| 释义 |
ˈmeliorative, a. (n.)
[f. late L. meliōrāre to meliorate: see -ative.]
a. That meliorates; improving. spec. in Linguistics, giving or acquiring a more favourable meaning or connotation (opp. pejorative).
1808G. Edwards Pract. Plan iii. 30 We..become savage in our hatred to the various meliorative processes. 1841R. Oastler Fleet Papers I. xl. 314 Peel has no meliorative and restorative principle to propose. 1902Encycl. Brit. XXXI. 678/1 The so-called meliorative and pejorative developments in word-meaning. 1916F. Swinnerton Chaste Wife xvii. §2. 254 Its note had been meliorative rather than optimistic. 1933G. A. Van Dongen Amelioratives in Eng. I. 146 A meliorative sense-development can be shown to have taken place in a far greater number of words than is generally supposed. 1954Pei & Gaynor Dict. Ling. 134 Meliorative suffix, a suffix which gives a word a more favorable or flattering connotation. 1967R. A. Waldron Sense & Sense Devel. vii. 159 Shrewd is certainly most often a term of praise nowadays, though it comes from ME shrewede ‘wicked, vicious’..and passes through the ‘cunning, crafty’ stage before reaching its present mainly meliorative sense. 1971Archivum Linguisticum II. 36 Not only is silly old ― recognizably an example of a ‘meliorative-pejorative’ adjectival compound in English but, more generally, the example has..been shown to be ambiguous. 1973Times Lit. Suppl. 8 June 647/3 His qualities were British, in the meliorative sense.
b. As n. A word which has had a meliorative sense-development.
1933G. A. Van Dongen Amelioratives in Eng. I. 115 The delimitation of the scope of content displayed by those words..may result in the word becoming a meliorative or a pejorative. |