Emotionality of the Diminutive: The Relation with the Evaluation, Frequency, Age of Acquisition, Contextual Correlation

Based on the literature analysis and the previous studies' results, this article proves that the inconsistency of the results of the experimental studies of emotional vocabulary cognitive processing is determined by: (1) the heterogeneity of the empirical material, which belongs to emotional vocabulary; (2) the inconsistent differentiation of influence of emotional component and other components of emotional word syncretic semantics; (3) the insufficient differentiation of the emotionality factor and other psycholinguistic factors affecting word cognitive processing: evaluation, contextual correlation, frequency, age of acquisition. The object of consideration in this article is diminutives - a class of derived units, whose main function is to express the emotional-evaluative attitude of the speaker to the subject referred to by a base word. The aim of this article is to identify the correlation of emotional semantics with relevant psycholinguistic parameters: evaluation, contextual correlation, frequency, age of acquisition; identification of the specificity of the correlation parameters of diminutives in comparison with emotional and neutral units of other classes. Diminutives were used as emotional stimuli in the study. They were opposed to the corresponding neutral non-derivative units and groups of words with positive and negative evaluation. 371 stimuli were used. By means of a 7-point Likert scale, the average scores on the parameters of emotion strength, type of evaluation, frequency, typical contexts of use, age of word acquisition were obtained. Thestimuli were analyzed using nonparametric Spearman's correlation coefficient of STATISTICA software package. The correlation of emotional diminutives' semantics with selected psycholinguistic parameters in comparison with other groups of emotional and neutral vocabulary was revealed: a direct functional relationship between the factors "use in conversations with a child/adult" and "use in conversations about a child/adult" (r= 0.919037); the direct correlation between "evaluation" and "use in conversations with a child/adult" (r=0.582941), "age of acquisition" and "use in conversations with a child/adult" (r=0.542309), "emotion" and "reaction speed" (r=0.367116); "frequency" and "use in conversations with a child/adult" (r=0.30620); reverse correlation between "emotion" and "evaluation" (r=-0.520647); "emotion" and "frequency" (r=-0.433067); "emotion" and "use in conversations with a child/adult" (r=-0.467210), "age of acquisition" and "frequency" (r=-0.402450). The analysis of diminutives conducted with the Kruskal-Wallis criterion showed significant differences in diminutives in all the studied parameters in comparison with other groups of emotional and neutral stimuli. These conclusions allow to explain the inconsistency of the results obtained in previous experiments by the influence of adjacent psycholinguistically relevant word parameters, the need to take into account the nature of their correlation in the ongoing psycholinguistic studies.

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