Expressivity and Bilingualism

Abstract This chapter, focusing on pejorative expressives in the second language, examines the relationship between expressivity and bilingualism. It begins with a brief survey of expressivity and an inquiry into the definition of functional bilingualism, a view of bilingual capacity that is adopted in this chapter. Delving into the impact of social and situational contexts, this chapter further explores sociolinguistic variables such as age, gender, language proficiency, socioeconomic class, level of education, and communication context, and the ways in which such variables impact bilingual speakers’ choice of emotional expression in the second language. Given that sociopragmatic competence emerges at later phases of second language development, the benefit of incorporating pejorative lexical items into the second language formal instruction is also discussed.