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Article published In:
Linguistics in the Netherlands 2017
Edited by Sander Lestrade and Bert Le Bruyn
[Linguistics in the Netherlands 34] 2017
► pp. 1–15

Menscheln, kibbelen, sparkle

Verbal diminutives between grammar and lexicon

| Leiden University Centre for Linguistics
| Leiden University Centre for Linguistics
| Tufts University | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

German, Dutch and English have surprisingly large sets of verbal diminutives: verbs ending in -el/-le and carrying an attenuative and/or iterative meaning. These verbs exhibit particular properties that make them interesting for morphological theory. Focussing on Dutch data, this paper sketches the challenges that arise with respect to structure, productivity and meaning, and proposes a constructionist account that allows for a better understanding of the issues. The central notion is the schema, a generalization over the structure of complex words. In contrast to rules, whose main function is to generate new words, schemas motivate existing words by marking their structure as non-arbitrary. We discuss the modelling options this gives us and apply them to the verbal diminutives.

Keywords: verbal diminutives, frequentatives, schema, Construction Morphology, motivation, Germanic
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Non-lexical bases and non-productivity
  • 3.The identity of -el and structural ambiguity
  • 4.Theoretical challenges and a constructionist account
  • 5.Partial motivation
  • 6.Multiple motivation
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 23 November 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.34.01aud
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2020. Words are constructions, too: A construction-based approach to English ablaut reduplication. Linguistics 58:6 ► pp. 1701 ff. DOI logo

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