Dissertationsprojekt

Diminutiveness in the National Varieties of English

Diminutiveness is a universal category that is present in (almost) all languages of the world. Although there are a lot of works about diminutives in English, very few of them consider the category in the national varieties of English, dealing mostly with some particular aspects of the category (see e.g. Dossena 1998, Simpson 2004, Sussex 2004, Bardsley 2010, Wierzbicka 1985, 1992). There is almost no data on the semantic characteristics of diminutives in the national varieties of English. Just two works on Australian English (Kidd et al. 2011; 2016) study the sociolinguistic specificity of diminutives. Such fragmented and sporadic description of particular aspects of diminutive functioning in a limited number of national varieties seems insufficient for understanding diminutiveness and requires a complex analysis of diverse items representing the category under discussion.

The main research questions of this PhD are therefore as follows:

What are the instances of diminutive variation in the national varieties of English?

Which factors cause variation in the national varieties of English?

What are the attitudes of Australians, New Zealanders and South Africans towards diminutives in the Southern Hemisphere varieties of English?

The data for the study are retrieved from lexicographical sources and the corpora of the national English varieties (GloWbE and ICE), and statistical methods are applied for the data verification. The results of this work will add to the research of the category of diminutiveness in world languages and provide new data on structural peculiarities and special features of the vocabulary of English varieties, and are important for the description of areal features of the national varieties of English.