Semantic Studies on Standard Austrian German Diminutives and Diminutive Compounds

Abstract

This article examines for the first time the asymmetric distribution of semantic groups of diminutives formed with -chen and -erl in written Standard Austrian German in a corpuslinguistic study. Based on a large corpus, we discover asymmetries in the distribution of -chen- and -erl-diminutives in conceptual fields. We will also examine these two diminutive forms from a semantic and pragmatic view, taking the relative frequency of -chen- and -erl-diminutive forms into account. The results contribute to the description of Standard Austrian German on the morphological and morphopragmatic level, respectively, and correct views currently widely held in research and lexicography, which promote that -erl-diminutives were mostly colloquial or dialectal rather than standard forms. The data presented in this article prove this view to be inaccurate for Standard Austrian German.