Week of October 9 - Happy Columbus Day!
FoRiM talk
A visitor to our department, Yiyang Guo, will give a talk titled 'Diminutives in Colloquial Beijing Mandarin' in FoRiM this week. Details are as follows:
Title: Diminutives in Colloquial Beijing Mandarin
Time: Fri Oct 13th @ 12 - 1.30pm
Location: Boylston 303
Abstract: This work examines the non-uniform behaviours of the diminutive marker -er in Colloquial Beijing Mandarin. We identify two kinds of -er, one as a word-level modifier and the other as a root-level nominalizing head, in line with the two sets of morphosyntactic parameters proposed by Wiltschko and Steriopolo (2007). Moreover, we advance a set of semantic parameters (i.e., restriction vs. selection) to account for the compatibility with augmentative modifiers and the necessity of diminutive specification for different types of er-diminutives. Our formal analysis of the structure and meaning of er-diminutives further sheds light on semantic bleaching and semantic change, revealing a particular semantic mechanism for grammaticalization.