ДЕМИНУТИВИ В ОНТОГЕНЕЗАТА: ВЗАИМОДЕЙСТВИЕ МЕЖДУ ЕЗИКОВИ РАВНИЩА
DIMINUTIVES IN ONTOGENY: INTERACTION BETWEEN SOME LANGUAGE LEVELS

Author(s): Juliana Stoyanova
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies
Published by: Факултет по славянски филологии, Софийски университет »Св. Кл. Охридски«
Keywords: diminutives in CDS; prosodic models; intervocalic clusters; morphophonological alternations; word-formation models
Summary/Abstract: Abstract. The purpose of this study is to discuss, on the basis of Bulgarian naturalistic data, the claims according to which the use of diminutives in CDS is beneficial for the early language acquisition. On the basis of previous cross-linguistic investigations, some hypotheses are formulated and tested against the Bulgarian material: diminutives in the Bulgarian CDS increase the frequency of difficult phonemes (the affricates /tʃ/) and /ts/), as well as of intervocalic consonant clusters in the input which may aid their relative early mastering; diminutives offer the children an increased number of derived nouns with relative transparent word-formation structure accompanied by typical and widespread morpho-phonological alternations, and thus help them learn some basic rules by means of which different types of nouns are built. The analyses of the Bulgarian data confirm these hypotheses and reveal how some language specific characteristics of diminutives may influence acquisition.

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