Diminutives as pioneers of derivational and inflectional development – a cross-linguistic perspective

Although diminutives are commonly viewed as being typical of child speech and childdirected speech, their acquisition has so far neither been studied in a cross-linguistic perspective nor been related to recent theoretical developments in the study of diminutives and of the associated evaluative classes of augmentatives and pejoratives (Dressler & Merlini Barbaresi, 1994, 2001; Jurafsky, 1996). However, the cross-linguistic study of the development of diminutives is apt to shed light on much debated theoretical issues in the acquisition of morphology and on the impact of language typology on acquisition. We expect productivity, morphological transparency and salience in the input language to favour diminutive acquisition, which, in turn, may even facilitate the development of inflectional morphology. Our paper is meant to address these issues based on extensive longitudinal child data from typologically different languages. The data are transcribed and morphologically coded according to CHILDES (MacWhinney, 2000) within the “Cross-linguistic Project on Pre- and Protomorphology in Language Acquisition”. The main languages to be considered in this paper are the Indo-European inflecting-fusional languages Lithuanian, Croatian, Greek and German, as well as the agglutinating languages Turkish and HungarianVytauto Didžiojo universiteta