In press, Language UNIVERSAL TENDENCIES IN THE SEMANTICS OF THE DIMINUTIVE

Despite the crucial dependence of synchronic meaning on both historical and cog-nitive context, we have traditionally used diierent tools for capturing synchronic and diachronic generalizations in modeling a complex semantic category like the diminutive. In the case of the diminutive, this is partly due to the extraordinary, often contradictory range its senses synchronically (small size, aaection, approximation, intensiication, imitation, female gender), and the diiculty of proposing a coherent historical reconstruction for these senses. In addition, the diminutive often gives rise to second-order predicates which display a seemingly unmotivated similarity, and whose inception is diicult to account for in terms of traditional mechanisms of semantic change. We propose to model the synchronic and diachronic semantics of the diminutive category with a radial category (Lakoo 1987), a type of structured polysemy which explicitly models the diierent senses of the diminutive and the metaphorical and in-ferential relations which bind them. Synchronically, our model explains the varied and contradictory senses of the diminutive, such as its simultaneous use as an approximating and intensifying device. Diachronically, the radial category acts as a kind of archaeology of meaning, capturing the generalizations of the classic mechanisms of semantic change (metaphor, abstraction and inference) as well as a new one: lambda-abstraction, which accounts for the rise of quantiicational meaning and second-order predicates in the diminutive. In addition, the model allows us to propose that the origins of the diminutive crosslinguistically lie in words semantically or pragmatically linked to children. We test the synchronic aspects of our model by considering the semantics of the diminutive in over 60 languages, and the diachronic aspects by examining the origins of the diminutive in many of these, particularly in the case of Indo-European where our origin model allows us to propose a new reconstruction of the proto-semantics of the PIE suux *-ko- .