«Pani zvelila zarazisinko stulyty hubu» (Expressive functions of diminutive adverbs in Ahatanhel Krymskyi’s prose works)

Abstract

The article analyzes stylistic functions of adverbial diminutives in Ahatanhel Krymskyi’s small prosaic works, namely in the following stories: “Father’s Right”, “A Radical’s First Debut”, “Who really is to Blame?!”, “From the Manuscript of the Glorious Deeds of the Prystashis gentry” and “Beirut Stories”. Two categories of derivatives are identified: those derived from adjectives with diminutive meaning; those where diminutive siffix is added directly to the word-building stem in the process of adverb formation. Attention is paid to the fact that derivative adverbs-diminutives do not change the denotative meaning of the stem, but become an expressive means and give the utterance special colouring. Adverbial diminutives mainly have significant emotional and evaluative load which is as important as semantic one. Adverbs with diminutive suffixes do not always focus on the fact that that attribute of the attribute or the attribute of an action is diminished. Most frequently these word forms attract reader’s attention with the unusual form and enable the author of the work to send important signals to the reader. For example, emphasize compassionate and gentle attitude of the storyteller or a character to the other character of the work, make the utterance sound ironic, reduce too categoric statements, encode the meaning, etc. The rigorous analysis has proved that adverbial diminutives make Ahatanhel Krymskyi’s language more expressive and are characteristic feature of writer’s individual style.