Asymmetric use of diminutives and hypocoristics to pet animals in Italian, German, English, and Arabic

Mattiello, Elisa; Ritt-Benmimoun, Veronika; Dressler, Wolfgang U.

doi:10.1016/j.langcom.2020.11.004

Cited by 12 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…HYPs are mostly used for pragmatic reasons, but nearly never referring only to young age, and thus for the whole life-time of a person, a truly semantic meaning is exceptional. The same holds for PDS (see Mattiello et al 2021).…”

Section: History Of Researchmentioning

confidence: 66%

“…For PDS, Mattiello et al (2021) have found that nearly all DIM derivations are morphosemantically transparent and pragmatically used, e.g. It.…”

Section: Typological Results On the Impact Of Morphological Richness ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Systematic research on PDS is so far limited to Mattiello et al (2021). In Russian linguistics, especially dealing with the problems of colloquial speech, there is a tradition of studying PDS, cf.…”

Section: History Of Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For PDS, the German, Italian and English data were collected by written and oral interviews for our publication Mattiello et al (2021). In addition, we analyzed PDS data of eight German-speaking parents from the INPUT project in comparison to their CDS and ADS.…”

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Russian data (516 DIMs and HYPs) have been obtained from semi-formal oral or written interviews with 130 native speakers (102 females, 28 males, aged 14 to 69 years) in accordance with the questionnaire developed by Mattiello et al (2021). The age groups were balanced in number, except for those in their twenties.…”

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

See 4 more Smart Citations

Communication with diminutives to young children vs. pets in German, Italian, Lithuanian, Russian, and English

Dressler¹,

Mattiello²,

Korecky‐Kröll³

et al. 2022

SSTP

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This contribution is dedicated to Steven Gillis with whom we have collaborated since the nineties within the “Crosslinguistic Project on Pre- and Protomorphology in Language Acquisition” on both child speech (CS) and child-directed speech (CDS) and also about the development of diminutives (DIMs). We investigate parallels in the use of DIMs and of hypocoristics (HYPs) between CDS and pet-directed speech (PDS), whereas CS is only marginally dealt with. When relevant, also adult-directed speech (ADS), written or oral (especially from electronic corpora, wherever available) will be compared. The presuppositions of this investigation will be stated at the beginning of the Introduction (§ 1). This involves several innovations (beyond descriptions of new data), when compared with existing literature, relevant to theoretical and typological problem areas. We will show that also in DIMs and HYPs used in CDS and PDS semantics only plays a partial or even marginal role when using more DIMs to communicate with young children and young and/or small pets, because it is more relevant that both younger and smaller pets are emotionally closer to us, which is again a pragmatic factor. In regard to language typology, we will apply our concepts of morphological richness and productivity, as argued for and supported in our previous publications, to CDS and PDS and show that richer and more productive patterns of DIM formation of a language also have a typological impact on more frequent and more productive use both in CDS and PDS. We will also apply our concepts of grading morphosemantic transparency/opacity, as argued for and supported in our previous publications, and we start to show, as already shown for CS, that also in CDS towards young children (and similarly in PDS) more morphosemantically transparent DIMs are used than in ADS. This is also connected to their predominantly pragmatic meanings in CDS and PDS (obviously not exclusively pragmatic as in early CS). The languages and authors were selected according to who among the participants in the Crosslinguistic Project on Pre- and Protomorphology in Language Acquisition had CDS and PDS available, plus Elisa Mattiello who has collected English and Italian PDS data.

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Section: History Of Researchmentioning

confidence: 66%

“…For PDS, Mattiello et al (2021) have found that nearly all DIM derivations are morphosemantically transparent and pragmatically used, e.g. It.…”

Section: Typological Results On the Impact Of Morphological Richness ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: History Of Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 99%