Rivalry and Lack of Blocking Among Italian and German Diminutives in Adult and Child Language
| Autor: | Sabine Sommer-Lolei, Wolfgang U. Dressler, Katharina Korecky-Kröll, Lavinia Merlini Barbaresi, Sonja Schwaiger, Jutta Ransmayr |
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| Rok vydání: | 2019 |
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| Zdroj: | Competition in Inflection and Word-Formation ISBN: 9783030025496 University of Vienna-u:cris |
| DOI: | 10.1007/978-3-030-02550-2_5 |
| Popis: | This contribution deals with competition (rivalry) between diminutive suffixations in (Austrian) German and Italian adult language and child speech and the motivation of differences in terms of productivity and degree of morphosemantic transparency/opacity of the respective diminutives. For this purpose productivity, availability and profitability are differentiated, a scale of morphosemantic transparency/opacity is established which ranges from full transparency (degree 1), over slight pragmatic restrictions (degree 2), to total opacity (unless in metalinguistic reflections: degree 9) and fake decompositionality (degree 10). The degrees of transparency/opacity differ for different suffixations, in German also between compound and simplex diminutives. Longitudinal studies of early child language show that child language is more transparent than adult language in types and tokens. In both there is competition between fully transparent suffixations (degree 1) without any pattern blocking or lexical blocking, because such diminutives are mainly formed and used for pragmatic reasons and never for the purpose of lexical enrichment. Since productivity, availability and profitability of diminutive formation is much higher in Italian than in German, there is much more competition between diminutive suffixations in Italian than in German adult language. This difference between the two languages is much less the case in early child language. Possible psycholinguistic consequences are mentioned in the outlook. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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