Diminutives derived from terms for children: Comparative evidence from Southeastern Mande - Archive ouverte HAL Access content directly
Journal Articles Linguistics Year : 2019

Diminutives derived from terms for children: Comparative evidence from Southeastern Mande

Tatiana Nikitina
  • Function : Author
  • PersonId : 1006258

Abstract

The study addresses the relationship between diachronic change and synchronic polysemy based on the use of diminutives in four closely related Southeastern Mande languages. It explores the synchronic patterns of use of cognate diminutive markers deriving from the word 'child', and accounts for differences between the languages in terms of a Radial Category network, which is designed to capture in one representation both mechanisms of diachronic change and mechanisms of regular meaning extension. The study argues that the same approach can be used to account for the ways diminutive markers acquire new meanings and for the ways an old diminutive category disintegrates, when new markers start replacing the old one in some of the core diminutive functions. The invasion and expansion of new markers may result in discontinuous semantic structures that can only be understood when the diachrony is taken into account (in this particular case study, the evidence for historical change comes from a synchronic comparison with closely related languages).
Fichier principal
Vignette du fichier
Diminutives_derived_from_terms_for_child.pdf (732.6 Ko) Télécharger le fichier
Origin : Files produced by the author(s)
Loading...

Dates and versions

hal-02932440 , version 1 (07-09-2020)

Identifiers

Cite

Tatiana Nikitina. Diminutives derived from terms for children: Comparative evidence from Southeastern Mande. Linguistics, 2019, 57 (1), pp.1-28. ⟨10.1515/ling-2018-0029⟩. ⟨hal-02932440⟩
115 View
162 Download

Altmetric

Share

Gmail Facebook Twitter LinkedIn More