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Copyright of Knowledge: International Journal is the property of Institute for Knowledge Management and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Jesus' response to the Syrophoenician woman in Mark 7.27 is sometimes seen as sexist, racist, or abusive. The force of his response depends in part on the diminutive form κυναριον, which is often dismissed as a faded diminutive that lacks true force. But a statistical, semantic, and contextual analysis of the word indicates that it does, in fact, have diminutive force in Mark 7:27. Because of this, the pejorative force found in direct insults employing the word 'dog' is lacking in Jesus' response. In addition to failing to recognise the diminutive force of κυναριον, interpreters sometimes assume a social context in which Jews routinely referred to Gentiles as dogs. Finally, the analogy that Jesus makes is often read allegorically, assuming that 'children' and 'dogs' have direct counterparts in 'Jews' and 'Gentiles'. These assumptions are found to be dubious. The point of Jesus' analogy is about the proper order of events: children eat before the puppies; Jews receive the benefits of his ministry before Gentiles. The Syrophoenician woman outwits Jesus by arguing that the puppies may eat simultaneously with the children. The interpretive upshot is that Jesus' saying is unlikely to be misogynistic or abusive, but simply asserts Jewish priority, a priority that admits of exceptions and change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Terms of address in Turkish spontaneous pet-directed speech and those reported by the same pet-owners in questionnaires were compared with a focus on the proportion of diminutive and hypocoristic morphemes attached to various types of bases in order to see whether different data collection methods revealed different patterns of language use. The results showed that pet owners used diminutive and hypocoristic morphology along with the possessive marker in their spontaneous interactions to express endearment. While hypocoristic forms occurred with similar frequency in both sets of data, pet owners were less likely to report diminutives in their questionnaire responses although they used them in their spontaneous interactions. This is attributed to the use of diminutives to express the type of empathy, which could be easier to establish in spontaneous face-to-face communication. This attribution correctly predicted that stigmatized inverse address forms, as well, were rare in questionnaire responses. • A novel contribution to the study of the asymmetrical nature of communication between pets and pet-owners. • One of rare studies on pet-directed speech in Turkish, a non-European language. • One of rare morphopragmatics studies on diminutives and hypocoristics in Turkish. • A comparison of two sets of data and methods of data collection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is a comparison of diminutives and functionally similar lexical units in Serbian and Russian languages (hereinafter SL and RL). Crosslinguistic lexical comparison is conducted as a preparation for a large bilingual Serbian-Russian dictionary, which is a part of the project on comparative lexicology and lexicography. The article deals with the lexico-semantic category, which in the SL consists of the two subcategories, diminutives and terms of endearment, while in the Russian linguistic tradition it is united under the name diminutives. Lexical units of this group consist of motivated derivatives formed by affixation with a common primary semantics of diminution in relation to the norm. In terms of grammar, this group consists mainly of nouns, followed by adjectives and adverbs, as well as diminutive verbs in Serbian. The analysis of lexical items beginning with the letters A and B with qualifiers дем. ‘diminutives’, хип. ‘a term of endearment’ or у дем. значењу ‘in diminutive meaning’ from the one-volume Dictionary of the Serbian Language of Matica Srpska (2018), as well as their potential equivalents in the RL, apart from classification differences, reveals a number of inconsistencies at the level of functions and pragmatics of the units in SL and RL, which make their lexicographic representation difficult. Although the frequency of diminutives is higher in RL, the formal equivalent of the SL derivative is sometimes expressed through a synonym (a synonym of the derivative word is searched for and its diminutive form is built), a hyperonym or a syntagm. In the Russian part of the dictionary, the difference between meanings of diminutives and terms of endearment may be neutralized, since Russian derivatives carry a whole paradigm of potential connotations, which are actualized only in communicative situations. Not all communicative situations coincide with those in SL - for example, in RL the use of diminutives in polite communication is known. The lexicographic problem lies not only in finding a suitable congruent form, but also in the fact that by identifying lexemes in the dictionary one can impose on the Serbian lexeme connotations from RL that it did not possess in SL. An additional difficulty of semantics is related to the adequacy of interpretation of diminutives in SL formed from polysemantic words. Namely, it is not always obvious whether “diminution” refers to one of several separated meanings or to all meanings, because there is no qualifier referring to it, there is no illustration of usage, and the electronic corpus of SL does not provide an adequate number of usage examples. The paper also describes the problem of possible narrowing of the meaning of a lexeme. Finally, the stylistic status of the units is unequal: in RL derivatives with diminutives and / or meaning of subjective evaluation belong mainly to the verbal and colloquial style (and are limitedly recorded in dictionaries), while in SL diminutives are “accepted” in the language and dictionary, which means that they demonstrate a higher degree of lexicalization. The problem of representing diminutives and other lexical structures in a bilingual dictionary should be considered on a broader linguistic material and at the level of the methodology of bilingual lexicography.

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The present article takes another look at the Mansi diminutive -riś~-rəś, considers why there has been some unclarity surrounding the status of this element in many grammars of Mansi, takes note of some recent (and not so recent) literature on the diminutive in general, reflects on some ensuing implications for the description of the diminutive in Mansi, as well as on some Uralic (and Ewen) implications for Daniel Jurafsky's universal structure for the semantics of the diminutive, and finally has a brief look at augmentatives in Uralic and Ewen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article suggests a pragmatic-funcional approach to analyse diminutive and augmentative de-rivatives in Spanish newspapers ABC, El Mundo and El País. More specifically, the focus of interest is on studying their connotative meanings (emotional and expressive). Special attention is paid to the syncretic meaning of the investigated derivatives according to the context in which they appear. The polysemic character of diminutives and augmentatives constitutes a problem when it is necessary to identify their true meaning. In this case, linguistic and extralinguistic factors (social and cultural) should be considered.

Russian poetry of the 19–21st centuries, from the perspective of the relationship of ‘cultural-stereotypical (traditional) – author’s individual’. The analysis of 725 fragments from the Russian poetic works of the 19–21st centuries reveals the ways of word formation and the composition of diminutive dendronyms, as well as the composition of folk poetic, general poetic and individual author’s images of comparative tropes representing these diminutives as subjects of comparison: girl; love attraction, longing; to cry (tears), to grieve, to yearn; fertility; separation; bitter, unhappy fate, orphanhood; gold, silver; emerald; smoke; clothing; fire; pattern, mesh product; infantas by Velasquez, ermine coat; calico; fidelity. The reference-denotative features of the corresponding realia, motivating the choice of figurative associations are determined: a thin trunk, flexible branches, serrated, heart-shaped leaves, flowering trees, fruit trees. The techniques that help make stereotypical images of comparison in the Russian poetic language individualized are established: the inclusion in the composition of an extended anthropomorphic metaphor; updating by means of occasional epithets, lexical variation of the components of the trope. The stable semantic connotations of diminutive dendronyms are singled out: ‘shy’, ‘timid’, ‘meek’, ‘slender’, ‘tall’, ‘gentle’, ‘curls’, ‘braids’, ‘thin figure’, ‘beauty’, ‘breasts’, ‘captivate’, ‘innocence’, as well as the ways of their representation in poetic contexts: extended metaphors ‘autumnal withering of a tree – withering of female beauty’; memories of the lyrical hero about close people; parallelism of the images of a tree and a human condition; conventional epithets (weeping, bitter); features of the situation of a literary text. The results of the study allow us to improve the understanding of how comparative tropes with diminutive dendronyms develop dynamically in the Russian poetic language.

In a survey, 1,053 Brazilians provided the diminutive form of 60 test words. For example, given desconto participants provided diminutives such as descontinho or descontito. Most responses involved the suffixes -zinho and -inho. However, in many cases -zito and -ito were given as well. Statistical analysis revealed that the final phone and stress pattern of the base word were the most important predictors of diminutive form. A number of age-apparent changes were observed suggesting that certain diminutive forms may be on their way out in words with a particular phonological shape or in certain states. The state of residence, often in interaction with another predictor, proved to be an influencing factor as well. However, similar diminutivization patterns did not hold between geographically contiguous states, but between states with similarly sized populations suggesting an urban versus rural divide in Brazil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Applied Linguistics / Taikomoji Kalbotyra is the property of Vilnius University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Applied Linguistics / Taikomoji Kalbotyra is the property of Vilnius University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The present article suggests a pragmatic-funcional approach to analyse diminutive and augmentative derivatives in Spanish newspapers ABC, El Mundo and El País. More specifically, the focus of interest is on studying their connotative meanings (emotional and expressive). Special attention is paid to the syncretic meaning of the investigated derivatives according to the context in which they appear. The polysemic character of diminutives and augmentatives constitutes a problem when it is necessary to identify their true meaning. In this case, linguistic and extralinguistic factors (social and cultural) should be considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Any theoretical analysis of a fragment of reality is carried out by means of abstract models and aims to capture the specificity of a phenomenon. Theorising may nevertheless prove insufficient if its descriptive analysis is not doubled by the establishment of regularities, so that the current state of the phenomenon and its subsequent evolution may be explained. This general framework also includes linguistic intensification, which reveals one’s permanent need to evaluate everything that enters one’s sphere of perception: objects, beings, states, processes etc. The means of expressing “intensity” are most diverse and, implicitly, sensitive to any type of nuancing of the speaker, because it uncloses the shape its mental representation socially takes. This paper aims to highlight a certain aspect in the complex act of evaluation, namely expressing highest/lowest intensity by means of suffixes. The study relies on the analysis of two modern related languages, Romanian and Spanish, and the corpus has been essentially selected from the most modern form of human communication, the computer-mediated one.

Using different approaches, the author highlights functions of diminutives in medicinal plants' names. A diminutive is traditionally understood as a noun suffix expressing the degree of diminutiveness or a word form; in English 'diminutive' also means a derivative word containing a diminutive suffix. The results of the phytonymic lexis analysis show that diminutives are presented in various languages in a specific way. Some languages (French or German) have limited number of diminutives, whereas in Slavic languages, in which derivation is the most frequent word formation process, they are numerous. The use of structural-semantic and onomasiological analyses accompanied by a field approach, gives possibility to make complex research of medicinal plants' names in Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages. The author states the role of the diminutive in the structure of the onomasiological model, which includes basis, feature and predicate. Diminutives mainly serve as evaluative or emotive-expressive features denoting a medicinal plant of small size. Basic features of diminutives are smallness, the characteristic of the object, i.e., medicinal plant, and its subjective evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well known that German and Dutch have productive diminutive morphology. What is much less discussed is the fact that several other Germanic languages do not have such productive morphology, notably the Scandinavian languages. Instead, these languages form compounds to express a diminutive meaning. This paper addresses the puzzle of why the Scandinavian languages do not have productive diminutive morphology. The paper argues that the culprit is the particular definite suffix that the Scandinavian languages have. This is a postnominal definite suffix that occupies a low position in the nominal functional spine. It is argued that the presence of this suffixed article accounts for the lack of productive synthetic diminutive formation in these languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The central novel observation of this paper is that the Tense-marker qaʕɪd in North Hail Arabic has developed diminutive, augmentative and nunation morphological patterns, each of which is rooted in the morphological spine of qaʕɪd, expressing a certain discourse interpretation, as an interpretive-interface related consequence. Arguing it has pragmaticalised, a sub-deep type of grammaticalisation, qaʕɪd exhibits the diminutive pattern qweɪʕɪd when marking DEVALUE information while it displays an augmentative pattern qwa:ʕɪd when marking VALUE information, providing evidence that diminutive and augmentative, in a cross-linguistic manner, don’t merely express size, but encode a degree of speaker attitude. Entertaining the Split-CP system and implementing the Criterial approach within generative, minimalist tenets, this discourse function of qaʕɪd is activated, hence, achieved in narrow syntax by movement of the pragmaticalised instance of qaʕɪd, qweɪʕɪd and qwa:ʕɪd, to a C-layer in the left periphery, the locus of the relevant discourse value. Further investigations show that qweɪʕɪd and qwa:ʕɪd are potential host for a nunation marker ‘-ɪn’, which functions as a Focus marker, a discourse feature being spelled out at PF-interface as a nunation marker on qweɪʕɪd and qwa:ʕɪd. Moreover, given the morphological templates the pragmaticalised qaʕɪd develops, the research implements a touch of evaluative morphology approach, arguing that the morphological affixes contributing to the diminutivised and augmented forms of qaʕɪd carry an evaluative endowment at the pragmatic interface and attract the stem of qaʕɪd at the morphosyntax interface. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to analyse the diminutives present in the speeches of the characters of the Brazilian animated film Brichos, a floresta é nossa, in the light of the proposal of Alves (2006) who argues for the existence of three different diminutive morphemes as to the category of intensification: -inho1 ("inherent property", semantic value), -inho2 (attributed property "speaker's evaluation/judgement towards the entity", pragmatic value) and -inho3 (attributed property "speaker's evaluation/judgement towards the communicative situation and the listener", pragmatic value). This is a topic that arouses interest not only in relation to the behaviour of the X-inho/X-zinho formations in the mother tongue, but also in their understanding for the teaching of Portuguese as a foreign language (PFL) and for the teaching of translation, since it implies the acquisition of "a diversified repertoire" by the learners for "the comprehension of the communicative intentions" of the speaker (Freitag et al. 2020, p. 44) when using these formations that can convey not only a dimensional meaning, i.e., semantic, but also pragmatic. More than an analysis of the diminutive formation, the main interest of this paper lies in understanding its uses in order to provide clues for PFL learners to interpret and use these values appropriately in everyday language and/or in their subsequent translation into Italian or other foreign languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studies about Language / Kalbu Studijos is the property of Studies about Language / Kalbu Studijos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper examines the processes of expressive palatalization in the Basque diminutive. Basque has two forms of the diminutive, a list of inflectional suffixes and a method of palatalization with specific phonological requirements. A speaker will first palatalize any coronal sibilants in the word. If there are none, then a dental obstruent that has a palatal counterpart is the next candidate. If there are again, none, then the last candidate is a dental coronal, but only the consonant on the leftmost edge. However, if there is a sibilant and a dental consonant, only the sibilants are palatalized. If there is a dental obstruent and a dental sonorant, only the obstruent is palatalized. To describe this process, I adopt an OT approach and an autosegmental approach to determine where the [+palatal] inflection morpheme can attach. Finally, I show the application of unworking the hypocoristic formation through internal reconstruction of Basque in animal names to produce two reconstructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Any theoretical analysis of a fragment of reality is carried out by means of abstract models and aims to capture the specificity of a phenomenon. Theorising may nevertheless prove insufficient if its descriptive analysis is not doubled by the establishment of regularities, so that the current state of the phenomenon and its subsequent evolution may be explained. This general framework also includes linguistic intensification, which reveals one’s permanent need to evaluate everything that enters one’s sphere of perception: objects, beings, states, processes etc. The means of expressing “intensity” are most diverse and, implicitly, sensitive to any type of nuancing of the speaker, because it uncloses the shape its mental representation socially takes. This paper aims to highlight a certain aspect in the complex act of evaluation, namely expressing highest/lowest intensity by means of suffixes. The study relies on the analysis of two modern related languages, Romanian and Spanish, and the corpus has been essentially selected from the most modern form of human communication, the computer-mediated one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of CIRCULO de Linguistica Aplicada a la Comunicacion is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper deals with derivational and semantic problems of diminutive epithets of animals. Such words are usually used in Lithuanian folk songs for domestic or wild animals, first of all, for a horse and a hare. They have been produced with nine different diminutive suffixes, most popular among them were -elis and -ėlis. In most cases diminutive epithets of animals have been produced from suffixal derivatives or compound words (jautelis baubuolėlis, gegutytė pilkuolytė, kurmelis žemrausėlis, ančiukai raibaplunksnėliai). The most common motivation features of such words was the color of the animal (kiškelis baltužėlis, žirgelis sartonėlis), its body parts (ožkutė rudakutė, zuikelis statausėlis), its typical actions (katinėlis repečkėlis, laputė čiuženutė).

The objective of this study is to systematically describe the diminutive/augmentative mechanism through noun inflection in Kirundi. By applying the cognitive theory of space representation to the size of the static and bounded object (without considering its geometric shape), three results were obtained. First, the diminutive/augmentative is expressed by means of the secondary noun classification with derivational purpose. Then, the marks of secondary classes in the singular (-ki-, -ka-, -ru-) represent a mode of occupation of the continuous space while those of the plural (-bi-, -tu-, -bu-) serve as support for a mode of occupation of discontinuous space. Finally, taking the primary noun class as a mark of the normal reference size, the diminutive/augmentative mechanism distinguishes two degrees from the normal size of the object considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Vilnius University Open Series is the property of Vilnius University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Diminutives are typically nouns. However, verbs can also be diminutivised, i.e. marked for reduced intensity, duration, seriousness or success of the action or event. This paper is a first attempt at a typology of verbal diminutives, based on a balanced sample of 248 languages. We discuss the analytical and terminological challenges that arise from the study of a category that is not widely recognised and does not have an established place in grammatical descriptions. Our sample shows that verbal diminutives occur across the world, with a slightly higher predominance in the Americas and somewhat fewer cases in Africa. Among the language families, Austronesian has the highest percentage of verbal diminutives in our sample. We present our results for the various formal exponents of verbal diminution on the one hand and the array of semantic effects on the other. Meanings are separated into three categories: attenuation in quantity, attenuation in quality and affective meanings. In many cases, markers of verbal diminution encode additional meanings, some of which contradict the core meaning of attenuation by expressing intensity, durativity or iteration. Such apparent paradoxes have parallels in nominal diminutives. The paper closes with recommendations for further research.

This article discusses the screen translation, into English and Chinese, of some of the names in Hayao Miyazaki’s animated films. In particular, in drawing onomastic examples from Miyazaki’s six animated fantasies, this study provides insights into the naming practices and strategies adopted by the screen translators into languages of distinct linguistic families. The analysis of names sorted into four categories yields the following results: (a) each screen translator used diff erent approaches to the translation of names, and (b) shared similarities with the source language and culture play a crucial role in the translation task. In brief, the first category concerns the films’ protagonists, for which the strategy of diminution is observed in Chinese but not in English translation. The second concerns the names of supporting human characters. Here, screen translators adopt several strategies, including direct phonetic transfer and incorporation of courtesy titles. The third comprises names of anthropomorphic and non-human creatures, and translated samples are shown more likely to be denotative and descriptive. Finally, there is no loss in translation with respect to the symbolic implication of location names. In general, screen translators utilized various linguistic strategies to produce onomastic substitutes that are acceptable to the local audience. Concurrently, they strived not to deviate too much from the original character names, in form and meaning.

This study explores the morphology-phonology interface to be found in the formation of diminutives in Jordanian Arabic (JA). As evident in a corpus of diminutives in Bedouin and urban varieties, the results demonstrate that JA mainly depends on a non-concatenative (discontinuous) patterning of diminutive structures. Intriguingly, diminutives in JA not only are derived from nouns and adjectives, but also from perfective verbs. The diminutive verb adheres to the C1VC2VC3-eet template and is produced by children and by adults addressing children. Based on a rough frequency test, the most frequently used diminutive pattern in urban JA is C1aC2C2uuC3 whereas Bedouin JA enjoys a variety of diminutive structures. It is also reported that JA dialects vary in stress assignment with diminutive structures: urban JA mainly prefers the iambic CVC.'CVVC structure, while the Bedouin dialect demonstrates a variety of trochaic and iambic patterns. More importantly, although residues of transfer effects on diminutives were reported in Bedouin JA, no significant transfer effects have been found between diminutive and non-diminutive structures in urban JA. As such, it is concluded that diminutive formation in urban JA supports the root-based approach over the stem-based one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we present and analyse phonaesthemic alternations as they appear in Flemish dialects of Dutch, that is when a root-initial consonant or consonant cluster is replaced by a post-alveolar affricate /ʧ/ or /ʤ/ in order to create a phonaesthemically marked variant of a neutral base word. Although no longer productive in Flemish dialects, we show that such phonaesthemic alternations exhibit strong functional similarities to those found in other languages, in particular the evaluative notions of diminutivity and augmentativity. We also show that, formally speaking, Flemish phonaesthemic alternations differ from those attested in other languages in only targeting a single consonant or consonant cluster. We then put forward the hypothesis that Flemish speakers may have copied this mechanism to produce phonaesthemic alternations from Picard speakers, corroborating the notion that phonaesthemic alternations may emerge from language contact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diminutives, long an area of interest for researchers in phonology and morphology, are typically formed by the suffixation of a diminutive affix onto a root word and denote the smallness or youthfulness of whatever is referred to. In Yangxin Gan, a dialect of Gan spoken in southern Hubei, China, diminutive forms are highly variable. They may be formed by the addition of a diminutive morpheme, the insertion of a high-rising tone, insertion of a nasal or change in vowel quality. The latter three processes may simultaneously apply in cases where the diminutive is monosyllabic, in which case a high-rising tone is obligatory, although the phonological realization of the nasal and nucleus is variable. While these sound change processes are seemingly unpredictable, this paper seeks to account for them through an Optimality Theory analysis in which feature spreading is partially determined by the underlying feature specification of vowels and partially by language-specific constraint rankings. Outlier examples are suggested to present evidence of contrast preservation and different diminutive forms are argued to be different phonological realizations of a single diminutive morpheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Lenguaje is the property of Universidad del Valle and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Linguodidactica is the property of University of Bialystok and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Literatura y Lingüística is the property of Universidad Catolica Cardenal Raul Silva Henriquez and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This study investigates the semantics of the plural of paucity and the plural diminutive, based on their attestations in the non-literary source of Classical Arabic traditionally known as kalām al-'arab. In noun plural marking, the meaning of the diminutive is as elusive as that of the plural of paucity. What is known of both kinds of meanings is mainly derived from the indirect description of early lexicographers and grammarians. To assess the historical reality of this traditional semantic description, attestations from the kalām al-'arab are collected, then compared to data from Arabic dialects, and finally subjected to a distributional analysis. The grammatical categories of the collective, inherent plural, and the pseudo-dual are also considered in this assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the morpho-syntax, semantics and pragmatics of the diminutives w-án- and án- from a cognitive linguistic perspective in a little researched Niger-Congo language: Tiv. Tiv diminutives are particularly interesting in terms of their morphosyntactic origin, as well as the fact that they show the predominant influence of metaphor on variant interpretations. This leads to the proposal of more metaphors, in addition to those proposed in Jurafsky (1996), explaining the mapping of interpretations. Metaphor also aids the application of other mechanisms of semantic change, by shifting from the PERSON to the QUALITY feature of 'child'. Similar to previous researches on diminutives, e.g. Nikitina (2018), and Appah and Amfo (2011; 2019) this study shows that the diminutives' interpretations are interconnected and modellable into a single network, using the Radial Category approach. Theoretically, while Jurafsky's proposed model for diminutives only shows associations among the semantic interpretations and not among the pragmatic interpretations, this study shows how pragmatic interpretations also interact in Tiv. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is devoted the analysis o f semantic groups o f nouns that have diminutive suffixes in their composition. The author examines the emotional and expressive loading of the diminutive affixes, and their role in the reflection of the ethnic linguistic picture o f the world in folklore discourse

Upper German dialects make heavy use of diminutive strategies, but little is known about the actual conceptual effects of those devices. This paper is the first to present two large-scale psycholinguistic experiments that investigate this issue in East Franconian, a dialect spoken in Bavaria. Franconian uses both the diminutive suffix -la and the quantifying construction a weng a lit. 'a little bit a' to modify noun phrases. Our first experiment shows that diminutization has no effect on conceptualization of magnitude: People do not think of a smaller/weaker/shorter etc. referent when the NP is modified by the morphological diminutive, the quantifying construction, or their combination. The second experiment involves gradable NPs and shows that, again, the morphological diminutive has no effect on how people conceptualize the degree to which a gradable nominal predicate holds; in contrast, a weng a reduces it significantly. These experiments suggest that diminutization does not have uniform effects across semantic domains, and our results act as a successful example of extending the avenue of cognitive psychology into dialectology with the active participation of a speaker community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

En la Ciudad de México se hallan contextos en los que ahorita no puede ser interpretado como puntual ni como cercano al momento del habla. Este comportamiento es investigado como resultado de un proceso de atenuación semántica, bajo la hipótesis de cambio en tiempo aparente. Así, se analizó el habla de tres generaciones de hablantes de la Ciudad de México, y se encontró que ahorita se ha extendido a contextos incompatibles con los rasgos de puntualidad y cercanía al momento del habla entre los hablantes más jóvenes, desplazando con ello a ahora en ciertos casos.

This paper investigates the usage and frequency of what is referred to as K-suffixes in three Balochi dialects, namely Koroshi, Coastal and Sistani Balochi. It shows that K-suffixes are most likely the reflexes of earlier evaluative morphology, traditionally termed "diminutives," and are characterized by a high degree of multi-functionality. While in Coastal and Sistani Balochi evaluative functions continue to dominate, they have been largely lost in Koroshi Balochi, and the suffix is now used to indicate definiteness. The development appears to have been spearheaded by female speakers, and its frequency is also dependent on genre and speech situation. Data is taken from an extensive corpus of spoken Balochi narratives and from a questionnaire with thirty-six speakers. The results suggest that evaluative morphology can develop into definiteness marking, with the development passing over a stage of combination with deictic markers. The paper concludes that the development of definiteness marking can proceed down a pathway that is distinct from the one normally assumed for demonstrative-based definite marking, though the endpoint may be similar. This is the first detailed documentation of this process for any Iranian language, and one of the few well-documented cases of a non-demonstrative origin of definiteness marking worldwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the number of native Chinese speakers who are students of Spanish has increased dramatically. In the experience as an instructor and according to the records in the Corpus of Spanish Learners, it has been observed that the Spanish diminutive, although frequently employed in the colloquial register of native Spanish speakers, is rarely used in the Spanish oral expression of Chinese students. Furthermore, many of them fail to fully understand the diminutive in a variety of contexts. This article hopes to include diminutive instruction within departments of Hispanic Philology in Chinese universities. Given that the diminutive has been routinely marginalized both in relation to teaching practices and in the content of manuals for Spanish as a foreign language employed in China. Taking into account the high frequency and nature of diminutive use among native Spanish speakers in everyday communication, we will here demonstrate the incorporation of diminutive instruction into the Spanish Audiovisual Comprehension course in order to better train native speakers of Chinese as competent Spanish listeners and speakers in communicative contact that will include the diminutive. In this way, native Chinese speakers can interact more naturally with native Spanish speakers while increasing both confidence and linguistic creativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the working idea of Adamczewski (1978) about the fact that some temporal or frequency adverbial operators, when quantifying the validity of the predicative relation, block this relationship by thematizing it, we attempt to develop a linguistic analysis tool with which to address apparently disparate issues such as iterative or indeterminate interpretation in the verbal domain, or the use of plural or diminutive forms in the nominal domain. On the other hand, on detecting, in the contrast between languages, that some implement the operation of quantification through operators not possessed by others, and that in the long run each language can only make use of the resources at its disposal until that moment of its evolution, we develop the concept of poverty of resources. Through it, we aim to show that, in general, each language carries out operations similar to those performed by others, even if the visible traces of these operations are or may look completely different on the surface of the utterance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the semantics of the plural of paucity and the plural diminutive, based on their attestations in the non-literary source of Classical Arabic traditionally known as kalām al-'arab. In noun plural marking, the meaning of the diminutive is as elusive as that of the plural of paucity. What is known of both kinds of meanings is mainly derived from the indirect description of early lexicographers and grammarians. To assess the historical reality of this traditional semantic description, attestations from the kalām al-'arab are collected, then compared to data from Arabic dialects, and finally subjected to a distributional analysis. The grammatical categories of the collective, inherent plural, and the pseudo-dual are also considered in this assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Dacoromania is the property of Romanian Academy Publishing House / Editura Academiei Romane and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Peruvian Amazonian Spanish (PAS) is a variety formed in intense contact with Amerindian languages and relative isolation from urban centers of linguistic standardization. This article offers a description of the use of the diminutive -it in PAS based on Reynoso’s classification (2005). It also discusses the theoretical proposals of grammaticalization (Traugott and König 1991) regarding subjectivity and intersubjectivity (Traugott and Dasher 2002; Traugott 2003, 1995). The data consist of thirty sociolinguistic interviews with adult men and women, PAS speakers, and diverse elementary and high school education levels. This study offers a classification of the diminutive functions -it in EPA and examines some of the linguistic constraints associated with its use (e.g., grammatical category, narrative structure). The analysis reveals that the diminutives -it are predominantly pragmatic and polysemic, ranging from expressing objective meanings (e.g., small size) to increasingly subjective (e.g., modesty) and intersubjective (e.g., politeness) meanings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The diminutive construction is formed and used differently in Spanish and English, which leads us to the question how this construction with different morphosyntactic and semantic-pragmatic characteristics in the input languages is governed in Spanish-English bilingual and codeswitching speech. Through the analysis of a dataset of diminutive constructions extracted from the Bangor Miami corpus, this paper contributes to a better understanding of how one and the same construction differently represented in the input languages is administered in bilingual contexts. As this is a first approach to studying diminutives in codeswitching, three well known structural codeswitching models serve as a primary theoretical tool against which the diminutive is tested. These are Poplack's (1980) Universal Constraints, Myers-Scotton's (2002) Matrix Language Frame Model, and Blom and Gumperz' (1972) Metaphorical Codeswitching Framework. The results show that Miami bilinguals prefer the prototypical markers of each language, -ito and little (e.g. un partimecito, un little estante). Furthermore, while the data largely confirm Poplack's Constraints, they refute our hypothesis based on Myers-Scotton's MLF model. Regarding Gumperz' theory, the use of diminutive markers in a particular language correlates with a certain meaning the speaker wants to communicate (i.e. quantitative or qualitative), which again provides support to the framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]