Publication details
Pejoration through diminution : the case of the Italian -ino and the Portuguese -inho
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| Year of publication | 2026 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The morphological expression of pejoration is currently at the center of an intense debate (Finkbeiner, Meibauer & Wiese 2016; Fajardo 2022; Van Goethem, Norde & Masini 2023, Fajardo & Mattiello 2025), which builds on and further develops insights that have emerged over the past three decades in the field of evaluative semantics (Dressler & Merlini Barbaresi 1994, Grandi 2002, Merlini Barbaresi 2004). In particular, the polysemous networks of evaluative suffixes have been represented using radial models, especially for diminutives (Jurafsky 1996, Prieto 2005), augmentatives (Prieto 2005, Mutz 2015) and pejoratives (Mutz 2015). These studies show how different evaluative meanings, even those that appear distant from each other, can coexist within the semantic networks of evaluative suffixes as a result of processes such as metonymy, inference and metaphor. Given that the link between diminution and pejoration has been extensively studied (Jurafsky 1996, Grandi 2002, Prieto 2015), this work focuses on the expression of pejoration through the most productive diminutive suffixes in Italian and in Portuguese, -ino and -inho, respectively, that have received attention by many scholars (e.g., Merlini Barbaresi 2004, Sandmann 1989, Bacheschi 2014, Silva & Lebler 2020, Rio-Torto 2022). Although they are formally and functionally similar, they also differ; for instance, Italian -ino does not express intensification, whereas Portuguese -inho frequently does (Hummel 2015: 1538). While both suffixes may require an interfix for phonological reasons (Maiden 1998: 199; Rainer 2023: 216), the status of -inho and -zinho in Portuguese remains debated: some scholars treat them as allomorphs (e.g., Grandi 2002, Fortin & Rainer 2022, Rio-Torto 2022), while others consider them distinct suffixes due to formal properties (Villalva 2007), sociolinguistic factors (Freitas & Barbosa 2013) or subtle semantic differences (Bacheschi 2014: 142). This poster aims, first, to show that Italian -ino and Portuguese -inho, despite their formal and functional similarity, do not entirely overlap and instead refer to partially different semantic networks, and second, to demonstrate how this partial divergence is reflected in the selection of bases to which each suffix attaches. The study uses two comparable corpora on Sketch Engine (Jakubíček et al. 2013): the itTenTen20 corpus to extract Italian nouns ending in -ino and the ptTenTen23 corpus to extract Portuguese nouns ending in -inho. Subsequently, non-evaluative and lexicalized items were manually excluded from the list of the 1,000 most frequent results, and this procedure was repeated until a minimum frequency of 50 was reached. While examining the frequency list, the concordance lines were inspected to verify a potential pejorative meaning; when attested, a randomised sample of 200 occurrences was extracted for qualitative analysis. In cases with fewer than 200 occurrences, all of them were analysed. This work shows the different levels of productivity of these suffixes following Baayen (2009). Most importantly, it compares the behaviour of -ino and -inho through two semantic maps highlighting areas of convergence and divergence. In addition, it investigates whether Portuguese shows a preference for expressing pejoration using -inho or -zinho. |
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