Acceso usuarios
Madrid, España
The present study focusses on the Spanish suffixes denoting ‘baby animal’ (‑ato, ‑ezno, ‑ino, ‑ón, ‑ucho, etc.), although it also takes into account the simple substantives belonging to the same lexical field (e.g. potro ‘colt’). Since there are no previous studies which either enumerate or analyse suffixes on this kind, our initial goal is to identify them. In order to do so, we have drawn on the Diccionario de la lengua española (2014), which may be considered the linguistic work containing the greatest number of zoonyms. Then, once the corpus has been established, we describe the characteristics of some suffixes: productivity rate, patterns of formation, receptive bases of the suffixes, nouns which two or three alternative suffixes, relations of synonymy, and potential pragmatic and non-linguistic causes of the lexical diversity and morphological particularities of suffixes.
