Morphopragmatics

Abstract

Morphopragmatics is a theoretical model intended to deal with the area of systematic pragmatic meanings exclusively and autonomously obtained by morphological rules. It focuses on grammatical (although not prototypical) morphological phenomena, such as diminutives, augmentatives, elatives, reduplicatives, excessives, and, within inflection, honorifics and personal pronouns of address, whose meanings/effects on the utterance are primarily located in pragmatics. These devices, exhibiting no stable semantic meanings, are capable of obtaining pragmatic meanings/effects that cannot be derived from semantics nor accounted for within general pragmatics. The morphopragmatic model integrates morphology and pragmatics and is meant to cover an area of so far marginalized phenomena.