned with morphological expression of evaluative semantics (Grandi & Körtvélessy 2015), such as diminution (Dressler & Barbaresi 1994), intensification (Rainer 2015) or approximation (Masini, Norde & Van Goethem 2023). Evaluation is a broad concept, covering a wide array of values that are not always easy to distinguish from each other. Within approximation, for instance, we may identify privativity (Cappelle, Daugs & Hartmann 2023), similarity (Masini & Micheli 2020), depreciation (Amiot & Stosic 2022), fakeness (Van Goethem & Norde 2020) and a great many others. On the formal side, evaluation can be expressed by prefixes such as pseudo- (Vassiliadou et al. 2023), suffixes such as -ish (Eitelmann, Haugland & Haumann 2020), prefixoids such as German Hammer- ‘fantastic; very’ (Norde & Van Goethem 2018), or reduplication such as Mädchen-Mädchen ‘girly girl’ (Frankowsky 2022). On all levels, moreover, we find overlap and competition – similar values can be expressed by different bound morphemes and vice versa, often within one and the same language. 

The purpose of this workshop is to gain a better understanding of the sources, formal expressions and values of evaluative morphology cross-linguistically, addressing the following Research Questions:

• Which evaluative values can be expressed morphologically and how are they related to each other?
• How do morphological expressions of evaluation compete? Can they reinforce one another?
• What is the relationship between evaluative morphology and evaluation on other levels (e.g. free adverbials)? Again, is there competition and / or reinforcement across linguistic levels?