Attenuation and Intensification in Modern Greek verbs
Angeliki Efthymiou
Democritus University of Thrace
[email protected]
Evaluative morphology prototypically refers to diminutive, augmentative, endearing, and
pejorative morphemes. It has been widely investigated from many perspectives, with
emphasis lying on the question of its position in grammar (Scalise 1984, Stump 1993,
Melissaropoulou & Ralli 2008), as well as its semantic properties (Jurafsky 1996, Grandi
2005, 2009, Fortin 2011, Körtvelyessy 2014), its structural characteristics (Grandi &
Montermini 2005, Melissaropoulou & Ralli 2008), and its expression cross-linguistically
(Bauer 1997, Dressler & Merlini-Barbaresi 1994, Grandi & Montermini 2005, Štekauer at al
2012). While this turn of interest has yielded a number of interesting publications dealing
with various aspects of evaluative morphology, there are still many not yet resolved issues
concerning diminutives and augmentatives, including, inter alia, a) the range of evaluative
morphology in terms of semantics (diminutives, augmentatives, pejoratives, amelioratives,
hypocoristics, attenuation, intensification, iterativity, etc.) and b) the relationship between
evaluative morphology and the main grammatical categories. Furthermore, whereas nominal
diminutives are relatively well described in many languages, little attention has been given to
diminutive and intensified verbs so far, with the exception of a few in-depth analyses, which
focus on special topics (see e.g. Weidhaas & Schmid 2015, Amiot & Stosic 2014, Katunar
2013, Savvidou 2012, Grandi 2009, Dimela & Melissaropoulou 2009, Xydopoulos 2009,
Babiniotis 1969, Author 2003).
This paper aims at a) examing the semantic and pragmatic characteristics of Modern Greek
deverbal evaluative verbs (e.g. kutsovlépo ‘see poorly’, pseftoδjavázo ‘to study halfheartedly’, psilovíxo ‘cough lightly’, kakocimáme ‘to sleep poorly’, misocimáme ‘to be halfasleep’ − paracimáme ‘to oversleep’, iperfortóno ‘to overload’, katacéo ‘to burn all over’,
apokseréno ‘to dry completely’, ksekuféno ‘to make somebody completely deaf’) and b)
discussing the asymmetry in the distribution of prefixes and prefixoids in the expression of
diminution (i.e. attenuation) and intensification. More specifically it will be shown that
Modern Greek evaluative prefixes and prefixoids express various values, such as attenuation
(psilovíxo ‘cough lightly’), action which is performed with less effort than expected (e.g.
pseftoδjavázo ‘to study half-heartedly’), excess (e.g. paracimáme ‘to oversleep’),
completeness (katacéo ‘to burn all over’), etc. Furthermore, I will demonstrate that that not
all meanings are equally possible for all Greek evaluative morphemes under investigation and
that each evaluative morpheme relates to its base in a more or less idiosyncratic way (e.g.
para- is usually found in the meaning of excess with [+/- learned] bases, denoting
subjectivity, while iper- mostly with [+ learned] bases and terminology; cf. Author 2003,
Gavriilidou 2013). Moreover, it will be shown that the meaning of attenuation is (almost)
always expressed by prefixoids (e.g. kako- ‘bad’, kutso- ‘lame’, miso- ‘half’, psefto- ‘pseudo’,
psilo- ‘fine’), whereas the meaning of intensification is (almost) always expressed by
prepositional prefixes expressing the transgression of a limit (e.g. iper- ‘above, over,
beyond’, para- ‘close to’, beyond’, apo- ‘away from’). The findings of this study are
exemplified by reference to ca. 200 deverbal evaluative verbs, collected from two Modern
Greek dictionaries (Triandafyllidis 1998; Babiniotis 2002).
References
Amiot, Dany, and Stosic, Dejan. 2004. When evaluative morphology, pluractionality and
aspect get tangled up: a case study of French suffixed verbs. In Gavriilidou, Z. &
Revithiadou, A. (eds.), Mélanges offerts à Anna Anastassiades-Syméonides. Kavala: Saita
Publishers, 16-33.
Author, 2003. Prefixes and first constituents denoting intensity in Modern Greek. Studies in
Greek Linguistics 23. 519‒528. [in Greek]
Babiniotis, Georgios. 1969. Diminution and compounding. Ph.D. Thesis. Athens: University
of Athens. [in Greek]
Bauer, Laurie. 1997. Evaluative morphology: In search of universals. In Studies in Language
21.3, 533-575.
Dimela, Eleonora, and Melissaropoulou, Dimitra. 2009. On prefix like adverbs in Modern
Greek. Patras Working Papers in Linguistics. Vol 1, 59-71.
Dressler, Wolfgang, and Merlini-Barbarese Lavinia. 1994. Morphopragmatics: Diminutives
and Intensifiers in Italian, German and Other languages. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Fortin, Antonio. 2011. The Morphology and Semantics of Expressive Affixes. Ph.D. Thesis.
Lady Margaret Hall: University of Oxford.
Gavriilidou, Zoe. 2013. Aspects of intensity in Modern Greek. Thessaloniki: Kiriakidis. [in
Greek]
Grandi, Nicola. 2005. Sardinian evaluative morphology in typological perspective. In Putzu,
I. (ed.), Sardinian in Typological Perspective. Bochum. Dr. Brockmeyer University Press,
188-209.
Grandi, Nicola, and Montermini, Fabio. 2005. Prefix-suffix neutrality in evaluative
morphology, in Booij, G., et al. (eds.), Proceedings of the 4th Mediterranean Meeting of
Morphology. Available at: http://mmm.lingue.unibo.it/mmm-proc/MMM4/143-156Grandi-Montermini-MMM4.pdf.
Grandi Nicola. 2009. Restrictions on Italian verbal evaluative suffixes: The role of aspect and
actionality. York Papers in Linguistics. Series 2: 46 - 66.
Jurafsky, Daniel. 1996. Universal tendencies in the semantics of the diminutive. Language
1996, vol. 72.3, 522-578.
Katunar, Daniela. 2013. Diminutives in Action: A cognitive account of diminutive verbs and
their suffixes in Croatian. Suvremena Lingvistika 39. Issue 75, 1–23.
Kortvelyessy, Livia. 2014. Evaluative derivation. In R. Lieber, P. Stekauer (eds.), The Oxford
Handbook of Derivational Morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 296-316.
Melissaropoulou, Dimitra, and Ralli, Angeliki. 2008. Headedness in diminutive formation:
Evidence from Modern Greek and its dialectal variation. Acta Linguistica Hungarica
2008, vol. 55, 183-204.
Savvidou, Paraskevi. 2012. Mitigation and intensification with the use of the morphemes
θeo- and psilo-. A corpus-based analysis. In Z, Gavriilidou et al. (eds.), Selected Papers of
the 10th International Conference of Greek Linguistics. Komotini, Greece: Democritus
University of Thrace, 2012, pp. 1090-1099. [in Greek]
Scalise, Sergio. 1984. Generative Morphology. Dordrecht: Foris.
Stekauer, Pavol, Valera, Salvador, and Kortverlyessy, Lívia. 2012. Word-Formation in the
World’s Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stump, Gregory. 1993. How Peculiar is Evaluative Morphology? In Journal of Linguistics
1993, vol. 29, 1-36.
Weidhass, Thomas, and Hans-Jörg Schmid. 2015. Diminutive verbs in German: semantic
analysis and theoretical implications. Morphology, vol. 25/2, 183-227.
Xydopoulos, Georgios. J. 2009. Psilo-: Exploring the case of a ‘diminutive’ in Modern
Greek. In Tsangalidis, A. (ed.) Selected Papers from the 18th International Symposium of
Theoretical and Applied Linguistics. Thessaloniki: Monochromia, 397-405.