Form and Function of Expressive Morphology: A Case Study of Russian *

Abstract

In this paper, I conduct a detailed case study of expressive suffixes in Russian. Although the suffixes under investigation have the same function (expressive), they differ significantly in their formal properties. I identify two major semantic types of expressive suffixes: attitude suffixes, which convey the speaker’s attitude toward the referent, and size suffixes, which both convey the speaker’s attitude and refer to the size of the referent. I argue that the two different semantic types map onto different syntactic types. Attitude suffixes are syntactic heads, while size suffixes are syntactic modifiers. As heads, attitude suffixes determine the formal properties (syntactic category, grammatical gender, and inflectional class) of the derived form. As modifiers, size suffixes do not determine the formal properties of the derived form. Attitude suffixes can merge with both category‐ free √Roots and with categories (n/a/v), while size suffixes can only merge with a noun category (n). The present study is the first systematic investigation of the functional and formal properties of expressive suffixes in Russian. I analyze the patterns of expressive suffixes with respect to several criteria (gender/class change, category change, subcategorization); an important byproduct of this analysis is the conclusion that grammatical gender of an expressive form can be predicted from its inflectional class (c ombined with animacy and natural gender of the base). It has been claimed in the literature that Russian grammatical gender can be predicted from inflectional class (Corbett 1982, 1991; Corbett and Fraser 2000). This paper systematically shows how this works with respect to expressive forms, whic h to the best of my knowledge, has never been done before. An interesting result of this study is that the formal properties of expressives are no different from those of non‐expressives (descriptives), as both expressives and descriptives can attach as heads or modifiers either to √Roots or categories. Furthermore, the formal and functional criteria developed in this