EVALUATIVE MORPHOLOGY: 40 YEARS AND NOT FEELING IT

This paper surveys the studies on evaluative morphology over the forty years since its formal recognition as an autonomous field in Scalise (1984). After revisiting the foundational assumptions concerning the morphological status, semantic properties, and pragmatic profile of evaluative constructions, the paper reviews the major theoretical debates that shaped the field in its early decades, including the position of evaluatives between derivation and inflection, their polysemous semantic organization, and their intrinsic morphopragmatic dimension. It then considers more recent developments, highlighting the expansion of empirical coverage and the emergence of new research directions, such as approximation, the interaction between evaluative morphology and pluractionality, and the acquisition of evaluative morphology. The final section outlines a non-exhaustive set of promising topics that remain comparatively underexplored: the relationship between evaluative morphology and sociolinguistic variation, evaluative morphology in contact situations, evaluative constructions in sign languages, and the role of evaluatives in language disorders.