Bogdan Szymanek and Tetyana Derkach
Catholic University of Lublin
One reason why diminutives, cross-linguistically, have attracted considerable attention in the recent morphological literature, is that they allow “repeated application of the same rule on adjacent cycles” (Scalise 1986: 132). This property has been viewed as a characteristic trait of large areas of so-called “expressive” or “evaluative” morphology in various languages (Stump 1993). From the theoretical viewpoint, repetition of identical morphemes is significant, as there is a tension between its best known instantiations, i.e. processes of reduplication, and a variety of constraints, reported in the literature, which conspire to minimize the repetition of identical morphemes, cf., for instance, the Haplological Constraint in Dressler (1977) and Stemberger (1981), the Repeated Morph Constraint in Menn and McWhinney (1984), “identity avoidance” and the Obligatory Contour Principle in Yip (1998), or constraints on the occurrence of identical clitics in Grimshaw (1997).
In this paper, we investigate the repetition of diminutive suffixes in Polish and Ukrainian, which results in so-called “double diminutives” (e.g. Polish dom ‘house’ - dom-ekDIM1 - dom-ecz-ekDIM1-DIM2, Ukrainian dub ‘oak’ – dub-okDIM1 – dub-oč-okDIM1-DIM2). An attempt is being made to define the scope and productivity of the process in question in both languages. The formation of double diminutives is shown to be conditioned, in particular, by a variety of formal properties of the input nouns. In spite of the close genetic affinity between the two languages under investigation, there are marked differences in the way they form and use double diminutives.
References:
Dressler, Wolfgang U. 1977. "Phono-morphological dissimilation." Phonologica 1976, 41-48.
Grimshaw, Jane. 1997. "The best clitic: contraint conflict in morphosyntax." In: Liliane Haegeman (ed.), Elements of Grammar. Handbook in generative syntax. Dordrecht: Kluwer. 169-196.
Menn, Lise and MacWhinney, Brian. 1984. "The Repeated Morph Constraint: towards an explanation." Language 60, 519-541.
Scalise, Sergio. 1986. Generative morphology, 2nd edn. Dordrecht: Foris.
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Yip, Moira. 1998. "Identity avoidance in phonology and morphology." In: Stephen G. Lapointe, Diane K. Brentari and Patrick M. Farrell (eds.), Morphology and its relation to phonology and syntax. Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information, 216-246.