TY - JOUR
T1 - The lexical core of a complex functional affix
T2 - Russian baby diminutive -onok
AU - Gouskova, Maria
AU - Bobaljik, Jonathan David
N1 - Funding Information:
We would like to thank Luke Adamson, Michael Flier, Itamar Kastner, Naomi Lee, and Alec Marantz, the reviewers at NLLT, Daniel Harbour, and the audiences at NYU, Harvard, Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics 30, and Slavic Linguistic Society 16 for helpful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this work.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.
PY - 2022/11
Y1 - 2022/11
N2 - Like other syntactic elements, affixes are sometimes said to be heads or modifiers. In Russian, one suffix,-onok, can be either: as a head, it is a size diminutive denoting baby animals, and as a modifier, it is an evaluative with a dismissive/affectionate flavor. Various grammatical properties of this suffix differ between the two uses: gender, declension class, and interaction with suppletive alternations, both as target and trigger. We explore a reductionist account of these differences: the baby diminutive comprises a lexical morpheme plus a functional nominalizing head, while the evaluative affix is the lexical morpheme alone. We contend that our account is superior to two conceivable alternatives: first, the view that these are homophonous but unrelated affixes, and second, a cartographic alternative, whereby diminutives attach at different levels in a universal structure.
AB - Like other syntactic elements, affixes are sometimes said to be heads or modifiers. In Russian, one suffix,-onok, can be either: as a head, it is a size diminutive denoting baby animals, and as a modifier, it is an evaluative with a dismissive/affectionate flavor. Various grammatical properties of this suffix differ between the two uses: gender, declension class, and interaction with suppletive alternations, both as target and trigger. We explore a reductionist account of these differences: the baby diminutive comprises a lexical morpheme plus a functional nominalizing head, while the evaluative affix is the lexical morpheme alone. We contend that our account is superior to two conceivable alternatives: first, the view that these are homophonous but unrelated affixes, and second, a cartographic alternative, whereby diminutives attach at different levels in a universal structure.
KW - Adjunction
KW - Declension class
KW - Diminutives
KW - Distributed Morphology
KW - Gender
KW - Heads
KW - Modifiers
KW - Morphology
KW - Russian
KW - Suppletion
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U2 - 10.1007/s11049-021-09530-1
DO - 10.1007/s11049-021-09530-1
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85123079462
VL - 40
SP - 1075
EP - 1115
JO - Natural Language and Linguistic Theory
JF - Natural Language and Linguistic Theory
SN - 0167-806X
IS - 4
ER -