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Croatian Equivalents of the Portuguese Diminutive Adjectives

This work is an attempt to carry out an analysis of the European variety of Portuguese adjectives formed by the most productive diminutive suffixes -inho and -zinho in contrast with their equivalents in Croatian. Diminutive is known as a highly polysemous category (based on „small“ as its core meaning) in many languages of the world (e.g. Dressler & Barbaresi 1994, Taylor 1995, Jurafsky 1996), including Portuguese (e.g. Skorge 1957, da Silva 2006). Although general structure of diminutive meaning extensions in Portuguese is similar to that encountered in many other languages, it is precisely the meaning conveyed by the Portuguese diminutive suffixes -inho and -zinho on adjectival (and adverbial) stems that makes them semanticaly specific in comparison to other languages, including the Romance ones (Sarić 2006). Besides various pragmatic uses (such as the marking of affection, depreciation or metalinguistic hedges, also common in other word class stems to which the diminutive suffixes are attached) diminutivized adjectives may indicate intensification of the property, a type of superlativization, even when attached to the adjectives that do not already refer to some property of low intensity, as was suggested in Jurafskyʼs (1996) typological work which does not include Portuguese language. Jurafskyʼs claims were refuted in Sarić 2006. Our analysis is based on the occurrences found in the corpus of translated narrative texts. We intend to extract the sentences that contain diminutivized adjectives in the original Portuguese texts, identify the semantic contribution of the diminutive suffix in each example and compare the distribution of the same semantic components in the target Croatian language. The meanig contribution analysis will be based on the previous work on Portuguese diminutives (Skorge 1957, da Silva 2006, Sarić 2006), also supported by native speakersʼ intuitions on interpretation of the extracted sentences. The primary objective of the analysis is to examine the means by which different meanings or uses conveyed by diminutive suffixes -inho and -zinho as applied on adjective bases are expressed in Croatian. Although Croatian also has many productive diminutive suffixes (e.g. Barić 1997), our expectation is that the meanings of Portuguese suffixes cannot be expressed by similar morphological means in Croatian. We will examine the degree of equivalence achieved in the target sentences and try to find out whether there is a systematic way of explicit marking of identical concepts. The qualitative analysis will be accompanied by the relevant frequency data.

diminutive suffixes; adjectives; polysemy; contrastive analysis; Portuguese; Croatian

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