The Diminutive as a Polysemantic Category
The Diminutive as a Polysemantic Category

Summary/Abstract: Diminutives in English make up a particular linguistic category, which is said to be lessproductive nowadays in comparison with other languages, such as Spanish and Romanian.Diminutives are of different kinds, but they all exhibit traits like smallness, affection,endearment, or even contempt, which shows that they are a polysemantic category, withinwhich some meanings are more frequently encountered than others. The more frequent andregular senses tend to be called ‗central meanings‘, while the others are called ‗peripheralmeanings‘. In this paper, I present a study concerning the diminutive as being therepresentation of a polysemantic category and the existence of different diminutive suffixes inEnglish and their contextual meanings, from simply denoting the offspring of animals, youngtrees or plants to conveying derogatory connotations in a more informal language.

• Details
• Contents