A Psycholinguistic Investigation into Diminutive Strategies in the East Franconian NP: Little Schnitzels Stay Big, but Little Crooks Become Nicer

Upper German dialects make heavy use of diminutive strategies, but little is known about the actual conceptual effects those devices. This paper first to present two large-scale psycholinguistic experiments that investigate this issue in East Franconian, a dialect spoken Bavaria. Franconian uses both suffix -la and quantifying construction weng lit. ‘a bit a’ modify noun phrases. Our experiment shows diminutization has no effect on conceptualization magnitude: People do not think smaller/weaker/shorter etc. referent when NP modified by morphological diminutive, construction, or their combination. The second involves gradable NPs that, again, how people conceptualize degree which nominal predicate holds; contrast, reduces it significantly. These suggest does have uniform across semantic domains, our results act as successful example extending avenue cognitive psychology into dialectology with active participation speaker community.*