Reduplication OR pure diminutives

[Nigel Vincent]

Something else about Italian which shows that, as Giorgio suggests, the exact value can vary with each item is the way in Italian some of the diminutives have become independent lexical items - e.g. pane 'bread' vs panino 'bread roll' or with adjectives: caro 'dear (in both senses') and carino 'pretty'. Once lexicalised they can go off further in their own directions: e.g. casa 'house' vs casino 'brothel' (originally a house for a private gathering - which I suppose in a way a brothel still is!).
It would be interesting to know if there is a similar lexicalisation effect with the reduplicative type.
Nigel

Professor Nigel Vincent, FBA
Professor Emeritus of General & Romance Linguistics
The University of Manchester

Vice-President for Research & HE Policy, The British Academy

Linguistics & English Language
School of Arts, Languages and Cultures
The University of Manchester
Manchester M13 9PL
UK



http://www.llc.manchester.ac.uk/subjects/lel/staff/nigel-vincent/

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From: Discussion List for ALT [LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG]
Sent: Monday, March 04, 2013 2:01 PM
To: LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
Subject: Re: Reduplication OR pure diminutives

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: