Evaluative Morphology and (Mor) phonological Changes in Diminutives and Augmentatives of a Sample of Indo-European, Niger-Congo and Austronesian Languages

Universal #1926 (originally 1932) from Plank and Filimonova’s Universals Archive states that diminutives are characterized in high front vowels and augmentatives in high back vowels (ibid.) Ultan (1978) and Niewenhuis (1985) have extended this observation by the claim that palatal and post-alveolar consonants prevail in diminutives and back consonants are characterized for augmentatives. The cited Universal and the authors indicate that the formal expression of diminutive and augmentative meaning in languages is to a large extent influenced by sound symbolism. However, none of the research in this field (e.g. Bauer, 1996; Štekauer et. al., 2009; Gregová et. al., 2010; Körtvélyessy, 2011) has proved the mentioned universal tendencies. On the other hand, the thorough analysis of evaluative markers in a number of various languages has revealed that diminutive affixes may cause (mor)phonological changes in word stems which are not the part of evaluative morphology. For example, in Russian, the process of palatalization changes the consonant before the diminutive affix, e.g. ptic-a (a bird) > DIM ptič-k-a (a little bird). Consequently, the aim of this paper is to analyse the changes in the word stems of diminutives and augmentatives as the result of neutralization and alternation processes triggered by evaluative morphemes in the sample of languages from Indo-European, Austronesian and Niger-Congo language families.