[Lingtyp] Evaluative morphology expressing "authenticity/prototypicality"

[Juergen Bohnemeyer]

Dear all – Extending Francesca’s question, one could of course also ask what morphological means are used to express inauthenticity/atypicality. These are basically hedges of one kind or another. Having pestered Yucatec speakers for decades will all kinds of toys used as elicitation stimuli, I can report that they consistently use diminutives for this purpose. So an action figure of a man would be referred to as _le=chan=máak=o’_ DEF=DIM=person=D2 ‘the/that little man,’ a toy car as _le=chan=kàaro=a’_ DEF=DIM=cart=D1 ‘this little car,’ etc.

Initially, I naturally assumed that the diminutive was simply reflective of the size of the toys. It was only when I noticed that the speakers were quite reluctant to drop the diminutives and seemed to consider descriptions that omitted them infelicitous or downright inaccurate that I began to clue in to the diminutives being used in these cases to signal that we were not dealing with an actual person/car, but with representations of a person/car.

The Yucatec diminutive expression chan is a clitic particle that appears in a narrowly restricted position. It has a counterpart hach that expresses authenticity/prototypicality and, as a scalar modifier/specifier, a large degree of some property on a relevant scale. Hach and chan have subtly distinct positional properties.

Best – Juergen

Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
Professor, Department of Linguistics
University at Buffalo

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From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Francesca Masini via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Date: Tuesday, July 9, 2024 at 13:09
To: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: [Lingtyp] Evaluative morphology expressing "authenticity/prototypicality"
Dear Lingtyp community,

I’m looking for examples of evaluative word-formation processes (affixation, compounding, reduplication, etc.) conveying “authenticity/prototypicality” (Grandi & Körtvélyessy 2015: 11). Some relevant examples would be:

(1)
Kwaza (van der Voort 2015: 608)
kanwa-tete
canoe-INT
‘real canoe’

(2)
Warlpiri (Bowler 2015: 439)
warna-nyayirni
snake-AUG
‘poisonous snake’ [“[i]n central Australia, the characteristic of being poisonous or dangerous is a highly salient feature of many indigenous snakes”]

(3)
Kikuyu (Komu 2008: 50; quoted in Mattiola & Barotto 2023: 150)
irio > irioirio
‘food’ > ‘real food (not junk food)’

I would be extremely grateful for your help!

Best,
Francesca

REFERENCES

Bowler, Margit. 2015. Warlpiri. In Nicola Grandi & Livia Körtvelyessy (eds.), The Edinburgh handbook of evaluative morphology, 438–447. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Grandi, Nicola & Lívia Körtvelyessy. 2015. Introduction: Why evaluative morphology? In Nicola Grandi & Lívia Körtvelyessy (Eds.), The Edinburgh handbook of evaluative morphology, 3-20. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Komu, Mary W. 2008. An analysis of Gikuyu reduplication in the light of prosodic morphological approach. Nairobi: Kenyatta University MA thesis.

Mattiola, Simone & Alessandra Barotto. 2023. Nominal reduplication in cross-linguistic perspective. From PLURALITY to CHANGE OF REFERENTS’ SPECIFICITY. Studies in Language 47(1). 135–189.

van der Voort, Hein. 2015. Kwaza. In Nicola Grandi& Livia Körtvelyessy (eds.), The Edinburgh handbook of evaluative morphology, 606–615. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Prof. Francesca Masini
Rector’s Delegate for Open Science and Research Data
Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna
Dipartimento di Lingue, Letterature e Culture Moderne (LILEC)
Via Cartoleria 5, 40124 Bologna
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