Abstract
Largely neglected in the course of the 20th century, affect was gradually rehabilitated towards the end of the century by certain works in psychology : Zajonc (1980, 2000) in particular defends the idea that affect can intervene in the processing of stimuli at a very early level, described as " precognitive ". In linguistics, the vericonditionalist paradigm in the Fregéan tradition associates the meaning of a sentence with its truth conditions - a model in which affective connotations have no place. Admittedly, in recent years, there has been a great deal of work on terms or expressions that enable speakers to convey their feelings, such as interjections, expressives, insults and so on. But does the affective dimension really only concern a small part of the lexicon? On the contrary, isn't it relevant to the majority of words ? In fact, recent work in psychology and neuroscience suggests that in language, affect may be cognitively more important than purely referential information. So what is the linguistic and communicative status of affective connotations ? While we need to distinguish between linguistically encoded affective connotation and culturally encoded affective connotation, we shall see that each borrows features from both presuppositional content and conventional implicatures, although none of them relates entirely to these two categories. Affective connotation must be considered as a specific level of content, with its own characteristics.
