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In linguistics, approbatives are words or grammatical forms that denote a positive affect; that is, they express the appreciation or approval of the speaker. [1] [2] !Claro! (Spanish) and "Gotcha!" (English) are examples.
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". [3]
