SEMANTICS OF THE AFFECTIVE WORDS AS PART OF THE EMOTIVE LEXICON

Abstract

Various psycholinguistic studies claim that the language is emotive and there is not a single tongue that would contain an emotionally neutral lexicon. The immediate issue connected to it is whether the emotive meaning of a word can render a concept or a notion. Having determined that the emotive components of a word can render concepts, we will proceed with the study of a word emotive meaning. According to Professor V. Shakhovsky we distinguish four types of word emotive semantics: the conceptual/notional meaning, the denotative one, the emotive meaning proper which refers to the comparison of a concrete emotive word with a concrete social emotion expressed by the subject and the last type of meaning is the functional semantic one. It is found in typical social situations recognized by the individual and associated with an emotive word used to denote it. At the same time V. Shakhovsky identifies words with different types of emotive meaning status. They are: words with a denotative emotive meaning status (affective words), those with an optional or additional emotive meaning status (the connotatives), and words with a potential emotive meaning status. In the given paper we analyze the semantics of affective words associated with certain social situations used in “Memories from my Boyhood”, Stories and Tales by Ion Creangă in Romanian, English and Russian.