From: tgpedersen
Message: 55399
Date: 2008-03-17
>Aha. So geminated verbs are colored by some emotion, and non-geminated
> At 12:34:47 PM on Monday, March 17, 2008, tgpedersen wrote:
>
> > --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott"
> > <BMScott@> wrote:
>
> >> At 7:57:11 PM on Sunday, March 16, 2008, tgpedersen wrote:
>
> >>>>> In other words, with some words, you'll have to resort
> >>>>> to 'expressiveness' to explain the gemination, which is
> >>>>> no explanation at all.
>
> >>>> Why not? In many languages, "expressive" formnations do
> >>>> have their own peculiar phonology and phonotactics, and
> >>>> follow different historical developments.
>
> >>> What is 'expressive'? What does it express?
>
> >> Emotional coloring.
>
> > That's hardly better. Coloring by which emotion?
>
> Any, including 'This isn't something prosaic' and 'I want to
> give this term special emphasis'.
> >> Indeed, I now see that this is exactlyPfft. Anything you haven't heard before is 'prejudice' to you.
> >> the characteristic that Larry Trask used to define the term:
>
> >> *expressive formation* Either of two rather different cases.
> >> 1. A modified form of a word possessing additional
> >> emotional colouring, such as small size or affection. ...
> >> 2. (also *descriptive form*) A lexical item which is
> >> coined _de novo_, often in defiance of the ordinary
> >> phonological structure of words, and often to denote
> >> something with intrinsic emotional colouring. ...
>
> > And here's apart of my posting you left out:
> > "
> > It sounds to me like someone is playing on the word's
> > connotations of 'hypochoristic' and 'diminutive' but
> > doesn't want to say it straight out, since that would
> > provide an actual criterion for evaluating the use of that
> > epithet, by which it would surely fail. Those supposed
> > 'expressive' forms have nothing semantic in common.
> > "
>
> I omitted it because I thought that anyone reading the
> definition without prejudice would have seen that it
> answered the allegation satisfactorily. I still think so.
> > re 1)Trask doesn't say that, so why quote him?
> > 'small size' = diminutive
> > 'affection' = hypochoristic
> > That was pretty accurate of me. Now if that's what he
> > means, why doesn't he say so? [...]
>
> Because it isn't what he means. Expressive slang
> formations, for instance, often carry pejorative emotional
> coloring.
> Augmentatives as well as diminutives can beAnd?
> expressive formations. And the boundary between expressive
> formation and onomatopoeia is fuzzy; <zing> in 'The Hunan
> chicken doesn't have its usual zing tonight' is expressive,
> falling under his (2), but it seems to have an onomatopoetic
> component when used to describe an arrow flying by.
>
> The category of expressive formations is like pornography:What a load of blather. Now tell me straight: what is it that the
> it's hard to define and a lot of disagreement over details,
> but there's considerable agreement on the membership or
> non-membership of specific candidates.