ameliorative

From ameliorate + -ive.

• (UK, US) IPA^(key): /əˈmiːliəɹətɪv/

• Audio (General American):

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ameliorative (comparative more ameliorative, superlative most ameliorative)

1. Able to repair or ameliorate.
   • 2007, Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Faber and Faber (2009), page 175:

     One night while he was moaning on about his sorry existence I said: Do you really want to change it?
     Of course I do, he said, but nothing I’ve tried has been ameliorative.

2. (linguistics) Suggesting or relating to a positive or approving evaluation.
   • 2016, Olga Panić Kavgić, “Linguistic Creativity at Work: Nicknames of Women Tennis Players”, in English Studies Today‎^[1], archived from the original on 20 August 2018:

     […] personal nicknames can generally be divided into positively marked (ameliorative) ones, usually given by family members and friends as a sign of affection and acceptance, and those negatively marked (pejorative or derogatory), whose aim is to mock or ridicule a person […]

3. (philosophy) Of or relating to conceptual engineering, the normative study of which conceptual demarcation is most conducive to solve the problems the concept is a priori taken to solve.

   ameliorative inquiry

   ameliorative analysis

   ameliorative project

• (antonym(s) of “positive evaluation”): pejorative, derogatory

• (positive evaluation): evaluative

• ameliorative waste

• amelioration

ameliorative (plural amelioratives)

1. That which betters or improves.
   • 1973, Alan Gartner, Public service employment, page 106:

     With such conventional Keynesian amelioratives, the economy normally recovers with output and employment on the rise, and, unfortunately, with inflation picking up too.

   • 1944, Charles Smith, An Economic Plan for Democracy, page 3:

     It certainly means the stripping from Parliament of endless debates on niggling parsimonies and trivial amelioratives; the thousand and one unreal fights and distractions which has kept democracy from winning the other half of freedom.

2. (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.