engleski

Diminutives as pioneers of derivational and inflectional development– a crosslinguistic perspective

Although diminutives are commonly viewed as being typical of child speech and child-directed speech, their acquisition has so far neither been studied in a cross-linguistic perspective nor related to recent theoretical developments in the study of diminutives and of the associated evaluative classes of augmentatives and pejoratives (Dressler & Merlini Barbaresi 1994, 1999 ; Jurafsky 1996). Furthermore, the development of diminutives is apt to shed light on much debated issues such as dual vs. single process models of morphological acquisition (Bybee 1995, Clahsen 1999), the role of bootstrapping (Weissenborn & Höhle 2001) and item-based vs. across-the-board learning of morphological regularities (Tomasello 2003). The present paper is based on extensive longitudinal child data from typologically different languages collected on a weekly basis and transcribed and morphologically coded according to the CHILDES Project within the Crosslinguistic Project in Pre- and Protomorphology in Language Acquisition. The main languages to be considered in this paper are Croatian, German, Greek, Hungarian, Lithuanian, and Turkish (there will also be references to other project languages). For some of these languages, the acquisition of diminutives has been studied for the very first time here. In most languages, diminutive formation is the first word formation pattern to emerge. The main reason for this seems to be the primary pragmatic functions of endearment, empathy, and sympathy, which make diminutives particularly appropriate for child-centered communication. Most importantly, it is not the semantic meaning of smallness which is central to the meaning of diminutives, at least in early child speech. The theoretical implications of this finding need to be discussed in connection with lexical development, especially Clark’ s (1993, 1995) principle of contrast. Diminutives do not only play an important role in the development of derivational morphology. They may also simplify the acquisition of declension and may show a precocious development as compared to that of their simplex bases (Olmsted 1994 and publications of the Project). Thus, in Lithuanian, the transfer of a simple noun from an unproductive and opaque declension class (e.g. vanduo masc. nom. "water", vandens gen.) to a productive and transparent class of the diminutive (nom. vandenukas, gen. vandenuko "water:DIM") can explain why the latter type of declension is acquired earlier. If however the simplex noun and the respective diminutive belong to the same productive and transparent class, no such earlier development of diminutive inflection can be observed. This is the case with Turkish. These conclusions were checked in all the project languages and supported by quantitative analyses. Because of their greater length and higher complexity in comparison with their simplex bases, diminutives may also prove to be a "disadvantage" to acquisition. Thus, in Turkish, they were found to develop more slowly than simplex nouns, due to the agglutinating character of this language. In the other languages of our research project, this "disadvantage" of diminutives is more than compensated by their above-mentioned "advantages", namely more salience, productivity and transparency.

diminutives; child speech; child-directed speech

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