In linguistics, approbatives are words or grammatical forms that denote a positive affect; that is, they express the appreciation or approval of the speaker. Sometimes a term may begin as a pejorative word and eventually be adopted in an approbative sense. In historical linguistics, this phenomenon is known as amelioration. Examples from English include "punk", "nerd", "badass", "sick", and "killer".

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• Laudative, or praising affect
• Pejorative, or negative affect

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