Affect, in linguistics, is attitude or emotion that a speaker brings to an utterance. Affects such as sarcasm, contempt, dismissal, distaste, disgust, disbelief, exasperation, boredom, anger, joy, respect or disrespect, sympathy, pity, gratitude, wonder, admiration, humility, and awe are frequently conveyed through
paralinguistic mechanisms such as
intonation, facial expression, and
gesture, and thus require recourse to punctuation or
emoticons when reduced to writing, but there are grammatical and lexical expressions of affect as well, such as
pejorative and
approbative or
laudative expressions or inflections, adversative forms,
honorific and deferential language,
interrogatives and
tag questions, and some types of
evidentiality.