The phenomenon of value shift in Hungarian
On a special use of negative emotive elements
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18349/MagyarNyelv.2019.3.309Keywords:
evaluative content, value shift, negative emotive elements, enantiosemy, pragmaticsAbstract
This paper discusses a special use of what are known as negative emotive elements, the phenomenon of value shift. Negative emotive elements that, in themselves, out of context, exhibit a semantic content that can be taken to correspond to some negative emotion, are able to undergo value loss or, less frequently, value shift. By the former term, I mean the phenomenon where a negative element becomes an intensifying modifier for some other word as in brutálisan gyors ‘brutally fast’. By the latter term, I mean cases in which the element, in spite of its inherently negative content, expresses the speaker’s surprise or positive value judgement as in brutális alaplap ‘a brutal [= extremely/surprisingly good] mainboard’. Negative emotive elements can be found in a number of languages, and can also be attested historically. Nevertheless, disregarding my own earlier studies, very few papers discuss them; and even the ones that do, concentrate on, or even restrict their attention to, the phenomenon of value loss. The aim of the present paper is to fill that gap by contributing some observations concerning the study of value shift in negative emotive elements.
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