Publication details
Terminology in and around Diminutives (presentation)
| Authors | |
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| Year of publication | 2018 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | There are basically two possible ways how to form terms: motivated and not motivated. I would like to point out Czech derivatives with (typically) diminutive suffixes functioning as terms (e.g. Czech sloupek for English column, German (Zeitungs)Kolumne) and examine if there is any system in the structures of their counterparts in German and English. Potential regularities could ease the orientation in the terminology of several fields in these languages. The central roles in these issues are played by diminutives. The wide meaning of diminutive seems to be quite controversial because most of the constructs can not or do not convey evaluative meaning - one of the typical features of diminutives. For this paper, I would like to stick to the definition of Czech diminutives which has been proved on several corpus examples Many Czech words with diminutive affixes do not have an evaluative meaning although they are (most precisely, they were) apparent modifications of a base word such as bavlnka (cotton thread) derived from bavlna (cotton). A certain part of these derivatives belong to technical or scientific language. I would like to pick up all such terms from the list of diminutive forms of nouns which were identified as the most frequent in the contemporary written Czech (data of corpus syn, 2010 and InterCorp Czech-German version 7 in Káňa 2016). Further, I present their (non-evaluative) technical meaning and compare it with their German and English counterparts. I assume that most of the German counterparts will be a compound (stolek - Nachttisch) and the most of the English counterparts will be either a simplex (desk) or an attributive phrase (bedside table). This assumption is based on the results of counterparts of Czech “real” diminutives with an evaluative meaning such as dřevíčko: most significant counterparts in German Kleinholz (compound) and in English stick (simplex). Further topics: Czech back-formations used for coining terms in jargons e.g. loupák, limeta in food industry; correlation between the morphological language type and the type of coining terms. All data for this study were gathered from the multi-lingual corpus InterCorp (various versions) and from the Czech National Corpus (syn and syn2015). |