Redundancy and Rivalry in Language. A Case Study of Russian Diminutives
Redundancy and Rivalry in Language. A Case Study of Russian Diminutives

Summary/Abstract: In the present study of Russian diminutive constructions, I follow Goldberg’s idea about sematic or pragmatic differences that always accompany syntactic differences (Goldberg 1995, p. 67). My manually checked database comprises almost 1000 examples culled from the Russian National corpus (www.ruscorpora.ru) and includes three types of diminutive constructions: 1) morphological diminutives of the type dom-ik ‘house dim’, 2) analytical diminutives such as malen’kij dom ‘small house’ and milyj dom ‘nice house’ and 3) a mixed type where morphological diminutives occur with adjectives, such as malen’kij dom-ik ‘small house dim’. My analysis reveals differences between morphological and analytical diminutives, which are not freely distributed across the examples. While morphological diminutives rarely refer to size only, adjectives are often used for further specification and in order to avoid ambiguity. The variation in Russian diminutives sheds light on an important theoretical question of redundancy and its role in language. The results of the present study indicate that redundancy is motivated, has a function and helps language users avoid ambiguity.

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