Publication details
Deminutiva a deminutivní vyjádření v češtině, němčině a angličtině – hledání hranic
| Title in English | Diminutives and Diminutive Expressions in Czech, German and English – Searching for Boundaries |
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| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2011 |
| Type | Article in Proceedings |
| Conference | Korpusová lingvistika Praha 2011: 1 - InterCorp |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Field | Linguistics |
| Keywords | diminutives; diminutive expressions; contrastive linguistics; corpus linguistics; Czech – English – German; collocations of diminutives; analytical diminutive; diminutives and universals |
| Attached files | |
| Description | This is a description of searching structures o diminutives in Czech English and German and comparing them. The starting point of this study was the idea to compare diminutives in languages with very different frequency of diminutive usage. Recent studies claim diminutives can be realised not only as a synthetic form derived from a word but also as an analytic structure even “inherently” in totally different lexemes – and this all also in Czech. This study shows the differences in collocations between the analytic “diminutives” and the synthetic ones and presents an opinion poll from more than 100 native speakers. Both results show that there is no need to distinguish between the analytic and synthetic diminutives. Analytic (and other non-synthetic) diminutives obviously do not fulfil the same functions as synthetic diminutives. A short remark at the end of the article re-opens the discussion on the universality of diminutives in languages. The data (lists of parallels, collocations and examples in the questionary) were gained from the multilingual corpus InterCorp. |