ON THE CATEGORY OF DIMINUTIVENESS IN ENGLISH, RUSSIAN AND BULGARIAN

Bagasheva-Koleva M. S.

Bagasheva-Koleva M. S. PhD, South-West University “Neofit Rilski”

Keywords: diminutive forms, diminutive formation, patterns of diminutive meaning, English, Russian, Bulgarian

Abstract

In my paper I will present the results of the research I made for my doctoral thesis based on the formation and usage of diminutive forms in English, Russian and Bulgarian. I have made a contrastive analysis of the means of diminutive expression and the frequency of usage of the patterns of diminutive meaning in the three studied languages. Due to the extensive length of my research, I will focus on the four most frequent diminutive patterns in English, Russian and Bulgarian. The contrastive analysis of the differences and similarities of diminutive formation in English, Russian and Bulgarian is based on the theoretical framework of James (1980) and Danchev (2001). For the purposes of my contrastive analysis I chose English as a source language and Russian and Bulgarian as target languages. The reason to do this is that English is considered as a language which has very few diminutives, whereas Bulgarian and Russian, as Slavic languages, both have a huge number of diminutive forms. My aim was to investigate and analyze the quantity of diminutive forms in a language in which diminutives are rather limited and languages which are rich in various diminutive forms. I have used statistical methods to calculate the frequency of appearance of diminutive forms in English, Russian and Bulgarian. The conclusions I arrived at are based on my research data.

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