Reduplication OR pure diminutives

[Hannu Tommola]

Dear Francesca and all,

> However, as Östen's example suggests, it happens that the use of a  
> diminutive marker gets restricted to the encoding of size variation  
> only.

I am afraid Östen didn't want to say that the diminutive _marker_ in  
Russian is restricted to refer only to size. He said "in Russian there  
are diminutives that seem fairly free of evaluative or expressive  
meaning", and his example _stol-ik_ 'small table' does not prove that  
the marker with other words refers to size.

Russ. _chashe-chka kofe/chaja/u_ doesn't necessarily refer to a small  
cup but simply to 'a nice cup of coffee/tea'; an even more clear  
example without any hint to small size is _kon'ja-chok_ 'cognac' or  
any other uncountable noun.

Best,
Hannu

Quoting Francesca Di Garbo <francescadigarbo at gmail.com>:

> Dear Scott and dear All,
>
> As far as we now, the most common source of diminutive affixes  
> crosslinguistically is the noun for "child" (Jurafsky 1996). This  
> usually starts being used as a sort of classificatory noun to refer  
> to the young age of animate entities and gets gradually extended to  
> inanimate nouns where it marks small size with countable nouns and  
> small quantity with uncountable. Interestingly, there is no evidence  
> for affixal diminutives to derive from modifiers meaning "small'. On  
> the other hand, the diachronic development of diminutive  
> reduplication is very difficult to pin down, considering its  
> intertwinment with other grammatical functions (plurality,  
> distributivity, attenuation etc.). It would be interesting to  
> investigate if the notion of /fragmentation /used by Alex to make  
> sense of the polysemy of reduplication in Mwotlap is also applicable  
> on the diachronic level. Also, it would be interesting to see how  
> common reduplicative patterns for diminutive marking are across  
> other Creoles (which I don't have any clue about).
>
> As for the second point under discussion (whether on not diminutives  
> can express only size):
> Synchronically, diminutives express evaluation of quantity (SMALL)  
> and quality (BAD or GOOD) and, as Paul points out, the two  
> components are not easy to tell apart when analysing the semantics  
> of a diminutive affix. However, as Östen's example suggests, it  
> happens that the use of a diminutive marker gets restricted to the  
> encoding of size variation only. I have the impression that this is  
> very likely to happen in languages with several different diminutive  
> (and possibly augmentative) affixes, where the different markers  
> show different distributional properties in terms of the meanings  
> encoded. The Bantu languages are an excellent illustration in this  
> respect as the examples from Yeyi show. Bantu languages (and other  
> Niger-Congo languages with rich noun class systems as the Atlantic  
> languages) often have several noun classes which are used to encode  
> evaluative (diminutive and augmentative) meanings. Interestingly,  
> besides the range of uses pointed out by Frank with respect to Yeyi,  
> different diminutive classes in one language may specialize in the  
> encoding of different size nuances (small vs. tiny) as in the  
> example below from Lega, where class 12 expresses small size and  
> class 19 tiny size:
-- 
Hannu Tommola
Professor emer. of Russian Language (Translation Theory and Practice)
School of Language, Translation and Literary Studies
FIN-33014 University of Tampere, Finland