Diminutives derived from terms for children: Comparative evidence from Southeastern Mande
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Tatiana Nikitina
Abstract
The study addresses the relationship between diachronic change and synchronic polysemy based on the use of diminutives in four closely related Southeastern Mande languages. It explores the synchronic patterns of use of cognate diminutive markers deriving from the word ‘child’, and accounts for differences between the languages in terms of a Radial Category network, which is designed to capture in one representation both mechanisms of diachronic change and mechanisms of regular meaning extension. The study argues that the same approach can be used to account for the ways diminutive markers acquire new meanings and for the ways an old diminutive category disintegrates, when new markers start replacing the old one in some of the core diminutive functions. The invasion and expansion of new markers may result in discontinuous semantic structures that can only be understood when the diachrony is taken into account (in this particular case study, the evidence for historical change comes from a synchronic comparison with closely related languages).
Acknowledgements
This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 758232). I am grateful to the editors and the anonymous reviewers, as well as to Clement Appah, Nana Aba Amfo, and to colleagues who have generously shared with me their knowledge and expertise: Dmitry Idiatov, Daria Mishchenko, Elena Perekhvalskaya, Valentin Vydrin. I am alone responsible for all remaining errors.
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© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Diminutives derived from terms for children: Comparative evidence from Southeastern Mande
- Historical shifts with the into-causative construction in American English
- Assessing productivity in contact: Italian derivation in Maltese
- Syntactic structures of Mandarin purposives
- External possession of body-part nouns in Dinka
- The use of any with factive predicates
- Focus, exhaustivity and existence in Akan, Ga and Ngamo
- Notice from the Board of Editors
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Diminutives derived from terms for children: Comparative evidence from Southeastern Mande
- Historical shifts with the into-causative construction in American English
- Assessing productivity in contact: Italian derivation in Maltese
- Syntactic structures of Mandarin purposives
- External possession of body-part nouns in Dinka
- The use of any with factive predicates
- Focus, exhaustivity and existence in Akan, Ga and Ngamo
- Notice from the Board of Editors
