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14 - Evaluative Suffixes

from Part Three - Morphology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2022

By
Antonio Fortin  and
Franz Rainer
Edited by
Adam Ledgeway  and
Martin Maiden
Adam Ledgeway
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Martin Maiden
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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Summary

This chapter presents Romance evaluative suffixation not as a cabinet of curiosities but as a set of linguistic data with potentially important consequences for linguistic theorizing. The impact on linguistic theorizing that one is prepared to grant to these data depends on whether Romance evaluative suffixation is considered plain or expressive morphology. In the first part of the chapter, we conclude that it has greater affinities with the latter and counterexamples against supposed linguistic universals drawn from Romance evaluative morphology therefore should not be overrated. In the second part, an account of the semantic and pragmatic meaning of evaluative suffixation in the framework of Potts’s two-tiered semantics is shown to predict some of the seemingly abnormal behaviour of evaluative suffixes, such as their iterability when used in pragmatic function. In the third part, we present data from child-directed speech and dialects from Romania to Brazil that show evaluative suffixation outside verbal inflexion. This order of affixes is problematic for some theories that postulate a strict order of components in grammar, but we argue that it complies with deep principles underlying affix order in natural languages if one takes into account the peculiar affective-pragmatic use of diminutives as ‘sentence diminutives’ in some Romance varieties.

Keywords

Romanceexpressive morphologyevaluativesmultidimensional semanticsderivation outside inflexion
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Romance Linguistics , pp. 434 - 458
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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References

Selected References

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Napoli, D. J., and Reynolds, B. (1995). ‘Evaluative affixes in Italian’. In Booij, G. and van Marle, J. (eds), Yearbook of Morphology 1994. Dordrecht: Springer, 151–78.Google Scholar
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