Diminutives in Yangxin Gan

Abstract

Diminutives, long an area of interest for researchers in phonology and morphology, are typically formed by the suffixation of a diminutive affix onto a root word and denote the smallness or youthfulness of whatever is referred to. In Yangxin Gan, a dialect of Gan spoken in southern Hubei, China, diminutive forms are highly variable. They may be formed by the addition of a diminutive morpheme, the insertion of a high-rising tone, insertion of a nasal or change in vowel quality. The latter three processes may simultaneously apply in cases where the diminutive is monosyllabic, in which case a high-rising tone is obligatory, although the phonological realization of the nasal and nucleus is variable. While these sound change processes are seemingly unpredictable, this paper seeks to account for them through an Optimality Theory analysis in which feature spreading is partially determined by the underlying feature specification of vowels and partially by language-specific constraint rankings. Outlier examples are suggested to present evidence of contrast preservation and different diminutive forms are argued to be different phonological realizations of a single diminutive morpheme.