Inlinguistics,affect is an attitude oremotion that a speaker brings to an utterance. Affects such as sarcasm, contempt, dismissal, distaste, disgust, disbelief, exasperation, boredom, anger, joy, respect or disrespect, sympathy,pity, gratitude, wonder, admiration, humility, and awe are frequently conveyed throughparalinguistic mechanisms such asintonation, facial expression, andgesture, and thus require recourse to punctuation oremoticons when reduced to writing, but there are grammatical and lexical expressions of affect as well, such aspejorative andapprobative orlaudative expressions or inflections, adversative forms,honorific and deferential language,interrogatives andtag questions, and some types ofevidentiality.

Lexical choices mayframe a speaker's affect, such asslender (positive affect) vs.scrawny (negative affect),thrifty (positive) vs.stingy (negative) andfreedom fighter (positive) vs.terrorist (negative).^[1]

In many languages of Europe,augmentative derivations are used to express contempt or other negative attitudes toward the noun being so modified, whereasdiminutives may express affection; on the other hand, diminutives are frequently used to belittle or be dismissive. For instance, inSpanish, a name ending in diminutive-ito (masculine) or-ita (feminine) may be aterm of endearment, butseñorito "little mister" forseñor "mister" may be mocking.Polish has a range ofaugmentative anddiminutive forms, which express differences in affect. So, fromżaba "a frog", besidesżabucha for simply a big frog, there is augmentativeżabsko to express distaste,żabisko if the frog is ugly,żabula if it is likeably awkward, etc.

Affect can also be conveyed by more subtle means. Duranti, for example, shows that the use of pronouns in Italian narration indicates that the character referred to is important to the narration but is generally also a mark of a positive speaker attitude toward the character.^[2]

InJapanese andKorean, grammatical affect is conveyed both throughhonorific, polite, and humble language, which affects both nouns and verbal inflection, and through clause-finalparticles that express a range of speaker emotions and attitudes toward what is being said. For instance, when asked in Japanese if what one is eating is good, one might say 美味しいoishii "it's delicious" or まずいmazui "it's bad" with various particles for nuance:

美味しいよOishii yo (making an assertion; explicitly informing that it is good)

美味しいわOishii wa! (expressing joy; feminine)

美味しいけどOishii kedo ("it's good but ...")

まずいねMazui ne ("it's bad, isn't it?" -- eliciting agreement)

まずいもんMazui mon (exasperated)

The same can be done inKorean:

맛있어요Masi-issoyo (Neutral, polite)

맛있군요Masi-ittgunyo! (Surprised, elated)

맛있잖아Masi-ittjianha (lit. "It's not delicious", but connotes "It's delicious, no?")

맛이 없다Masi-eopda (the base verb form for "bad tasting", used as a blunt, impolite statement)

In English and Japanese, thepassive of intransitive verbs may be used to express an adversative situation:

Active voice (neutral affect)	雨が ame-ga rain-NOM 降った。 fut-ta fall-PFV 雨が 降った。 ame-ga fut-ta rain-NOM fall-PFV It rained.
Passive voice (negative affect)	雨に ame-ni rain-DAT 降られた。 fu-rare-ta fall-PASS-PFV 雨に 降られた。 ame-ni fu-rare-ta rain-DAT fall-PASS-PFV I was rained on.

In some languages withsplit intransitive grammars, such as theCentral Pomo language ofCalifornia, the choice of encoding an affectedverb argument as an "object" (patientive case) reflects empathy or emotional involvement on the part of the speaker:^[3]

• Propositional attitude

• Pragmatics
• Linguistics terminology

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