Formalising Expressive Morphology

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Expressivity - the signalling of the speaker's perspective on the utterance - has long been considered a secondary function oflanguage, but recent work shows that it is far more structured than previously thought. A prominent proposal argues that expressivemeaning is conveyed by 'marked morphology' (MM), i.e. functional morphemes which appear in a deviant (marked) structuralposition. However, the scarcity of systematic investigations is a serious obstacle for our understanding of the exact encoding ofexpressivity in human language. The goal of the FEMOR-project is two-fold, namely i) conduct an in-depth comparative study onexpressivity strategies, and b) couch the theoretical analysis of this new empirical knowledge in the recently taken highly promisingtheoretical direction towards the formalization of expressive meaning in morphosyntax. Afrikaans and Dutch form an ideal empiricaldomain for this research as a) they share two clear manifestations of MM with expressive meaning, and b) only Afrikaans also displaysexpressivity in a common (language-internally unmarked) morphological process, i.e reduplication (RE). By i) systematically collectingdata on the morphosyntax of MM and RE, and ii) analysing the data with exploratory statistical techniques prior to developing adetailed formal analysis, the FEMOR-project will make significant progress in the formalization of expressive meaning inmorphosyntax, and deepen our understanding of the pragmaticalization and grammaticalization of expressive elements.