Publication details
Cattivi suffissi : La peggiorazione morfologica in siciliano antico
| Title in English | Bad suffixes : Morphological Pejoration in Old Sicilian |
|---|---|
| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | Études romanes de Brno |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| web | https://journals.phil.muni.cz/erb/article/view/39930 |
| Doi | http://dx.doi.org/10.5817/ERB2024-3-7 |
| Keywords | evaluative morphology; suffixation; pejoration; category construction; Old Sicilian |
| Attached files | |
| Description | The article describes some aspects of the evaluative morphology of Old Sicilian (14th–16th centuries), with a focus on suffixes that encode a pejorative meaning. Based on a survey of the ARTESIA corpus, we draw the semantic network of three suffixes inherited, as in other Romance languages, from Latin: -azzu, -a (< Lat. aceus; cf. acquazza ‘dirty water’), -astru, -a (< Lat. -aster; cf. figliastru ‘stepson’) and -uni, -a (< Lat. -(i)o; cf. tuvagliuni ‘rough tablecloth’). We adopted a semantic-pragmatic theoretical background, which allows us to describe the pejorative sense and, more generally, evaluative meanings as a strategy to indicate first of all a certain degree of deviation from a standard defined within a linguistic community. In this sense, evaluation is essentially a tool for organising linguistic categories in prototypical terms, that is, as having a centre and a periphery, in which increasingly marginal examples are placed. |
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