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43006863 03 01 01 JB John Benjamins Publishing Company 01 JB code LALD 43 Eb 15 9789027292896 06 10.1075/lald.43 13 2006052653 DG 002 02 01 LALD 02 0925-0123 Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 43 <TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText textformat="02">The Acquisition of Diminutives</TitleText> <TitlePrefix>The </TitlePrefix> <TitleWithoutPrefix textformat="02">Acquisition of Diminutives</TitleWithoutPrefix> <Subtitle textformat="02">A cross-linguistic perspective</Subtitle> 01 lald.43 01 https://benjamins.com 02 https://benjamins.com/catalog/lald.43 1 B01 Ineta Savickienė Savickienė, Ineta Ineta Savickienė Vytautas Magnus University 2 B01 Wolfgang U. Dressler Dressler, Wolfgang U. Wolfgang U. Dressler University of Vienna 01 eng 360 vi 352 LAN009000 v.2006 CF 2 24 JB Subject Scheme LIN.LA Language acquisition 24 JB Subject Scheme LIN.MORPH Morphology 24 JB Subject Scheme LIN.THEOR Theoretical linguistics 06 01 This cross-linguistic volume innovates research of the acquisition of diminutives in the inflecting-fusional languages Lithuanian, Russian, Croatian, Greek, Italian, Spanish, German and Dutch, the agglutinating languages Turkish, Hungarian and Finnish and in the introflecting Hebrew. These languages differ in various aspects relevant for the acquisition of diminutives and the development of pragmatics in early child language. Diminutive formation often tends to be the first pattern of word formation to emerge. The main reason for this seems to lie in the pragmatic functions of endearment, empathy, and sympathy, which make diminutives particularly appropriate for child-centred communication. A main topic of this book is the relation of emergence and early development between diminutives and other categories of word formation and inflection. The greater degree of morphological productivity and transparency, as well as phonological saliency, favors the use of diminutives. In this case diminutives may facilitate the acquisition of inflection. 04 09 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/475/lald.43.png 04 03 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/475_jpg/9789027253033.jpg 04 03 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/475_tif/9789027253033.tif 06 09 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/1200_front/lald.43.hb.png 07 09 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/125/lald.43.png 25 09 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/1200_back/lald.43.hb.png 27 09 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/3d_web/lald.43.hb.png 10 01 JB code lald.43.01sav 1 12 12 Miscellaneous 1 <TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText textformat="02">Introduction</TitleText> 1 A01 Ineta Savickienė Savickienė, Ineta Ineta Savickienė 2 A01 Wolfgang U. Dressler Dressler, Wolfgang U. Wolfgang U. Dressler 10 01 JB code lald.43.02sav 13 41 29 Chapter 2 <TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText textformat="02">1. Form and meaning of diminutives in Lithuanian child language</TitleText> 1 A01 Ineta Savickienė Savickienė, Ineta Ineta Savickienė 01 The aim of this chapter is to discuss the acquisition of diminutives from a quantitative and qualitative perspective. Diminutives in Lithuanian present an interesting case not only in terms of morphopragmatics (a feature which is shared by Lithuanian as well as other languages), but also from a languagespecific point of view. We suggest that the early and frequent use of diminutives by the Lithuanian child is due to the fact that it facilitates the acquisition of declensional noun endings by restricting the number of paradigm patterns to 3 instead of the traditional 12 declension classes. 10 01 JB code lald.43.03pro 43 72 30 Chapter 3 <TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText textformat="02">2. Diminutives in Russian at the early stages of acquisition</TitleText> 1 A01 Ekaterina Protassova Protassova, Ekaterina Ekaterina Protassova 2 A01 Maria D. Voeikova Voeikova, Maria D. Maria D. Voeikova 01 Two Russian children, a boy and a girl, were observed during the first steps of their use of diminutives. Having a different language proficiency and strategy of learning, the children under observation demonstrated a clear difference in the acquisition of diminutives: the early speaking girl Varja (as well as her mother) shows a high frequency of diminutives already at 1;6, whereas the later speaking Filipp reaches his maximum only about 2;0. It is argued that the most important pragmatic function of consciously used diminutives in cds as well as in cs is the creation of a familiar, personal world. The mothers try to familiarize the children with the surroundings, to make the world good for their children and to stress the relative smallness of the things that surround the children in contrast to those of grown-ups. Such distinctions are, in the Russian world, important both for the instruction and for the emotional comfort of a child. In addition, diminutives play an important role in facilitating the acquisition of case system: in the early phases both children use more indirect case forms of diminutives than of simplex nouns. This may be explained by the fact that diminutives end with similar codas. After children get a good command of using nominal case suffixes, this advantage of diminutives is of no help anymore. 10 01 JB code lald.43.04pal 73 88 16 Chapter 4 <TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText textformat="02">3. The acquisition of diminutives in Croatian</TitleText> 1 A01 Marijan Palmovic Palmovic, Marijan Marijan Palmovic 01 Diminutives are very frequent in Croatian child language; children acquire them before they master many other elements of morphology. A great majority of diminutives used by the child are nouns. Although diminutives phonologically are more difficult than the simplex forms, diminutives make paradigms more transparent and reduce the number of noun classes. In this study the data of one Croatian girl were analyzed. The analysis includes frequencies, oppositions of diminutives and simplex forms, mini-paradigms and a comparison of child’s production and parental input. 10 01 JB code lald.43.05tho 89 123 35 Chapter 5 <TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText textformat="02">4. Diminutives in Greek child language</TitleText> 1 A01 Evangelia Thomadaki Thomadaki, Evangelia Evangelia Thomadaki 2 A01 Ursula Stephany Stephany, Ursula Ursula Stephany 01 In this chapter, the emergence and use of the forms and functions of the most frequent diminutive suffixes occurring in the longitudinal data of a Greek monolingual child from age 1;8 to 3;0 are studied and compared to childdirected speech, which is rich in diminutives and hypocoristics. Furthermore, the distinction between pragmatic and semantic functions of diminutives as compared to simple nouns is explored, focussing on the innovative use of a nonstandard suffix in this particular mother-child dyad. Since diminutives occur in a high number of singular and plural forms both type- and tokenwise from 1;9 on, the relation between derivational and inflectional morphology in early child Greek is discussed. 10 01 JB code lald.43.06noc 125 153 29 Chapter 6 <TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText textformat="02">5. The role of diminutives in the acquisition of Italian morphology</TitleText> 1 A01 Sabrina Noccetti Noccetti, Sabrina Sabrina Noccetti 2 A01 Anna De Marco De Marco, Anna Anna De Marco 3 A01 Livia Tonelli Tonelli, Livia Livia Tonelli 4 A01 Wolfgang U. Dressler Dressler, Wolfgang U. Wolfgang U. Dressler 01 The paper deals with the acquisition of diminutives by four Italian children with three objectives: to highlight parallelisms and differences in input and output data; to contrast the mechanism of item-based learning (cf. Tomasello 2003) to the dual-route model (Clahsen et al. 2003) as regards the acquisition of diminutives; to investigate whether the productive use of diminutives is a simplifying strategy for acquiring the morphology of non-productive, opaque inflectional classes. The analysis of data reveals a common developmental pattern in the children and that the acquisition of diminutive suffixes (especially -<i>ino</i>) can be ascribed to children’s rule extraction. The children, more markedly two of them, use the regular inflection of the diminutives as a strategy to simplify the input data. 10 01 JB code lald.43.07mar 155 181 27 Chapter 7 <TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText textformat="02">6. The acquisition of diminutives in Spanish</TitleText> <Subtitle textformat="02">a useful device</Subtitle> 1 A01 Victoria Marrero Marrero, Victoria Victoria Marrero 2 A01 Carmen Aguirre Aguirre, Carmen Carmen Aguirre 3 A01 María José Albalá Albalá, María José María José Albalá 01 The acquisition of diminutives in Spanish, facilitated by phonoprosodical, morphological and pragmatic means, becomes more than a simple morphopragmatic device to be acquired. We propose that it provides the child with essential cues for grammatical segmentation, which proves very useful in later stages of language development. To test this hypothesis, an analysis of two longitudinal corpora of Spanish L1 has been carried out. Quantitative considerations included type/token ratio in children and cds across ages and word classes; qualitative considerations included a search for the emergence of the first contrast (mini-paradigms). Both perspectives confirm a pattern of a very rapid development and mastery of diminutive formation. Some other aspects, such as morphophonology, suffix selection and spontaneity versus imitation, are also considered. We round up with some considerations regarding the semantics and pragmatics of diminutives in Spanish. 10 01 JB code lald.43.08sou 183 206 24 Chapter 8 <TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText textformat="02">7. A longitudinal study of the acquisition of diminutives in Dutch</TitleText> 1 A01 Agnita Souman Souman, Agnita Agnita Souman 2 A01 Steven Gillis Gillis, Steven Steven Gillis 01 The acquisition of diminutives in the language of three Dutch-speaking children from the Netherlands is described on the basis of longitudinal observational data between the age of 21 and 36 months. It is shown that diminutives occur early, i.e. in the first stage of vocabulary development, and that the frequency of diminutives is high and increases over time. The language of the parents does not shown such a development, but they seem to provide more diminutive lemmas in the first stages of diminutive acquisition. Furthermore, a higher occurrence of diminutives is found in child directed speech than in adult speech. The allomorphs that occur in child directed speech are used with relative similar frequency in child speech, except for certain low frequent ones. 10 01 JB code lald.43.09kor 207 230 24 Chapter 9 <TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText textformat="02">8. Diminutives and hypocoristics in Austrian German (AG)</TitleText> 1 A01 Katharina Korecky-Kröll Korecky-Kröll, Katharina Katharina Korecky-Kröll 2 A01 Wolfgang U. Dressler Dressler, Wolfgang U. Wolfgang U. Dressler 01 This paper intends to show how diminutives emerge in the corpus of two children who acquire a language which has productive diminutive formation, but where diminutives play a minor role due to low frequency; they do not serve as triggers or facilitators in the acquisition of German noun morphology. In addition, we will look into input-dependent inter-individual variation. 10 01 JB code lald.43.10bod 231 262 32 Chapter 10 <TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText textformat="02">9. Acquisition of diminutives in Hungarian</TitleText> 1 A01 Péter Bodor Bodor, Péter Péter Bodor 2 A01 Virág Barcza Barcza, Virág Virág Barcza 01 The chapter presents a longitudinal study on the acquisition of diminutives in Hungarian from the age of two to three. The analysis shows that the two children in the study followed their own particular paths while acquiring diminutive suffixes. Grammatical productivity did not exert an unequivocal effect on the sequence of acquisition: both children started with unproductive suffixes such as <i>-u </i>and -<i>ó</i>, with the productive <i>-kA </i>and the semi-productive <i>-i</i>, whereas the grammatically most productive <i>-cskA </i>was produced later. Our analysis indicates that matching relevant functions to diminutive suffixes is probably a later development: diminutive suffixes did not convey the semantic meaning of “smallness”; a positive emotional evaluation as a pragmatic value of diminutives was not clearly present in the analyzed conversations either. 10 01 JB code lald.43.11laa 263 278 16 Chapter 11 <TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText textformat="02">10. Diminutives in Finnish child-directed and child speech</TitleText> 1 A01 Klaus Laalo Laalo, Klaus Klaus Laalo 01 There are various means to form diminutives in Finnish, for example regular suffixation (e.g. <i>isä </i>‘father’ + <i>i </i>&#62; <i>isi </i>‘daddy’) and modification of the stem possibly combined with suffixation (e.g. <i>kissa </i>‘cat’ &#62; <i>kisu </i>‘pussycat’, <i>maha </i>‘stomach’ &#62; <i>masu </i>‘tummy’). The article first deals with the different types of Finnish diminutives and then examines the diminutives of two Finnish-speaking children. In early child language, a trochaic bias is observed. In diminutive formation, there is a tendency towards transparent inflection: when forming diminutives by stem modification, different morphophonological alternations are eliminated and transparent inflection patterns are favoured. 10 01 JB code lald.43.12ket 279 293 15 Chapter 12 <TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText textformat="02">11. The (scarcity of) diminutives in Turkish child language</TitleText> 1 A01 F. Nihan Ketrez Ketrez, F. Nihan F. Nihan Ketrez 2 A01 Ayhan Aksu-Koç Aksu-Koç, Ayhan Ayhan Aksu-Koç 01 This study reports that diminutive morphology is not one of the early acquisitions in Turkish child speech (1;3–2;0), although the language has a number of productive diminutive morphemes. Similarly the use of hypocoristic forms of nouns is not a typical property of Turkish child speech. We attribute the scarcity of diminutives and hypocoristic forms in child speech to their infrequent use in the input speech and the complexity of the diminutive formation in the language which does not have properties that could facilitate word learning. 10 01 JB code lald.43.13hor 295 317 23 Chapter 13 <TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText textformat="02">12. Acquiring diminutive structures and meanings in Hebrew</TitleText> <Subtitle textformat="02">An experimental study</Subtitle> 1 A01 Anat Hora Hora, Anat Anat Hora 2 A01 Galit Ben-Zvi Ben-Zvi, Galit Galit Ben-Zvi 3 A01 Ronit Levie Levie, Ronit Ronit Levie 4 A01 Dorit Ravid Ravid, Dorit Dorit Ravid 01 The chapter describes an experimental study of the acquisition of derivational diminutives in Hebrew. The study population consisted of 48 children in four age groups: 5–6, 7–8, 10–11, 12–13, and adults. Participants were administered two tasks: an explanation task, and a production task. The learning curves we uncovered begin in kindergarten, with less than one quarter correct productions and about one third correct explanations, and they rise steadily from age 7–8 throughout grade school, especially between ages 9–12. Only from age 12 do Hebrew speakers show that they have mastered the morphological, semantic, pragmatic, and cognitive factors that interact in understanding and producing diminutive forms. Diminutive derivational morphology is thus part of what is termed ‘later language development’, that is, linguistic acquisition during the school years. 10 01 JB code lald.43.14kem 319 342 24 Chapter 14 <TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText textformat="02">13. Diminutives provide multiple benefits for language acquisition</TitleText> 1 A01 Vera Kempe Kempe, Vera Vera Kempe 2 A01 Patricia J. Brooks Brooks, Patricia J. Patricia J. Brooks 3 A01 Steven Gillis Gillis, Steven Steven Gillis 01 This chapter explores the hypothesis that diminutive usage in child-directed speech may provide multiple benefits for language acquisition. We summarize a series of experiments that exposed naïve English-speaking adults to Dutch or Russian diminutives, and tested their ability to isolate words in fluent speech or acquire gender categories. Across studies, adults benefited from exposure to diminutives over their simplex counterparts, supporting the hypothesis that diminutives simplify word segmentation and morphology acquisition, by increasing word-ending invariance, regularizing stress patterns, and decreasing irregularity in morpho-syntactic categories. A similar diminutive advantage is observed in experimental studies of first language acquisition: Preschool children produce fewer gender agreement and case marking errors with diminutives than with simplex nouns across several languages (Russian, Serbian, Polish, Lithuanian). 10 01 JB code lald.43.15sav 343 349 7 Miscellaneous 15 <TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText textformat="02">Conclusions</TitleText> 1 A01 Ineta Savickienė Savickienė, Ineta Ineta Savickienė 2 A01 Wolfgang U. Dressler Dressler, Wolfgang U. Wolfgang U. Dressler 10 01 JB code lald.43.16sub 351 352 2 Miscellaneous 16 <TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText textformat="02">Subject index</TitleText> 02 JBENJAMINS John Benjamins Publishing Company 01 John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam/Philadelphia NL 04 20070118 2007 John Benjamins 02 WORLD 13 15 9789027253033 01 JB 3 John Benjamins e-Platform 03 jbe-platform.com 09 WORLD 21 01 00 120.00 EUR R 01 00 101.00 GBP Z 01 gen 00 180.00 USD S 828005795 03 01 01 JB John Benjamins Publishing Company 01 JB code LALD 43 Hb 15 9789027253033 13 2006052653 BB 01 LALD 02 0925-0123 Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 43 <TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText textformat="02">The Acquisition of Diminutives</TitleText> <TitlePrefix>The </TitlePrefix> <TitleWithoutPrefix textformat="02">Acquisition of Diminutives</TitleWithoutPrefix> <Subtitle textformat="02">A cross-linguistic perspective</Subtitle> 01 lald.43 01 https://benjamins.com 02 https://benjamins.com/catalog/lald.43 1 B01 Ineta Savickienė Savickienė, Ineta Ineta Savickienė Vytautas Magnus University 2 B01 Wolfgang U. Dressler Dressler, Wolfgang U. Wolfgang U. Dressler University of Vienna 01 eng 360 vi 352 LAN009000 v.2006 CF 2 24 JB Subject Scheme LIN.LA Language acquisition 24 JB Subject Scheme LIN.MORPH Morphology 24 JB Subject Scheme LIN.THEOR Theoretical linguistics 06 01 This cross-linguistic volume innovates research of the acquisition of diminutives in the inflecting-fusional languages Lithuanian, Russian, Croatian, Greek, Italian, Spanish, German and Dutch, the agglutinating languages Turkish, Hungarian and Finnish and in the introflecting Hebrew. These languages differ in various aspects relevant for the acquisition of diminutives and the development of pragmatics in early child language. Diminutive formation often tends to be the first pattern of word formation to emerge. The main reason for this seems to lie in the pragmatic functions of endearment, empathy, and sympathy, which make diminutives particularly appropriate for child-centred communication. A main topic of this book is the relation of emergence and early development between diminutives and other categories of word formation and inflection. The greater degree of morphological productivity and transparency, as well as phonological saliency, favors the use of diminutives. In this case diminutives may facilitate the acquisition of inflection. 04 09 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/475/lald.43.png 04 03 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/475_jpg/9789027253033.jpg 04 03 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/475_tif/9789027253033.tif 06 09 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/1200_front/lald.43.hb.png 07 09 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/125/lald.43.png 25 09 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/1200_back/lald.43.hb.png 27 09 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/3d_web/lald.43.hb.png 10 01 JB code lald.43.01sav 1 12 12 Miscellaneous 1 <TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText textformat="02">Introduction</TitleText> 1 A01 Ineta Savickienė Savickienė, Ineta Ineta Savickienė 2 A01 Wolfgang U. Dressler Dressler, Wolfgang U. Wolfgang U. Dressler 10 01 JB code lald.43.02sav 13 41 29 Chapter 2 <TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText textformat="02">1. Form and meaning of diminutives in Lithuanian child language</TitleText> 1 A01 Ineta Savickienė Savickienė, Ineta Ineta Savickienė 01 The aim of this chapter is to discuss the acquisition of diminutives from a quantitative and qualitative perspective. Diminutives in Lithuanian present an interesting case not only in terms of morphopragmatics (a feature which is shared by Lithuanian as well as other languages), but also from a languagespecific point of view. We suggest that the early and frequent use of diminutives by the Lithuanian child is due to the fact that it facilitates the acquisition of declensional noun endings by restricting the number of paradigm patterns to 3 instead of the traditional 12 declension classes. 10 01 JB code lald.43.03pro 43 72 30 Chapter 3 <TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText textformat="02">2. Diminutives in Russian at the early stages of acquisition</TitleText> 1 A01 Ekaterina Protassova Protassova, Ekaterina Ekaterina Protassova 2 A01 Maria D. Voeikova Voeikova, Maria D. Maria D. Voeikova 01 Two Russian children, a boy and a girl, were observed during the first steps of their use of diminutives. Having a different language proficiency and strategy of learning, the children under observation demonstrated a clear difference in the acquisition of diminutives: the early speaking girl Varja (as well as her mother) shows a high frequency of diminutives already at 1;6, whereas the later speaking Filipp reaches his maximum only about 2;0. It is argued that the most important pragmatic function of consciously used diminutives in cds as well as in cs is the creation of a familiar, personal world. The mothers try to familiarize the children with the surroundings, to make the world good for their children and to stress the relative smallness of the things that surround the children in contrast to those of grown-ups. Such distinctions are, in the Russian world, important both for the instruction and for the emotional comfort of a child. In addition, diminutives play an important role in facilitating the acquisition of case system: in the early phases both children use more indirect case forms of diminutives than of simplex nouns. This may be explained by the fact that diminutives end with similar codas. After children get a good command of using nominal case suffixes, this advantage of diminutives is of no help anymore. 10 01 JB code lald.43.04pal 73 88 16 Chapter 4 <TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText textformat="02">3. The acquisition of diminutives in Croatian</TitleText> 1 A01 Marijan Palmovic Palmovic, Marijan Marijan Palmovic 01 Diminutives are very frequent in Croatian child language; children acquire them before they master many other elements of morphology. A great majority of diminutives used by the child are nouns. Although diminutives phonologically are more difficult than the simplex forms, diminutives make paradigms more transparent and reduce the number of noun classes. In this study the data of one Croatian girl were analyzed. The analysis includes frequencies, oppositions of diminutives and simplex forms, mini-paradigms and a comparison of child’s production and parental input. 10 01 JB code lald.43.05tho 89 123 35 Chapter 5 <TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText textformat="02">4. Diminutives in Greek child language</TitleText> 1 A01 Evangelia Thomadaki Thomadaki, Evangelia Evangelia Thomadaki 2 A01 Ursula Stephany Stephany, Ursula Ursula Stephany 01 In this chapter, the emergence and use of the forms and functions of the most frequent diminutive suffixes occurring in the longitudinal data of a Greek monolingual child from age 1;8 to 3;0 are studied and compared to childdirected speech, which is rich in diminutives and hypocoristics. Furthermore, the distinction between pragmatic and semantic functions of diminutives as compared to simple nouns is explored, focussing on the innovative use of a nonstandard suffix in this particular mother-child dyad. Since diminutives occur in a high number of singular and plural forms both type- and tokenwise from 1;9 on, the relation between derivational and inflectional morphology in early child Greek is discussed. 10 01 JB code lald.43.06noc 125 153 29 Chapter 6 <TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText textformat="02">5. The role of diminutives in the acquisition of Italian morphology</TitleText> 1 A01 Sabrina Noccetti Noccetti, Sabrina Sabrina Noccetti 2 A01 Anna De Marco De Marco, Anna Anna De Marco 3 A01 Livia Tonelli Tonelli, Livia Livia Tonelli 4 A01 Wolfgang U. Dressler Dressler, Wolfgang U. Wolfgang U. Dressler 01 The paper deals with the acquisition of diminutives by four Italian children with three objectives: to highlight parallelisms and differences in input and output data; to contrast the mechanism of item-based learning (cf. Tomasello 2003) to the dual-route model (Clahsen et al. 2003) as regards the acquisition of diminutives; to investigate whether the productive use of diminutives is a simplifying strategy for acquiring the morphology of non-productive, opaque inflectional classes. The analysis of data reveals a common developmental pattern in the children and that the acquisition of diminutive suffixes (especially -<i>ino</i>) can be ascribed to children’s rule extraction. The children, more markedly two of them, use the regular inflection of the diminutives as a strategy to simplify the input data. 10 01 JB code lald.43.07mar 155 181 27 Chapter 7 <TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText textformat="02">6. The acquisition of diminutives in Spanish</TitleText> <Subtitle textformat="02">a useful device</Subtitle> 1 A01 Victoria Marrero Marrero, Victoria Victoria Marrero 2 A01 Carmen Aguirre Aguirre, Carmen Carmen Aguirre 3 A01 María José Albalá Albalá, María José María José Albalá 01 The acquisition of diminutives in Spanish, facilitated by phonoprosodical, morphological and pragmatic means, becomes more than a simple morphopragmatic device to be acquired. We propose that it provides the child with essential cues for grammatical segmentation, which proves very useful in later stages of language development. To test this hypothesis, an analysis of two longitudinal corpora of Spanish L1 has been carried out. Quantitative considerations included type/token ratio in children and cds across ages and word classes; qualitative considerations included a search for the emergence of the first contrast (mini-paradigms). Both perspectives confirm a pattern of a very rapid development and mastery of diminutive formation. Some other aspects, such as morphophonology, suffix selection and spontaneity versus imitation, are also considered. We round up with some considerations regarding the semantics and pragmatics of diminutives in Spanish. 10 01 JB code lald.43.08sou 183 206 24 Chapter 8 <TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText textformat="02">7. A longitudinal study of the acquisition of diminutives in Dutch</TitleText> 1 A01 Agnita Souman Souman, Agnita Agnita Souman 2 A01 Steven Gillis Gillis, Steven Steven Gillis 01 The acquisition of diminutives in the language of three Dutch-speaking children from the Netherlands is described on the basis of longitudinal observational data between the age of 21 and 36 months. It is shown that diminutives occur early, i.e. in the first stage of vocabulary development, and that the frequency of diminutives is high and increases over time. The language of the parents does not shown such a development, but they seem to provide more diminutive lemmas in the first stages of diminutive acquisition. Furthermore, a higher occurrence of diminutives is found in child directed speech than in adult speech. The allomorphs that occur in child directed speech are used with relative similar frequency in child speech, except for certain low frequent ones. 10 01 JB code lald.43.09kor 207 230 24 Chapter 9 <TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText textformat="02">8. Diminutives and hypocoristics in Austrian German (AG)</TitleText> 1 A01 Katharina Korecky-Kröll Korecky-Kröll, Katharina Katharina Korecky-Kröll 2 A01 Wolfgang U. Dressler Dressler, Wolfgang U. Wolfgang U. Dressler 01 This paper intends to show how diminutives emerge in the corpus of two children who acquire a language which has productive diminutive formation, but where diminutives play a minor role due to low frequency; they do not serve as triggers or facilitators in the acquisition of German noun morphology. In addition, we will look into input-dependent inter-individual variation. 10 01 JB code lald.43.10bod 231 262 32 Chapter 10 <TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText textformat="02">9. Acquisition of diminutives in Hungarian</TitleText> 1 A01 Péter Bodor Bodor, Péter Péter Bodor 2 A01 Virág Barcza Barcza, Virág Virág Barcza 01 The chapter presents a longitudinal study on the acquisition of diminutives in Hungarian from the age of two to three. The analysis shows that the two children in the study followed their own particular paths while acquiring diminutive suffixes. Grammatical productivity did not exert an unequivocal effect on the sequence of acquisition: both children started with unproductive suffixes such as <i>-u </i>and -<i>ó</i>, with the productive <i>-kA </i>and the semi-productive <i>-i</i>, whereas the grammatically most productive <i>-cskA </i>was produced later. Our analysis indicates that matching relevant functions to diminutive suffixes is probably a later development: diminutive suffixes did not convey the semantic meaning of “smallness”; a positive emotional evaluation as a pragmatic value of diminutives was not clearly present in the analyzed conversations either. 10 01 JB code lald.43.11laa 263 278 16 Chapter 11 <TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText textformat="02">10. Diminutives in Finnish child-directed and child speech</TitleText> 1 A01 Klaus Laalo Laalo, Klaus Klaus Laalo 01 There are various means to form diminutives in Finnish, for example regular suffixation (e.g. <i>isä </i>‘father’ + <i>i </i>&#62; <i>isi </i>‘daddy’) and modification of the stem possibly combined with suffixation (e.g. <i>kissa </i>‘cat’ &#62; <i>kisu </i>‘pussycat’, <i>maha </i>‘stomach’ &#62; <i>masu </i>‘tummy’). The article first deals with the different types of Finnish diminutives and then examines the diminutives of two Finnish-speaking children. In early child language, a trochaic bias is observed. In diminutive formation, there is a tendency towards transparent inflection: when forming diminutives by stem modification, different morphophonological alternations are eliminated and transparent inflection patterns are favoured. 10 01 JB code lald.43.12ket 279 293 15 Chapter 12 <TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText textformat="02">11. The (scarcity of) diminutives in Turkish child language</TitleText> 1 A01 F. Nihan Ketrez Ketrez, F. Nihan F. Nihan Ketrez 2 A01 Ayhan Aksu-Koç Aksu-Koç, Ayhan Ayhan Aksu-Koç 01 This study reports that diminutive morphology is not one of the early acquisitions in Turkish child speech (1;3–2;0), although the language has a number of productive diminutive morphemes. Similarly the use of hypocoristic forms of nouns is not a typical property of Turkish child speech. We attribute the scarcity of diminutives and hypocoristic forms in child speech to their infrequent use in the input speech and the complexity of the diminutive formation in the language which does not have properties that could facilitate word learning. 10 01 JB code lald.43.13hor 295 317 23 Chapter 13 <TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText textformat="02">12. Acquiring diminutive structures and meanings in Hebrew</TitleText> <Subtitle textformat="02">An experimental study</Subtitle> 1 A01 Anat Hora Hora, Anat Anat Hora 2 A01 Galit Ben-Zvi Ben-Zvi, Galit Galit Ben-Zvi 3 A01 Ronit Levie Levie, Ronit Ronit Levie 4 A01 Dorit Ravid Ravid, Dorit Dorit Ravid 01 The chapter describes an experimental study of the acquisition of derivational diminutives in Hebrew. The study population consisted of 48 children in four age groups: 5–6, 7–8, 10–11, 12–13, and adults. Participants were administered two tasks: an explanation task, and a production task. The learning curves we uncovered begin in kindergarten, with less than one quarter correct productions and about one third correct explanations, and they rise steadily from age 7–8 throughout grade school, especially between ages 9–12. Only from age 12 do Hebrew speakers show that they have mastered the morphological, semantic, pragmatic, and cognitive factors that interact in understanding and producing diminutive forms. Diminutive derivational morphology is thus part of what is termed ‘later language development’, that is, linguistic acquisition during the school years. 10 01 JB code lald.43.14kem 319 342 24 Chapter 14 <TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText textformat="02">13. Diminutives provide multiple benefits for language acquisition</TitleText> 1 A01 Vera Kempe Kempe, Vera Vera Kempe 2 A01 Patricia J. Brooks Brooks, Patricia J. Patricia J. Brooks 3 A01 Steven Gillis Gillis, Steven Steven Gillis 01 This chapter explores the hypothesis that diminutive usage in child-directed speech may provide multiple benefits for language acquisition. We summarize a series of experiments that exposed naïve English-speaking adults to Dutch or Russian diminutives, and tested their ability to isolate words in fluent speech or acquire gender categories. Across studies, adults benefited from exposure to diminutives over their simplex counterparts, supporting the hypothesis that diminutives simplify word segmentation and morphology acquisition, by increasing word-ending invariance, regularizing stress patterns, and decreasing irregularity in morpho-syntactic categories. A similar diminutive advantage is observed in experimental studies of first language acquisition: Preschool children produce fewer gender agreement and case marking errors with diminutives than with simplex nouns across several languages (Russian, Serbian, Polish, Lithuanian). 10 01 JB code lald.43.15sav 343 349 7 Miscellaneous 15 <TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText textformat="02">Conclusions</TitleText> 1 A01 Ineta Savickienė Savickienė, Ineta Ineta Savickienė 2 A01 Wolfgang U. Dressler Dressler, Wolfgang U. Wolfgang U. Dressler 10 01 JB code lald.43.16sub 351 352 2 Miscellaneous 16 <TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText textformat="02">Subject index</TitleText> 02 JBENJAMINS John Benjamins Publishing Company 01 John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam/Philadelphia NL 04 20070118 2007 John Benjamins 02 WORLD 01 245 mm 02 164 mm 08 795 gr 01 JB 1 John Benjamins Publishing Company +31 20 6304747 +31 20 6739773 bookorder@benjamins.nl 01 https://benjamins.com 01 WORLD US CA MX 21 29 20 01 02 JB 1 00 120.00 EUR R 02 02 JB 1 00 127.20 EUR R 01 JB 10 bebc +44 1202 712 934 +44 1202 712 913 sales@bebc.co.uk 03 GB 21 20 02 02 JB 1 00 101.00 GBP Z 01 JB 2 John Benjamins North America +1 800 562-5666 +1 703 661-1501 benjamins@presswarehouse.com 01 https://benjamins.com 01 US CA MX 21 20 01 gen 02 JB 1 00 180.00 USD