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Form And Function Of Expressive Morphology: A Case Study Of Russian, Olga Steriopolo

Russian Language Journal

In this paper, I conduct a detailed case study of expressive suffixes in Russian. Although the suffixes under investigation have the same function (expressive), they differ significantly in their formal properties. I identify two major semantic types of expressive suffixes: attitude suffixes, which convey the speaker’s attitude toward the referent, and size suffixes, which both convey the speaker’s attitude and refer to the size of the referent. I argue that the two different semantic types map onto different syntactic types. Attitude suffixes are syntactic heads, while size suffixes are syntactic modifiers. As heads, attitude suffixes determine the formal properties (syntactic …