CONSTRAINTS ON THE DERIVATION OF DOUBLE DIMINUTIVES IN POLISH AND UKRAINIAN

• Authors: Szymanek B. , Derkach T.
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

One reason why diminutives, cross-linguistically, have attracted considerable attention in the recent morphological literature, is that they allow 'repeated application of the same rule on adjacent cycles' (Scalise 1986: 132). This property has been viewed as a characteristic trait of large areas of 'expressive' or 'evaluative' morphology in various languages (Stump 1993). From the theoretical viewpoint, repetition of identical morphemes is significant, as there is a tension between its best known instantiations, i.e. processes of reduplication, and a variety of constraints which conspire to minimize the repetition of identical morphemes; cf., for instance, the Haplological Constraint in Dressler (1977) and Stemberger (1981), the Repeated Morph Constraint in Menn and McWhinney (1984), 'identity avoidance' and the Obligatory Contour Principle in Yip (1998), or constraints on the occurrence of identical clitics in Grimshaw (1997). In this paper, we investigate the repetition of diminutive suffixes in Polish and Ukrainian, which results in so-called 'double diminutives' (e.g. Polish 'dom' (house) - 'dom-ek'(DIM1) - 'dom-ecz (DIM1)-ek' (DIM2), Ukrainian 'dub' (oak) - 'dub-ok' (DIM1) - 'dub-och(DIM1)-ok'(DIM2). An attempt is being made to define the scope and productivity of the process in question in both languages. The formation of double diminutives is shown to be conditioned, in particular, by a variety of formal properties of the input nouns. In spite of the close genetic affinity between the two languages under investigation, there are marked differences in the way they form and use double diminutives.

Keywords

EN

CONSTRAINTS ON WORDFORMATION; DOUBLE DIMINUTIVES; POLISH MORPHOLOGY; UKRAINIAN MORPHOLOGY

Discipline

• PHILOLOGY_&_LINGUISTICS: PHILOLOGY & LINGUISTICS

• Publisher: Instytut Języka Polskiego Polskiej Akademii Nauk
• Journal: Studies in Polish Linguistics
• Year: 2005
• Volume: 2
• Pages: 91-110
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Szymanek B.

author

Derkach T.

• B. Szymanek, Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski, Katedra Wspolczesnego Jezyka Angielskiego, al. Raclawickie14, 20-950 Lublin, Poland

Identifiers

CEJSH db identifier

07PLAAAA02404992