Book excerpt: This monograph is intended as a contribution to the integral description of language and verbal communication. Chapter I and Chapters VII and VIII are concerned with general problems of emotivity and expressivity in language as such and on all linguistic levels. These chapters describe emotivity from a new semiotic perspective and suggest a typology of emotive signs and meanings. Chapter II discusses general methodology of investigating and "measuring" emotive meaning in the area of word-formation (with examples from Russian). Chapters III, IV and V treat Russian diminutives fromgeneral-structural, lexical-contextual and pragmatic perspectives, while Chapter VI presents a comparison of the semantic structures of the various types of emotive noun derivatives which exist in Russian. The book thus begins with a general treatment on emotivity, goes on to consider the specific case of emotive noun-formation, giving special attention to the Russian diminutives, and then returns, by way of a comparison of the semantic structures of various types of emotive nouns, to more general problems of emotivity in language and to semiotic typology.