Jesus' response to the Syrophoenician woman in Mark 7.27 is sometimes seen as sexist, racist, or abusive. The force of his response depends in part on the diminutive form κυναριον, which is often dismissed as a faded diminutive that lacks true force. But a statistical, semantic, and contextual analysis of the word indicates that it does, in fact, have diminutive force in Mark 7:27. Because of this, the pejorative force found in direct insults employing the word ‘dog’ is lacking in Jesus' response. In addition to failing to recognise the diminutive force of κυναριον, interpreters sometimes assume a social context in which Jews routinely referred to Gentiles as dogs. Finally, the analogy that Jesus makes is often read allegorically, assuming that ‘children’ and ‘dogs’ have direct counterparts in ‘Jews’ and ‘Gentiles’. These assumptions are found to be dubious. The point of Jesus' analogy is about the proper order of events: children eat before the puppies; Jews receive the benefits of his ministry before Gentiles. The Syrophoenician woman outwits Jesus by arguing that the puppies may eat simultaneously with the children. The interpretive upshot is that Jesus' saying is unlikely to be misogynistic or abusive, but simply asserts Jewish priority, a priority that admits of exceptions and change.

This paper aims to investigate the usage and frequency of what we refer to as K-suffixes in Classical New Persian of the ninth to thirteenth centuries, Contemporary Written Persian of the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, and Contemporary Spoken Persian. It shows that K-suffixes are most likely to be the reflexes of earlier evaluative morphemes, traditionally called “diminutives,” and are characterized by a high degree of multifunctionality. While evaluative functions continue to dominate in the Classical New Persian works, they have largely been lost in contemporary spoken Persian, and the suffix is now systematically used to express definiteness. The development of the K-suffix as a definiteness marker in contemporary colloquial Persian appears to be innovative, and is mainly dependent on genre, speaker, and speech situation.

Data for Classical New Persian is taken from critical editions of works from the ninth to thirteenth centuries. The data for Contemporary Written Persian comes from comprehensive books of fiction from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, and for Contemporary Spoken Persian from an extensive corpus of spoken Persian narratives and a questionnaire answered by fifteen speakers. The results suggest that evaluative morphology can develop into definiteness marking, with the development passing through a stage of combination with a deictic marker.

This paper concludes that the development of definiteness marking can proceed down a new pathway that is different from the one normally assumed for demonstrative-based definite marking, though the endpoint may be similar. The study contributes the second detailed documentation of this process for any Iranian language, and one of the few well-documented cases of a non-demonstrative origin of definiteness marking worldwide.

This paper investigates the usage and frequency of what is referred to as K-suffixes in three Balochi dialects, namely Koroshi, Coastal and Sistani Balochi. It shows that K-suffixes are most likely the reflexes of earlier evaluative morphology, traditionally termed “diminutives,” and are characterized by a high degree of multi-functionality. While in Coastal and Sistani Balochi evaluative functions continue to dominate, they have been largely lost in Koroshi Balochi, and the suffix is now used to indicate definiteness. The development appears to have been spearheaded by female speakers, and its frequency is also dependent on genre and speech situation. Data is taken from an extensive corpus of spoken Balochi narratives and from a questionnaire with thirty-six speakers. The results suggest that evaluative morphology can develop into definiteness marking, with the development passing over a stage of combination with deictic markers. The paper concludes that the development of definiteness marking can proceed down a pathway that is distinct from the one normally assumed for demonstrative-based definite marking, though the endpoint may be similar. This is the first detailed documentation of this process for any Iranian language, and one of the few well-documented cases of a non-demonstrative origin of definiteness marking worldwide.

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.*

In this article, we discuss the ei litta construction in Norwegian, a construction that involves the use of feminine morphology combined with non-feminine nouns, and expresses evaluation. Through corpus analyses and an online survey, we investigate the form and function of the construction, synchronically and diachronically. We discuss the emergence of the ei litta construction in the light of a larger restructuring of the Norwegian gender system, possibly allowing for greater flexibility in the assignment of gender. We also describe the ei litta construction as an example of gender shift, a previously unattested morphological strategy in Norwegian to express evaluative meaning.