On the Word Formation of the Diminutive in the Kajkavian Dialect

Abstract

This paper gives an analysis and overview of the diminutive word formation system in the Kajkavian dialect group. An analysis has been carried out using examples from published descriptions of local dialects, Kajkavian dictionaries, and the author’s own corpus collected during fieldwork. The word formation analysis is synchronically based, while some historical linguistic remarks are added for clasification. The paper cites all affirmed suffixes from the corpus that form diminutives of masculine, feminine, and neuter nouns. For each of the formation categories, the author describes the phonological changes occurring at the boundary between the root and the suffix.

Keywords

• Kajkavian dialect group
• Croatian language
• word formation
• diminutives