The influence of emotional valence on the interpretation of expressive adjectives

Abstract

Pure expressive adjectives (EAs) (e.g., damn) convey a negative speaker attitude toward a discourse referent and display interpretational flexibility, often targeting elements beyond their syntactic sister. The speech-act hypothesis treats EAs as quasi-independent, non-at-issue speech acts whose target is pragmatically inferred. We propose that ‘contextual valence’ — the perceived positivity or negativity of discourse referents — is a key factor in EA interpretation. Study 1 (English) shows that EAs are significantly more likely to target negatively valenced referents, though this effect interacts with EA-placement. Study 2 (German) extends this framework to mixed EAs (e.g., shitty), whose descriptive content negativizes the local referent and thereby biases for local readings. However, non-local interpretations become more likely when additional contextual cues support a more negative evaluation of the non-local referent. Taken together, these findings show that valence systematically guides EA interpretation and provide a unified explanation for a range of previous experimental results and theoretical argumentations.