LEXICALIZATION OF WORDS CONTAINING DIMINUTIVE SUFFIXES IN ENGLISH.

Diminutives are morphological, polysemous linguistic instruments whose purpose has always been to suggest informal attitudes, closeness, small physical dimensions, positive or negative feelings. However, their use and presence have lead in time to the assigning of specific semantic values to words containing them, through the process of lexicalization. This article will attempt to mention and classify the different instances of use of the English diminutive suffixes (such as -let, -ling, -ette, -kin) and their journey towards various linguistic semantic and morphological changes, contexts in which they coexist nowadays along with the original senses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]