The Place of Evaluation within Morphology

A cross-linguistic survey of formal strategies that convey evaluative meanings shows that they cover a wide range of phenomena, crossing the boundaries of morphology: tonal alterations, sound changes, reduplication, affixation, compounding, etc. Of course, the cross-linguistic frequency of these formal processes is uneven: affixation decidedly overtakes all the others. Consequently, in the literature ‘evaluative morphology’ has become synonymous with ‘evaluative affixation’, even if evaluative affixes do not cover the whole range of constructions that fall within the domain of evaluative morphology. On the basis of this premise, the aim of this chapter is not to investigate the place of all morphological strategies involved in evaluation within word formation. Since affixation is the formal device with the highest cross-linguistic diffusion in evaluative morphology, my focus will be on evaluative affixes only.