Emotive Component of Lexical Meaning: Semantic and Contextual Dimensions

Abstract

In contemporary linguistics, emotive semantics is increasingly viewed not as a peripheral addition to the denotational and conceptual content of a word, but as a complex mechanism that involves the interaction among linguistic meaning, speakers’ experience, and communicative context. This perspective calls for a reconsideration of the traditional view of the emotive component as a stable semantic feature that can be unambiguously extracted from a dictionary definition. Thus, the emotive component of lexical meaning can be understood as a dynamic semantic-pragmatic characteristic that may be conventionally encoded in a linguistic unit or activated through its functioning in a particular context. Its realization is determined by the interaction of nominative content, evaluation, imagery, cultural experience, genre conventions, and communicative intention. Such an approach makes it possible to move from a simple inventory of emotive lexical items to an analysis of the mechanisms through which a word acquires emotional significance in a particular communicative act. For contemporary philology, this opens up opportunities for integrated research on emotivity at the intersection of lexical semantics, cognitive linguistics, discourse studies, linguocultural studies, and corpus linguistics.