Top Qs
Timeline
Chat
Perspective

Approbative

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Remove ads

In linguistics, approbatives are words or grammatical forms that denote a positive affect; that is, they express the appreciation or approval of the speaker. Sometimes a term may begin as a pejorative word and eventually be adopted in an approbative sense. In historical linguistics, this phenomenon is known as amelioration. Examples from English include "punk", "nerd", "badass", "sick", and "killer".

Remove ads

See also


Loading related searches...

Wikiwand - on

Seamless Wikipedia browsing. On steroids.

Remove ads