Potential of diminutive formation in contemporary Czech (on material of everyday speech of youth) Potential of diminutive formation in contemporary Czech (on material of everyday speech of youth) Potential of diminutive formation in contemporary Czech (on material of everyday speech of youth) Potential of diminutive formation in contemporary Czech (on material of everyday speech of youth) Potential of diminutive formation in contemporary Czech (on material of everyday speech of youth)
Abstract
The paper deals with occurrence and functions of diminutives (mainly nominal) in the vocabulary of young people from the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. The analysed material is excerpted from the dictionary Slova v soukromých dopisech.
Lexikografická sonda (Hladká, Z. - Martincová, O., Brno 2012), obtaining 800 entries and based on hundred of hand-written private letters by people up to the age of 30 years. Diminutives are analysed as for their word-formation structure and pragmatic, stylistic and lexical functions in the text.
With respect to the fact that this is private correspondence and marked lexical items, diminutives show variability and obvious expression of emotional and evaluative attitudes of writers (there is a number of pragmatic diminutives such as albíčko, brigádička, čajík, dopísek, jídélko).Following linguistic works on Czech diminutives, the paper aims at covering a particular language sphere by means of language corpora (KSK-dopisy; http://ucnk.ff.cuni.cz).