Resumen de Root and Phrasal Diminutive Markers in Gan Chinese

Xuping Li, Hongyong Liu

• Previous analyses of diminutives made a dichotomy between derivational and inflectional diminutives, and we found that such a distinction does not cover all the possibilities that diminutives may be in world languages. This article presents a case study of two diminutive markers, namely, ‐li and ‐tsiʔ, in Yichun Gan, a Sinitic language. The diminutive marker ‐tsiʔ is typologically significant in being cross‐categorial at the phrasal level. It can be attached to different types of phrases, ranging from noun phrases, classifier phrases, adjective phrases and verb phrases. These two diminutive markers are characterized with distinct distributions and semantic interpretations, based on which, we propose that the diminutive ‐li works at the root level and functions as a root nominalizer, and ‐tsiʔ operates at the phrasal level and is a phrasal diminutive modifier.