This chapter introduces the topic of expressivity and outlines the contributions to the book.

This chapter provides an organized ranking and a discussion of expressives in Breton. Expressives are defined as expressions whose morphophonology is not entirely arbitrary, but partly iconic. I provide an inventory of them in Breton, a Celtic modern language spoken in Western France in a bilingual context with French. I discuss the productivity of the operations of expressive morphology, their exclusive use for expressive means, and their degree of iconicity. I show for each category in turn what operations or structures might be exclusive to expressive words.

This work compares the morphosyntactic properties of expressive suffixes in four European languages: Russian, German, Spanish and Greek. It shows that although these suffixes share the same expressive meaning, they differ significantly in their syntactic structure, namely in the manner and place of attachment in the syntactic tree. Thus, the Russian and Spanish expressive suffixes that refer to the size of a referent (or size suffixes) are syntactic modifiers, while the German size suffixes are syntactic heads. And in Greek, the two most productive expressive suffixes -ak and -ul have homophonous counterparts that possess contrasting syntactic properties: syntactic heads vs. syntactic modifiers. This shows that across languages as well as within single languages, such as Greek, there is no 1:1 correspondence between the meaning and the structure of expressive forms. These findings are further supported by two novel case studies of the homophonous suffixes -its (in Greek) and -ic (in Russian).

Basque possesses a large, distinctive class of iconic elements known as ideophones (onomatopoeia in traditional terms). This chapter succinctly describes the main typological characteristics of these words, and argues that, due to their prominent status in Basque and in linguistic typology in general, they should be considered one of the main typological traits of Basque, alongside other linguistic features specific to this language such as ergativity, case alignment, and double marking.

Scots, like too many other European languages, is viewed as possessing a dearth of expressivity in spite of evidence to the contrary. This chapter documents the fact that Scots possesses a wide range of forms of expressivity as part of its grammatical repertoire – including most notably echo word formations. Echo words are a type of apophonic reduplication where a root, stem, or other morphosyntactic constituent is partially reduplicated and there is a concomitant change in the echoant; the reduplicated, or copied, portion has no independent semantic value. The change in the copy portion can involve vowel ablaut, consonant alternation/substitution, or tone/register changes.

In this chapter we discuss the results of the experimental component to the study, which is designed to examine the degree to which the probabilistic contrasts uncovered in the corpus analysis are also discernible in language users’ introspective preferences. These experiments were designed to corroborate and interrogate the scope of the patterns observed in our corpus models.

This chapter begins with a general discussion of potential data types in variationist linguistics. Next, we present the two main data sources we use in the study: the International Corpus of English (ICE) and the Global Corpus of Web-Based English (GloWbE). The former comprises a set of parallel, balanced corpora representative of language usage across a wide range of standard national varieties. Each ICE corpus contains 500 texts of 2000 words each, sampled from twelve spoken and written genres/registers, totaling approx. 1 million words. GloWbE contains data collected from 1.8 million English language websites – both blogs and general web pages – from twenty different countries (approx. 1.8 billion words in all). Discussion of the corpora is followed by a detailed description of the data collection, identification, and annotation procedures for our three alternations. Here we carefully define the variable context for each alternation, and outline the methods for coding various linguistic constraints that are included in our analyses.