Editing Indexicality (section)

==== Affect indices ====
Affective meaning is seen as "the encoding, or indexing of speakers emotions into speech events."<ref name=affect>Besnier, Niko. Language and Affect. Annual Reviews, Inc., 1990.</ref> The interlocutor of the event "decodes" these verbal messages of affect by giving "precedence to intentionality";<ref name=affect/> that is, by assuming that the affective form intentionally indexes emotional meaning.

Some examples of affective forms are: [[diminutives]] (for example, diminutive affixes in [[Indo-European languages|Indo-European]] and [[Amerindian language]]s indicate sympathy, endearment, emotional closeness, or antipathy, condescension, and emotional distance); [[ideophones]] and [[onomatopoeias]]; [[Expletive attributive|expletives]], exclamations, [[interjections]], curses, insults, and [[imprecations]] (said to be "dramatizations of actions or states"); [[Intonation (linguistics)|intonation]] change (common in tone languages such as Japanese); address terms, kinship terms, and pronouns which often display clear affective dimensions (ranging from the complex address-form systems found languages such a [[Javanese language|Javanese]] to inversions of vocative kin terms found in Rural [[Italy]]);<ref name=affect/> [[lexicon|lexical]] processes such as [[synecdoche]] and [[metonymy]] involved in effect meaning manipulation; certain categories of meaning like [[evidentiality]]; [[reduplication]], [[Quantifiers (linguistics)|quantifiers]], and comparative structures; as well as [[inflectional morphology]].

Affective forms are a means by which a speaker indexes emotional states through different linguistic mechanisms. These indices become important when applied to other forms of non-referential indexicality, such as sex indices and social identity indices, because of the innate relationship between first-order indexicality and subsequent second-order (or higher) indexical forms.  (See multiple indices section for Japanese example).