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Lists of pejorative terms for people include: . List of ethnic slurs. List of ethnic slurs and epithets by ethnicity; List of common nouns derived from ethnic group names
In terms of lexical opposites, a marked form is a non-basic one, often one with inflectional or derivational endings. Thus, a morphologically negative word form is marked as opposed to a positive one: happy/unhappy, honest/dishonest, fair/unfair, clean/unclean, and so forth.
A double negative almost always resolves to a positive meaning and even more so in colloquial speech where the speaker particularly stresses the first negative word. Meanwhile, a triple negative resolves to a negative meaning, which bares a stronger negativity than a single negative. For example, "我不覺得没有人不知道" (Wǒ bù ...
In historical linguistics, the process of an inoffensive word becoming pejorative is a form of semantic drift known as pejoration.An example of pejoration is the shift in meaning of the word silly from meaning that a person was happy and fortunate to meaning that they are foolish and unsophisticated. [3]
If the prefix or suffix is negative, such as 'dis-' or -'less', the word can be called an orphaned negative. [ 2 ] Unpaired words can be the result of one of the words falling out of popular usage, or can be created when only one word of a pair is borrowed from another language, in either case yielding an accidental gap , specifically a ...
An example is Japanese, which conjugates verbs in the negative after adding the suffix -nai (indicating negation), e.g. taberu ("eat") and tabenai ("do not eat"). It could be argued that English has joined the ranks of these languages, since negation requires the use of an auxiliary verb and a distinct syntax in most cases; the form of the ...
The examples and perspective in this article deal primarily with the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada and do not represent a worldwide view of the subject. You may improve this article, discuss the issue on the talk page, or create a new article, as appropriate. (December 2022) (Learn how and when to remove this message)
A pejorative suffix is a suffix that attaches a negative meaning to the word or word-stem preceding it. There is frequent overlap between this and the diminutive form.. The pejorative suffix may add the sense of "a despicable example of the preceding," as in Spanish -ejo (see below).