Deminutiivsete nimi- ja omadussõnade tähendused eesti ilukirjandustekstides
Diminutive meanings in Estonian literary texts

Summary/Abstract: This paper aims to map the semantic and pragmatic senses of Estonian diminutive nouns and adjectives, based on Jurafsky’s (1996) model of diminutive meanings. The objectives are to demonstrate that apart from the usual connotations associated with diminutives, such as smallness, affection, and disdain, Estonian diminutives can express a wide range of other semantic and pragmatic senses, such as imitation, intensity, small type, etc; and to find out if any of these senses are linked to a specific diminutive suffix. The results show that Estonian diminutives do indeed convey more meanings than the three mentioned above. The diminutives from the analysed Estonian fiction data express the semantic senses SMALL (tükike ’piece+DIM – a little piece’), SMALL-TYPE (saiake ’bread+DIM – a small pastry’), IMITATION (linnuke ’bird+DIM – check mark √’), APPROXIMATION (pehmeke, ’soft+DIM – softish’), INTENSITY (nooruke, ’young+DIM+DIM – very young’), RELATED-TO (märjuke ’wet+DIM+DIM – a beer’) and PARTITIVE (sõnake ’word+DIM – a few words’), and the pragmatic senses HEDGES (tunnike ’hour+DIM – just an hour’), SCOFF (vennike ’brother+DIM+DIM – a worthless, pitiful person’), AFFECTION (emme ’mother+DIM – mommy’) and SYMPATHY (vaeseke ’poor+DIM – poor thing’). The most common sense of the Estonian diminutive appears to be AFFECTION, a meaning that is expressed by 36% of the entire data, while SMALL is only present in 18% of the analysed diminutives. While none of the diminutive suffixes has a specific function, the diminutive suffix -u seems to encode affection as its main value and -ke – although it can convey other meanings as well – appears to be the only suffix for expressing a small size. While the formal grammar descriptions only attribute three meanings to diminutives – physical smallness, affection and contempt – the results of this study suggest that the range of meanings expressed by diminutives is more diverse than previously assumed and is not limited to only two or three prototypical meanings.

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