Spanish and Italian Diminutives Compared: Two Alternatives of a Single Diasystem

Abstract

The relexification of diminutives has been one of the most productive ways to create new words in the Romance languages. The phenomenon is defined as the historical reanalysis of a lexical item composed of root plus diminutive suffix, whereby the original semantic value of the suffix is bleached over time and its combined form is subsequently reanalyzed as part of a new single morphological root carrying new meaning. This study provides a quantitative lexicographic analysis of the entirety of diminutives that have relexified in the history of Italian. When compared to results for Spanish by Ryan and Parra-Guinaldo (2016), data of this study suggest that Italian followed a very different trajectory of diminutive relexification from Latin than that for Spanish. Specifically, Italian appears to have developed a preference for the alternate ad hoc diminutive suffixes -ino/a and -etto/a (based on non-diminutive Latin forms) at a much earlier period than did Spanish, allowing for greater absorption and the time necessary for relexification. Contrastively, lexicographic data for Spanish suggest that Spanish instead continued to favor reflexes of the original Latin diminutive suffixes. The reasons proposed for this divergence is the relatively early colonization of the Iberian Peninsula and continued preference for traditional Latin diminutive endings over innovative endings that were being adopted Empire-wide, beyond Castile, including other regions of Hispania Keywords: morphology, lexicon, diminutives, Italian, Spanish