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A Psycholinguistic Investigation into Diminutive Strategies in the East Franconian NP: Little Schnitzels Stay Big, but Little Crooks Become Nicer
Editors
Title / Series / Name
Journal of Germanic Linguistics
Publication Volume
33
Publication Issue
4
Pages
Authors
Editors
Keywords
Degree
Diminutive
East Franconian
Magnitude
Measurement
Noun phrase
Diminutive
East Franconian
Magnitude
Measurement
Noun phrase
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14018/14008
Abstract
Upper German dialects make heavy use of diminutive strategies, but little is known about the actual conceptual effects of those devices. This paper is the first to present two large-scale psycholinguistic experiments that investigate this issue in East Franconian, a dialect spoken in Bavaria. Franconian uses both the diminutive suffix -la and the quantifying construction a weng a lit. ‘a little bit a’ to modify noun phrases. Our first experiment shows that diminutization has no effect on conceptualization of magnitude: People do not think of a smaller/weaker/shorter etc. referent when the NP is modified by the morphological diminutive, the quantifying construction, or their combination. The second experiment involves gradable NPs and shows that, again, the morphological diminutive has no effect on how people conceptualize the degree to which a gradable nominal predicate holds; in contrast, a weng a reduces it significantly. These experiments suggest that diminutization does not have uniform effects across semantic domains, and our results act as a successful example of extending the avenue of cognitive psychology into dialectology with the active participation of a speaker community.
Topic
Publisher
Place of Publication
Type
Journal article
Date
2021
Language
ISBN
Identifiers
10.1017/S1470542721000052