Diminutive and Nominal Aspect in Spanish

Abstract

This paper addresses the issue of diminutives in Spanish and how the nominal aspect influences their formation as well as the values they can assume. The analysis provides evidence that Spanish has two resources to create a diminutive from a noun; first, the suffix -it, called morphological, which can be applied to any kind of name and can be used to diminish concrete countable nouns both objectively and subjectively; while the second, the morphosyntactic resource, which adds the same suffix to the nominal head of a bounded phrase —a characteristic of mass nouns—, is more flexible concerning the semantic effects it can produce.