Reduplication OR pure diminutives

Mon Mar 4 14:01:56 UTC 2013

Dear colleagues,

Incidentally, the stol-ik 'small table' example is found 
also in Italian:

tavolo > tavol-ino 'small table'

Which refers only to size. Thus, as Francesca suggests, 
the exact connotation of diminutives may actually depend 
on the specific item involved.

Best,

Giorgio F. Arcodia

-- 
Dr. Giorgio Francesco Arcodia
Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca
Dipartimento di Scienze Umane per la Formazione
Edificio U6 - stanza 4101
Piazza dell'Ateneo Nuovo, 1
20126 Milano

Tel.: (+39) 02 6448 4946
Fax: (+39) 02 6448 4863
E-mail: giorgio.arcodia at unimib.it

On Mon, 4 Mar 2013 14:19:40 +0100
 Francesca Di Garbo <francescadigarbo at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> 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: