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Diminutives in the child language in Croatian

Diminutives are a prominent feature of child language in Croatian. Parents use them a lot when they speak to their children. Diminutives make about 1/3 of all nouns in child language in Croatian. The acquisition of diminutives will be briefly presented. The analysis will be based upon longitudinal data of three Croatian children tape-recorded from the age of about one to the age of about three. The data are included into the CHILDES databank and analysed with the CLAN programmes. Although the children differ in their characters, interests and topics of conversation (two girls and one boy), the language data of the three children show a remarkably high level of similarity in the course of language acquisition. The differences are mainly dialectal: two of the children use Kajkavian dialect more than the third child (additionally, one child speaks Kajkavian more often with the grandparents than with her parents). This dialectal difference between children is important since diminutives are in Kajkavian dialects more frequent than in Štokavian, even in the adult language. Diminutives are a productive category of derivational morphology. Nouns, adjectives, adverbs and verbs can be diminutivized. However, the vast majority of diminutives in child language are nouns (in the analysed data only a few adjective and verbal diminutives could be found) and therefore, in this work only noun diminutives are analysed. In addition, although diminutives can be built by suffixation (čamac→ čam-čić 'boat-DIM) and prefixation-suffixation (selo→ za-sel-ak 'village-DIM'), only suffixation is present in the data. The analysis of the acquisition of diminutives is thus reduced to the analysis of the diminutives derived by suffixation. In Croatian there are eleven diminutive suffixes in Croatian, but today only five are productive. These five are the ones that are present in the child language in Croatian. A closer look at the diminutive suffixes found in the child language corpus reveals a system that a Croatian child discovers and uses productively around his or her second birthday: a default suffix for feminina and a phonological variant of this suffix, a default suffix for masculina and a phonological variant for it and, finally, a default suffix for neutra (only a couple of nouns). This suffix is usually dialectal. Children start using diminutives well before their second year of life. However, first oppositions between diminutives and simplex forms occur around the age of two - this could be taken as a first sign of child's productivity. Often, diminutives are the only nouns for some objects. While the number of diminutives increases as the children grow, the number of diminutives in the input is constant throughout the recording period. Children seem to prefer using oblique cases with diminutives in a higher degree than simplex forms. Even later, children of kindergarten age are reported to use simplex form in nominative, but the appropriate diminutives in oblique cases, e.g. leptir 'butterfly', but leptir-ić-a 'butterfly-DIM-GEN.SG'. This can be viewed as an important point in the acquisition of morphology. Diminutives are phonologically more difficult and longer, but the diminutive suffix makes the end of the word more salient. This makes the task of "detecting" the morphology easier for the child. There might be several explanations for children to prefer diminutives. Using diminutives children often avoid morphonological changes making the paradigms transparent and simpler. However, children often make mistakes when applying morphonological rules whether they use diminutives or not. Further simplification of the noun morphology is the reduction of the noun classes (from three to two): when diminutive suffixes are added to the roots of the -i- class nouns, the derived diminutives belong to the more frequent -e- class nouns. It will be shown how the meaning of the child's diminutives (as well as the diminutives in the child directed speech) differs from the meaning of diminutives in the adult language. In adult language a diminutive can mean a small or a dear thing, but can also have pejorative meaning. In the child language diminutives usually do not have any special meaning different from the simplex form. They do contribute to the child-oriented atmosphere that is oriented to small and dear things. Children are ready to use diminutive forms of various names - names for members of family, friends, dolls etc. They use diminutives when referring to their toys, characters in the stories they are told, pets etc. In about 2/3rds the diminutives used by the parents and children overlap, but sometimes children use diminutives for words that parents use in the simplex form. This can be taken as another sign of the productivity.

diminutives; child language; Croatian

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