Reduplication OR pure diminutives

[Francesca Di Garbo]

Dear Hannu,
Thanks a lot for your clarification to my message. I actually didn't 
mean to interpret Östen's example as if the Russian diminutive marker 
encodes only small size in all its occurrences. I only meant to say that 
it is cross-linguistically common for diminutive markers to encode only 
size with certain nouns (as in the example quoted by Östen for Russian). 
It seems to me that this may depend on the meaning of the noun to which 
the diminutive marker is attached, on the context of occurrence, and on 
the presence of other diminutive markers in a language. I hope this 
sounds less ambiguous now.
Thanks again and best wishes,

Francesca


On 2013-03-04 13:38, Hannu Tommola wrote:
> 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: