"Small" talk: the form and function of the diminutive suffix in northern east Cree

Cunningham, Amanda Leigh (2008) "Small" talk: the form and function of the diminutive suffix in northern east Cree. Masters thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

[English] PDF - Accepted Version Available under License - The author retains copyright ownership and moral rights in this thesis. Neither the thesis nor substantial extracts from it may be printed or otherwise reproduced without the author's permission. Download (7MB)

Abstract

Diminutivization is a morphological process that is commonly attested among the world's languages. Though it has been studied in numerous languages belonging to a variety of language families, there has been a limited amount of research conducted on the diminutive in Algonquian. This thesis examines the diminutive suffix in Northern East Cree (NEC), a subdialect of Cree-Montagnais-Naskapi which is a Central Algonquian language spoken in Quebec. Comparisons, where possible, are made with other Algonquian dialects for which there is diminutive data. -- The phonological, semantic, and morphosyntactic properties of the particle, nominal, and verbal diminutive in NEC are described. There is a particular focus on the verbal diminutive, the investigation of which analyzes its distribution by identifying what elements of the sentence (subject, object, and/or verb) it modifies within each of the four Algonquian verb classes. The extent to which the Algonquian diminutive behaves like inflectional morphology is also discussed.

Actions (login required)

View Item