Universal Tendencies in the Semantics of the Diminutive

Abstract

Despite the crucial dependence of synchronic meaning on both historical and cognitive context, we have traditionally used different tools for expressing synchronic and diachronic generalizations in modeling a complex semantic category like the diminutive. This is due in part to the extraordinary, often contradictory range of its senses synchronically (small size, affection, approximation, intensification, imitation, female gender), and the difficulty of proposing a coherent historical reconstruction for these senses. I propose to model the synchronic and diachronic semantics of the diminutive category with a RADIAL CATEGORY (George Lakoff 1987), a type of structured polysemy that explicitly models the different senses of the diminutive and the metaphorical and inferential relations which bind them. Synchronically, this model explains the varied and contradictory senses of the diminutive. Diachronically, the radial category acts as a kind of ARCHAEOLOGY OF MEANING, expressing the generalizations of the classic mechanisms of semantic change (metaphor, abstraction and inference) as well as a new one: LAMBDA-ABSTRACTION, which accounts for the rise of quantificational meaning and second-order predicates in the diminutive. The model also predicts that the origins of the diminutive cross-linguistically lie in words semantically or pragmatically linked to children. I test the model by considering the semantics of the diminutive in over 60 languages, examining the origins of the diminutive in many of these, particularly in Indo-European where the theory suggests a new reconstruction of the proto-semantics of the PIE suffix -ko-.