The Acquisition of Diminutives: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective (Language Acquisition & Language Disorders) PDF
Preview The Acquisition of Diminutives: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective (Language Acquisition & Language Disorders)
<DOCINFOAUTHOR""TITLE"TheAcquisitionofDiminutives:Across-linguisticperspective"SUBJECT"LanguageAcquisition&LanguageDisorders,Volume43"KEYWORDS""SIZEHEIGHT"240"WIDTH"160"VOFFSET"4"> TheAcquisitionofDiminutives Language Acquisition & Language Disorders Volumesinthisseriesprovideaforumforresearchcontributingtotheoriesof languageacquisition(firstandsecond,childandadult),languagelearnability, languageattritionandlanguagedisorders. SeriesEditors HaraldClahsen LydiaWhite UniversityofEssex McGillUniversity EditorialBoard MelissaF.Bowerman LuigiRizzi MaxPlanckInstitutfürPsycholinguistik,Nijmegen UniversityofSiena KatherineDemuth BonnieD.Schwartz BrownUniversity UniversityofHawaiiatManao WolfgangU.Dressler AntonellaSorace UniversitätWien UniversityofEdinburgh NinaHyams KarinStromswold UniversityofCaliforniaatLosAngeles RutgersUniversity JürgenM.Meisel JürgenWeissenborn UniversitätHamburg UniversitätPotsdam WilliamO’Grady FrankWijnen UniversityofHawaii UtrechtUniversity MabelRice UniversityofKansas Volume43 TheAcquisitionofDiminutives:Across-linguisticperspective EditedbyInetaSavickiene˙ andWolfgangU.Dressler The Acquisition of Diminutives A cross-linguistic perspective Editedby Ineta Savickiene˙ VytautasMagnusUniversity Wolfgang U. Dressler UniversityofVienna JohnBenjaminsPublishingCompany Amsterdam(cid:2)/(cid:2)Philadelphia TM Thepaperusedinthispublicationmeetstheminimumrequirements 8 ofAmericanNationalStandardforInformationSciences–Permanence ofPaperforPrintedLibraryMaterials,ansiz39.48-1984. LibraryofCongressCataloging-in-PublicationData Theacquisitionofdiminutives:across-linguisticperspective/editedbyIneta Savickiene˙andWolfgangU.Dressler. p. cm.(LanguageAcquisition&LanguageDisorders,issn 0925–0123;v.43) Includesbibliographicalreferencesandindexes. 1.Languageacquisition.2.Grammar,Comparativeandgeneral-- Diminutives.I.Savickiene˙,Ineta.II.Dressler,WolfgangU.,1939- P118.A1423 2007 401’.93--dc22 2006052653 isbn9789027253033(Hb;alk.paper) ©2007–JohnBenjaminsB.V. Nopartofthisbookmaybereproducedinanyform,byprint,photoprint,microfilm,or anyothermeans,withoutwrittenpermissionfromthepublisher. JohnBenjaminsPublishingCo.·P.O.Box36224·1020meAmsterdam·TheNetherlands JohnBenjaminsNorthAmerica·P.O.Box27519·Philadelphiapa19118-0519·usa Table of contents Introduction 1 Ineta Savickienė, Wolfgang U. Dressler chapter 1 Form and meaning of diminutives in Lithuanian child language 13 Ineta Savickienė chapter 2 Diminutives in Russian at the early stages of acquisition 43 Ekaterina Protassova, Maria Voeikova chapter 3 The acquisition of diminutives in Croatian 73 Marijan Palmović chapter 4 Diminutives in Greek child language 89 Evangelia Thomadaki, Ursula Stephany chapter 5 The role of diminutives in the acquisition of Italian morphology 125 Sabrina Noccetti, Anna De Marco, Livia Tonelli, Wolfgang U. Dressler chapter 6 The acquisition of diminutives in Spanish 155 A useful device Victoria Marrero, Carmen Aguirre and María José Albalá chapter 7 A longitudinal study of the acquisition of diminutives in Dutch 183 Agnita Souman, Steven Gillis On Information Structure, Meaning and Form: Generalizations across languages chapter 8 Diminutives and Hypocoristics in Austrian German (AG) 207 Katharina Korecky-Kröll, Wolfgang U. Dressler chapter 9 Acquisition of diminutives in Hungarian 231 Péter Bodor, Virág Barcza chapter 10 Diminutives in Finnish child-directed and child speech 263 Klaus Laalo chapter 11 The (scarcity of) diminutives in Turkish child language 279 F. Nihan Ketrez, Ayhan Aksu-Koç chapter 12 Acquiring diminutive structures and meanings in Hebrew 295 An experimental study Anat Hora, Galit Ben-Zvi, Ronit Levie and Dorit Ravid chapter 13 Diminutives provide multiple benefits for language acquisition 319 Vera Kempe, Patricia J. Brooks, Steven Gillis Conclusions 343 Ineta Savickienė, Wolfgang U. Dressler Subject index 351 Introduction Ineta Savickienė and Wolfgang U. Dressler 1. Diminutives are commonly viewed as a characteristic of child speech (CS) and child- directed speech (CDS), but this has never been studied in a cross-linguistic way with adequate quantitative analyses nor in a qualitatively adequate manner, notably with reference to recent theoretical developments in the study of diminutives and their re- lated evaluative (or alterative) classes of augmentatives and pejoratives (cf. Dressler & Merlini Barbaresi 1994, 1997, 2001; Jurafsky 1996; Corbin et al. 1999) and in reference to hotly debated issues in inflectional morphology or word formation and its acquisi- tion (as focussed, e.g., in Clahsen 1999; Clahsen et al. 2003). We intend to do both, especially in order to show how and why diminutives emerge as the earliest category of derivational morphology in nearly all languages and of morphology as a whole in many languages. 2.1 Early research in baby talk (BT) noted that diminutives or hypocoristics are not only more frequently used in BT than in adult-directed speech (ADS) but also play a role in the development of the child’s grammar. For example, Rūķe-Draviņa (1959) re- ported that Latvian has a rich variety of diminutive suffixes in ADS with these suffixes used even more commonly in BT. 2.2 Interesting results from experimental research on the acquisition of morpho- logy, diminutives included, came from the morphologically poor English language. J. Berko in her classical study in 1958 showed how children from the age of 4 until 7 mas- ter English morphology and the derivation of diminutives. She observed that 50% of adults produced diminutives with several English suffixes (*wuglet, *wuggie, *wugette), but none of the children used a diminutive suffix. 52% of children formed analytical phrases like baby *wug and little *wug. One interesting case was observed when two children said *wig, employing sound symbolism where a narrow vowel stands for a small animal (1958: 168). 2.3 According to Ferguson (1977: 224), the ‘most prominent expressive feature of BT probably is the hypocoristic affix.’ The statement is supported by research into a number of languages investigated in this study (Dutch, Greek, Italian, Lithuanian, Russian, Spanish, a bit less in Austrian-German, Croatian, Hebrew, Hungarian, Turk- ish), which has demonstrated that diminutives are especially frequent when talking to Ineta Savickienė and Wolfgang U. Dressler children. It stands to reason, then, that due to the direct influence of CDS, diminutive suffixes are among the first morphemes that a child acquires. 2.4 In their longitudinal and experimental investigation of Italian diminutives, Bates and Rankin (1979) found, in a first phase of development, “no evidence of either understanding or an attempt to encode size or value concepts” (1979: 35). They claimed that, in a later phase, denotative (or semantic, i.e. size-related) concepts emerge, with pragmatic (or connotative or value-related) concepts acquired even later, such as me- taphoric and interpersonal speech in general. It should be noted that Bates and Rankin incorrectly classified Italian diminutives as inflectional, rather than derivational mor- phology. Although diminutives are inflectional morphology in Bantu languages, and diminutives in other languages may share some properties with inflections, diminu- tives in Italian and in all of the other languages studied in this volume are derivational (cf. Dressler & Merlini Barbaresi 1994). 2.5 Dressler (1994), Dressler and Karpf (1995) have claimed that diminutives are also acquired early because they belong to non-prototypical derivational morphology, which is easier to acquire than prototypical derivational or inflectional morphology. Due to their early acquisition, diminutives may have some properties of extra-gram- matical and marginal morphology, such as truncations, applicability to bases other than nouns, preservation of the gender of the base noun in the diminutive derived from it. This proposal has been integrated into a model of development from pre- over protomorphology to morphology proper established within the Crosslinguistic Project on Pre- and Protomorphology in Language Acquisition.1 In this model premorphology precedes the child’s detection of morphology (as indicated by the emergence of mini- paradigms, i.e. incomplete paradigms consisting at least of three contrasting, freely used contrasting paradigm members, see Kilani-Schoch & Dressler 2002; Bittner et al. 2003), protomorphology starts with the first generalisations of morphological pat- terns (usually beginning already before age 2), morphology proper (or modularized morphology) starts to resemble adult morphology, cf. Dressler (1997), Voeikova and Dressler (2002), Bittner, Dressler and Kilani-Schoch (2003). 2.6 In her experimental study, Dąbrowska (2006) administered an inflection for- mation test with nonce words, half of which resembled diminutives, to Polish adults and to three groups of Polish children (aged between 2;4 and 4;8). Especially young children did better on diminutives than simplex nouns (but not in neuters) and sub- stituted simplex nouns more often with diminutives than vice versa. Dąbrowska in- terpreted this pattern as evidence for the greater impact of low-level schemas than of general rules of inflection. Unfortunately she specifies neither the properties of di- minutive inflection schemas (which include vowel-zero alternation in the masculines and morphophonological rules of palatalization in the feminines) nor of the errors committed nor does she discuss the advantages and disadvantages of different schema approaches (totally omitting the most elaborated one of Köpcke 1993, 1998). On other research on saliency see § 6.1. Introduction 3.1 With this volume we intend to innovate in several respects: we will look closely into the difference between diminutives and hypocoristics and into the gradual tran- sition between them and explicate how young children differ in this categorization from adults. Diminutives are derived from common nouns, and in many languages also from adjectives, adverbs, etc. (cf. Dressler & Merlini Barbaresi 1994; Nieuwenhuis 1985; Grandi 2002). Hypocoristics are derived from proper names, either by diminu- tive suffixes or a subset of them (e.g., Jonny vs. *John-let, Annie, Annette) or by reduc- tion (e.g., Pete, Mike, Liz) or by other suffixes or by a combination of such operations. Finally there is, especially for children, the special category of common-noun diminu- tives used as hypocoristic names for caretakers, such as mummy, daddy, granny, which behave like names also in other respects, i.e. pragmatically or in some languages syn- tactically, e.g., in German by feminine nouns taking the masculine and neuter genitive -s, as in Maria-s Haus, Mutter-s Haus, Mutt-i-s Haus ‘Mary’s / Mother’s / Mummy’s house’ vs. der Mutter Haus ‘the mother’s house.’ 3.2 Furthermore, we will attempt to transcend cross-linguistic juxtaposition of languages (i.e. of the time course of diminutive acquisition) towards a real typological analysis. We will relate the acquisition of diminutives to typological properties of the morphology of the target languages (from most agglutinating Turkish to introflect- ing Hebrew and strongly vs. weakly inflecting-fusional Indo-European languages) and to the properties of diminutives intermediate between prototypical derivational and prototypical inflectional morphology. Wherever there are sufficient data we will try to support our findings by statistical analysis. 3.3 Another typological criterion is morphological richness in the domain of diminutives. Beyond the question of whether diminutives are accompanied by aug- mentatives and/or pejoratives in their inventories, languages differ in the number of diminutive operations – in our languages: the number of suffixes, especially produc- tive suffixes. Such differences may (but need not) be paralleled by the generality of application of these rules, i.e. by the conditions of their application (e.g., whether a given suffix may also be attached to adjectives and adverbs or how it is restricted in its application to different types of nouns). Finally the higher or lower degree of pro- ductivity may be paralleled by higher or lower frequency of usage. Such differentiation between generality, consequences for type frequency, token frequency and productiv- ity makes most sense if one defines productivity in Schultink’s way, as translated by van Marle (1985: 45), as “the possibility for language users to coin, unintentionally, a number of formations which are in principle uncountable” (cf. Dressler 2003; Dressler & Ladányi 2000). Finally, a language may have, among diminutive formation rules, a default, i.e. the rule normally used, in contrast to rules used under specific conditions only, as in English the default -y/-ie, in contrast to the non-default suffixes -let, -ette (more on default in Clahsen 1999). In this volume, the main question will be the im- pact of such typological differences, as manifested in the input, on the emergence and development of diminutives in the children’s output.
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