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As I understand it, linguists (and the rest of us) call pieces of derogatory or negatively-valenced language ‘pejoratives’. But is there a similar term for pieces of commendatory or positively-valenced language?

The best I can come up with is ‘euphemisms’, which unfortunately carries a sense of polite dishonesty. I’m thinking of the way a word like ‘scholar’ is well-suited for communicating admiration (or the opposite, “he's not exactly a scholar”) but ‘academic’ and ‘professor’ aren’t, and likewise with ‘journalist’ and ‘reporter’ or ‘steed’ and ‘horse’.

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  • Not quite a dup. The other question is about the descriptive use such as with adjectives. I took this question to ask about nouns such as labels and categories. Still, they are very close. Can they be merged? Can we get the answer set edited to form a community wiki? Also note that the top answer on the other question is even rarer than my answer here when used as a noun. Google scholar yields only 4 hits for [grammar "approbatives", "pejoratives"] compared to hundreds for [grammar "laudatives" "pejoratives"]; and one of the docs with *approbatives" also contains *laudatives". Commented Aug 22, 2024 at 14:19
  • theses.ubn.ru.nl/server/api/core/bitstreams/… Commented Aug 22, 2024 at 14:19
  • "My suggestion is that slurs, pejoratives, approbatives, laudatives, epithets, and the like will all fall into one or the other of two categories. " page 78 - libra2.lib.virginia.edu/downloads/… Commented Aug 22, 2024 at 14:27
  • What do we call language this is intended to calm anxiety? Seems like there's more to life than approval and disapproval. And how about pep talk? Commented Aug 22, 2024 at 17:42
  • @TimR: So you mean, an opposite of "incendiary"? "Placate" and "calm" would be good verbs, someone will know the appropriate forms for other grammatical usages. Commented Aug 22, 2024 at 20:22

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Laudatives.

Laudatives are words or grammatical forms that denote a positive affect. That is, they express praise or approval on the part of the speaker. Laudatory words are rare in English compared to pejorative ones, though there are a few, such as "steed" for a fine horse. —Wikipedia

Examples:

My suggestion is that slurs, pejoratives, approbatives, laudatives, epithets, and the like will all fall into one or the other of two categories.

How to Do Things with Norms: A Speech Act Approach to Metanormative Theory by Andrew Dale Morgan - Page 78 - https://libra2.lib.virginia.edu/downloads/q237hs00g?filename=1_Morgan_Andrew_2017_PHD.pdf

[Article title] Do laudatives really mirror pejoratives? by Pepa Mellema dated 14/08/2020

https://theses.ubn.ru.nl/server/api/core/bitstreams/ffad0215-fbf7-45e9-9e72-6c4620922296/content

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  • I'm embarrassed to say I didn't know this. Thank you. Commented Aug 21, 2024 at 18:49
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    @EdwinAshworth Unless you are a little over 400 years old, it would be surprising if you did. The OED marks the noun as obsolete with the last citation from the middle of the 17th century, - it was replaced by laudatory. The noun is not recorded in MW either. The quoted Wiki article "has multiple issues" - the least of which is no references. Commented Aug 21, 2024 at 21:10
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    @Greybeard However term laudative is formed analogically to other linguistic terms ending with -ive and could have been easily resurrected by modern linguists with more linguistic meaning. (Compare nominative, genitive, accusative, continuative, conclusive, attributive, perfective, imperfective, imperative, indicative, subjunctive, hortative, interrogative, active, passive, negative, positive, comparative, superlative etc.) Commented Aug 21, 2024 at 23:27
  • @Arfrever I didn't think EL&U was into inventing words. The OP asks if there is one - not if someone can come up with a new word. Commented Aug 22, 2024 at 11:48
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I agree with the term "Laudative" being apparently the correct term for referring to a commendatory grammatical term. It's in fairly regular current use in that sense in linguistic circles, even if you filter out French results, and anyway it just makes intuitive sense from the word laud. Google n-grams shows slowly increasing usage since the 1940s.

However, there are plenty of terms that could be used if you wanted to avoid the OED's incorrect categorization of it as "obsolete", rather than as "jargon".

While these words mostly aren't specifically nouns to describe grammatical terms, I'd generally use one of:

  • a commendation/a commendatory term/a commendative.

Cambridge dictionary lists commendative only as an adjective synonymous with commendatory, and defines commendation as: "praise, or an official statement that praises someone"; "an honor such as a prize given to someone because they have done something that people admire"; "a formal statement of praise for someone who has done something admirable." Commendative seems very rarely seen.

Given these, these terms can carry implications of formal, official or public recognition.

  • an approbation/an approbatory term/an approbative.

Cambridge again defines approbative as an adjectival form of approbation, rather than as a noun, and approbation as "approval or agreement, often given by an official group".

The term approbation also isn't super well known, and to those unfamiliar with it, can even appear to mean something negative. It also has the same problems as commendation in that it can imply formal recognition.

However, approbative seems at least somewhat more common than commendative and laudative, though it is hard to tell how much, if any of this usage is in the grammar-jargon noun sense rather than the lay-speech adjectival sense.

Relevant Google Ngram.

  • a praise/a term of praise

This seems the most direct, simplest term. It's vagueness makes it ambiguous whether you mean the whole statement rather than a single word, so you might have to use a compound like "a praise-word" or "a term of praise". There's also the possible misinterpretation as having religious overtones.

  • a praiseword

I can find only a very few usages (one, two) of the term praiseword in this jargon sense, and it is not referenced in any online dictionary I could find, but honestly, as an antonym for curseword, it may well be way more intuitive and suitable than the more technically correct laudative, for non-jargon contexts like the linked articles.

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I'd have thought "plaudit" was an approximation, though not as grammatically authoritative as laudative.

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    Your answer could be improved with additional supporting information. Please edit to add further details, such as citations or documentation, so that others can confirm that your answer is correct. You can find more information on how to write good answers in the help center. Commented Aug 21, 2024 at 20:33
  • Hi, Steve, welcome to ELU! I see that the Community Bot has already advised you, but I'm also going to leave a signed note: give as much supporting information as possible for answers, for example in this case you could include a newspaper quote where "plaudit" was used; and for single word requests like this, hopefully you can find a dictionary containing the definition of the word, and you would copy a relevant portion of that definition into your answer, attributed with a link to the original if possible. Commented Aug 22, 2024 at 13:10
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I believe linguists mainly use the term ameliorative as opposed to pejorative. The language process associated with positive change is called amelioration, whereas negative change is known as pejoration. Wiktionary lists the linguistics term ameliorative and notes that the term is rare. This rarity can be attributed to the fact that pejoration happens more often than amelioration, making pejorative a more frequently encountered term.

Noun

ameliorative

(linguistics, rare) A linguistic unit (such as a word, morpheme) that implies a positive or approving evaluation. 
Antonym: pejorative

2015, Nicola Grandi, Edinburgh Handbook of Evaluative Morphology, page 4:
Moreover, diminutives, augmentatives, pejoratives and amelioratives have always been analysed as independent categories, neglecting the possible interrelations among them.

Wiktionary

Meliorative is a synonym but appears to be less common. Wiktionary lists the word as an adjective only and rare:

(rare) That meliorates; curative, improving, salutary

OED lists the noun meliorative as a linguistics term:

Linguistics. A meliorative word, prefix, suffix, etc.

1933 The delimitation of the scope of content displayed by those words..may result in the word becoming a meliorative or a pejorative.
G. A. Van Dongen, Amelioratives in Eng. vol. I. 115

Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “meliorative (n.),” July 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/6941820202.

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  • Interesting. I knew meliorative but I had never heard ameliorative. Commented Aug 24, 2024 at 19:44
  • @Stef They are kind of synonyms but I thought ameliorarive is more common, as a noun also. Wiktionary lists meliorative as an adjective only. OED lists meliorative as a noun also and gives the linguistics sense as well. OED lists ameliorative as a more common and general noun, not only as a linguistics term. Perhaps, I can add to my answer. Commented Aug 24, 2024 at 21:54
  • Interesting! I would've naively parsed "ameliorative" as meaning "making less bad" like minor in "The Carboniferous rainforest collapse was a minor extinction event", rather than actually signalling goodness. Because, ameliorate. Commented Sep 2, 2024 at 3:25
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Complimentary looks like a good opposite candidate to pejorative as in:

a complimentary review

a complimentary expression

a complimentary word

a complimentary description

See: Complimentary on Merriam Webster

Slightly more positive than the other very good proposal of approbatory.

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