Abstract
Upper German dialects make heavy use of diminutive strategies, but little is known about the actual conceptual effects of those devices. This paper is the first to present two large-scale psycholinguistic experiments that investigate this issue in East Franconian, a dialect spoken in Bavaria. Franconian uses both the diminutive suffix -la and the quantifying construction a weng a lit. ‘a little bit a’ to modify noun phrases. Our first experiment shows that diminutization has no effect on conceptualization of magnitude: People do not think of a smaller/weaker/shorter etc. referent when the NP is modified by the morphological diminutive, the quantifying construction, or their combination. The second experiment involves gradable NPs and shows that, again, the morphological diminutive has no effect on how people conceptualize the degree to which a gradable nominal predicate holds; in contrast, a weng a reduces it significantly. These experiments suggest that diminutization does not have uniform effects across semantic domains, and our results act as a successful example of extending the avenue of cognitive psychology into dialectology with the active participation of a speaker community.*
Highlights
It is often mentioned in the literature that the highly frequent use of diminutive strategies is a signature property of several Upper German dialects
After having characterized these core conceptual and structural properties of the different diminutive strategies, we propose two possible hypotheses regarding their measurement function in section 2.3: Either those diminutive devices can measure the magnitude of the noun referent, or they can measure the degree of predicates that we find in gradable nouns, or they can function in both conceptual domains of measurement
This experiment asked two questions: We investigated whether the morphological diminutive -la and the quantifying construction a weng a affect how people conceptualize the magnitude of noun referents, using a phrase-picture matching task: Participants listened to a grocery list and clicked on the best candidate items from an array of pictures
Summary
Upper German dialects make heavy use of diminutive strategies, but little is known about the actual conceptual effects of those devices. This paper is the first to present two large-scale psycholinguistic experiments that investigate this issue in East Franconian, a dialect spoken in Bavaria Franconian uses both the diminutive suffix -la and the quantifying construction a weng a lit. The second experiment involves gradable NPs and shows that, again, the morphological diminutive has no effect on how people conceptualize the degree to which a gradable nominal predicate holds; in contrast, a weng a reduces it significantly. These experiments suggest that diminutization does not have uniform effects across semantic domains, and our results act as a successful example of extending the avenue of cognitive psychology into dialectology with the active participation of a speaker community.*.
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