Research
I am interested in the communication of affective meanings, broadly intended as the expression of affective states, using a particular linguistic structure, Creative Total Reduplication (CTR), the intentional and immediate repetition of a word, occurring quite spontaneously in everyday conversation. My main research hypothesis is that CTR conveys an explicit meaning, according to which, for example, “A long long stroke” means “A very long stroke”, and an implicit affective meaning (that I call “affective inference”), according to which, for example, “A long long/very long stroke” may describe a good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant situation, depending on the context.
I develop this topic from a linguistic point of view (pragmatics, semantics, morphology), and from an experimental point of view, relying on literature on pragmatic inferences.
