A note on the emotive origins of syntax

Abstract

In this note, I ask what (if any) linguistic means above the word level might have already been in place before our full-blown syntactic capacity involving recursive Merge has evolved. I argue that the ‘pre-Merge era’ might have been characterized by paratactic emotive utterances comparable to root small clauses in modern languages. At the end of this contribution, this new emotive perspective on so-called ‘living linguistic fossils’ is extended to the core syntactic property of displacement, which features an augmentation strategy in the form of multiple copies that is reminiscent of doubling and reduplication processes involved in conveying expressive meaning components.

Syntactic means of positive emotions representation in American and British drama

“…Linguists study linguo-cultural peculiarities in emotional speech in different languages and among native and non-native speakers [3,4]. Special attention is also paid to differential features of emotionally coloured speech in speech genres [5] and on various levels of the language system including grammar [6,7].…”