Diminutive Nouns Research Articles

The Role of Diminutives in the Acquisition of Russian Gender: Can Elements of Child‐Directed Speech Aid in Learning Morphology?

Diminutives are a pervasive feature of child‐directed speech (CDS) in Russian. Their frequent use might be beneficial for gender acquisition because it eliminates nontransparent morphophonological marking. To examine the effect of diminutives on gender learning, adult native speakers of English were taught Russian nouns, with half of the participants trained on diminutive nouns and half on the nondiminutive base forms. Over four sessions, participants learned to use adjectives that had to agree in gender with nouns. Learners were then tested on various types of novel nouns. The diminutive training group demonstrated better learning of noun gender, and better generalization to novel forms, indicating that regularization of gender marking through diminutives promotes the extraction of morphophonological regularities.

The ‘two way’ formation: the diminutive nouns in the Tshiguvhu dialect of Venda

The aim of this paper is to give an insight into the formation of diminutive nouns in Tshiguvhu. The discussion of the formation of diminutive nouns will mainly be based on morphological features. In some cases, examples from the Lobedu and Tlokwa dialects of Northern Sotho will be compared with those of Tshiguvhu to show the influence they have on Tshiguvhu.

On the visibility of word-internal morphological features

In this paper I argue that word-internal morphological features can be visible. I present a case from Hebrew, where plural formation of feminine diminutive nouns is blocked due to features associated with an internal suffix. The feminine diminutive form yaldonet (little girl) consists of a base yeled (boy), a diminutive suffix -on, and a feminine suffix -et ; -on is specified for [-Fem] and -et for [+Fem]. The plural suffixes in Hebrew are subcategorized for gender, -ot for [+Fem] and -im for [-Fem]. I argue that diminutive forms such as yaldonet cannot be pluralized because -im conflicts with the gender of -et, and -ot with the gender of -on. While the conflict with -et is expectable, the one with -on can be explained only if the gender of the internal suffix is visible. There are, however, cases where word-internal suffixes are not visible. These suffixes, unlike the visible suffix -on, are noncompositional. I thus propose to view words as consisting of compositional and noncompositional morphological domains; only suffixes in a compositional domain can be visible word-internally

A DIACHRONIC ARGUMENT AGAINST THE SPLIT MORPHOLOGY HYPOTHESIS‐ANALOGICAL UMLAUT IN GERMAN DIALECTS

ABSTRACTThis paper presents diachronic evidence from four modern German dialects against Anderson's (1982) formal dichotomy between inflection and derivation, otherwise known as the ‘Split Morphology Hypothesis’ (SMH). It examines the relative productivity of analogical umlaut rules (i.e. the analogical fronting of back vowels in morphologically complex forms leading to the creation of new ‘phonemes’) in a number of inflectional and derivational categories and demonstrates that these rules are either (i) productive in inflection and derivation, (ii) productive in inflection and diminutive nouns but sporadic in derivation or (iii) productive only in diminutive nouns. As a marker of noun plurals, analogical umlaut is lexically conditioned. On the basis of this evidence, it is argued that the productivity of analogical umlaut is determined by semiotically‐based parameters, including the semantic transparency of the relation between base and derivative and the uniformity and transparency of the formal means used to mark morphologically complex forms, all of which interact to determine the overall perceptual saliency of particular alternation types.