On appereciative suffixes

Author: Gràcia Lluisa   Turon Lídia  

Publisher: Akademiai Kiado

ISSN: 1216-8076

Source: Acta Linguistica Hungarica, Vol.47, Iss.1-4, 2000-09, pp. : 231-248

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Abstract

In this paper we demonstrate that appreciative suffixes (AS) in Catalan, as well as in other Romance languages, belong to a single group of affixes, independently of the lexical root that they adjoin to. We focus our attention on the semantics of nouns and adjectives that contain an AS. We justify the apparent diÿerences among the derived words by proposing that the AS acts as a modifier of some features of the lexical conceptual structure of the root. We assume Jackendos proposal (1990; 1991) for nouns, and we extend the features (bounded and individual) as well as the dimensional feature to adjectives. Only roots containing a [+b] feature will be able to be modified by an AS.