Small but Intense

Abstract: "Ideation reigns supreme in language, […] volition and emotion come in as distinctly secondary factors." With these words, Edward Sapir (1921:217) claimed that language is primarily a tool for the expression of thought (ideas). The expression of affect is only secondary. This secondary role is reflected in the form of language: "[T]he emotional aspect of our psychic life is but meagerly expressed in the build of language;" (Sapir ibidem). Roman Jakobson (1960) acknowledges the supremacy of the expression of thought but emphasizes "[...] that this supremacy does not authorize linguistics to disregard the 'secondary factors'." Jakobson argues that "[I]f we analyze language from the standpoint of the information it carries, we cannot restrict the notion of information to the cognitive aspect of language.” The aim of this talk is to examine the "meager" formal expression of affective information in the build of human language by closely considering and analyzing a number of affect-related formal properties that are manifest in (varieties of) Dutch. At a more descriptive level, these formal strategies of encoding affective information can be characterized as being augmentative: they make the structure 'bigger' and effectuate a concomitant intensifying meaning. Three types of augmentative strategies will be considered: (i) augmentation by local dislocation; (ii) augmentation by "spreading"; (iii) augmentation by coordination. It will be shown that this augmentation often surfaces phonetically in a "small" way, viz., by means of the default vowel 'schwa'. It will be argued that this schwa externalizes functional categories. In the first part of the talk, I will discuss a variety of syntactic construction types featuring this intensifying schwa. In the second part of the talk, I will examine the appearance of schwa in complex curse expressions. It will be argued that complex curse expressions in Dutch are structured expressions (i.e., have a syntax) and that the schwa that appears in these constructions instantiates a functional head.