REDUNDANCY AND RIVALRY IN LANGUAGE. A CASE STUDY OF RUSSIAN DIMINUTIVES

• Authors: Makarova Anastasia
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

In the present study of Russian diminutive constructions, I follow Goldberg’s idea about sematic or pragmatic differences that always accompany syntactic differences. My manually checked database comprises almost 1000 examples culled from the Russian National corpus (www.ruscorpora.ru) and includes three types of diminutive constructions: 1) morphological diminutives of the type dom-ik ‘housedim ’, 2) analytical diminutives such as malen’kij dom ‘small house’ and milyj dom ‘nice house’ and 3) a mixed type where morphological diminutives occur with adjectives, such as malen’kij dom-ik ‘small housedim ’. My analysis reveals differences between morphological and analytical diminutives, which are not freely distributed across the examples. While morphological diminutives rarely refer to size only, adjectives are often used for further specification and in order to avoid ambiguity. The variation in Russian diminutives sheds light on an important theoretical question of redundancy and its role in language. The results of the present study indicate that redundancy is motivated, has a function and helps language users avoid ambiguity.

Keywords

EN

SYNONYMY; DIMINUTIVES; REDUNDANCY; RUSSIAN

• Publisher: Ludovit Stur Institute of Linguistics, Slovak Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Slovenská reč (Slovak Language)
• Year: 2025
• Volume: 90
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 93 – 106

Contributors

author

Makarova Anastasia

• Uppsala University, Department of Modern Languages, Engelska parken, Thunbergsvägen 3 L 751 26, Uppsala, Norway

• https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0468-9867

Identifiers

DOI

https://doi.org/10.31577/slovrec.2025.2.5