Being part of nonprotoypical derivation (Dressler 1989), diminutives are characterized by high variation and rivalry in many languages (Dressler et al. 2019), by non-canonical suffix ordering (Kind-er-chen ‘child-PL-DIM’, where the diminutive suffix follows the inflectional suffix, Dressler 1989) as well as by interfaces with other linguistic levels (semantics and pragmatics, Dressler & Merlini Barbaresi 1994) and other lexical and morphological categories, such as hypocoristics (Korecky-Kröll/Dressler 2007) and clippings (Köpcke 2002).
German is an interesting testing ground for diminutive use: There is not only high areal-horizontal variation of different diminutive suffixes in different regions (Seebold 1983), but also high social-vertical variation in different registers of the same region (Korecky-Kröll accepted). Likewise, overall diminutive frequencies in everyday language differ according to the region and register (Elmentaler 2013).
The aim of this contribution is an in-depth analysis of diminutive formation in a rather diminutive-rich part of the German-speaking area (Wrede 1908; Schirmunski 1962/2010), namely Austria with its mostly Bavarian, but also Alemannic dialects. Results are discussed in the framework of Natural Morphology (Dressler et al. 1987), Morphopragmatics (Dressler/Merlini Barbaresi 1994) and the Linguistics Dynamics approach (Schmidt/Herrgen 2011).
Focusing on areal-horizontal and social-vertical variation, we use both experimental production data and natural conversational data. Participants were autochthonous rural adults (men and women) of two age groups (18-35 and 60+) and two educational backgrounds (+/- high school diploma). We used their oral diminutive production data collected in four settings:
A) Experimental settings:
1) elicited “Wenker” translations (DSA 1927-1956; Fleischer 2017) of 147 participants from 13 small rural locations in five dialect regions, from standard to dialect
2) elicited “Wenker” translations of the same 147 participants as in setting 1), from dialect to standard
B) Naturalistic settings:
3) formal interviews with a researcher conducted with 40 adults from five rural locations, one per dialect region (a subgroup of the participants analyzed in A)
4) informal peer conversations conducted with the same 40 adults analyzed in 3).
Results show higher frequencies of particularly non-standard diminutives in informal conversation, whereas the formal interviews contain fewer diminutives in general, but more standard-like diminutive forms. Experiments were useful to capture some rare diminutives (particularly diminutive plurals) that could not be found in the naturalistic data. Nevertheless, we find high rates of diminutive refusal in the translation experiments (1/3 of diminutive stimuli were realized as simplex nouns) because participants considered pragmatically loaded diminutives as inappropriate in this artificial setting. However, there is significant areal variation, i.e. lower rates of diminutive refusal in the Southwest than in the Northeast of Austria. This overall higher diminutive-friendliness of Southern Bavarian and Alemannic dialects compared to Central Bavarian was also found in the naturalistic settings.
Overall, our multi-method approach turned out to be an adequate procedure to gain sufficient data on areal-horizontal and social-vertical variation of the moderately frequent morphological phenomenon of diminutive formation in German in Austria.