caa a22 4500 378890700 CHVBK 20180305123454.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161128e20041124xx s 000 0 eng 10.1515/iprg.2004.1.2.249 doi (NATIONALLICENCE)gruyter-10.1515/iprg.2004.1.2.249 Travis Catherine E. The ethnopragmatics of the diminutive in conversational Colombian Spanish [Elektronische Daten] [Catherine E. Travis] This paper considers the cultural values manifested in the use of the diminutive suffix -ito/-ita in a corpus of conversational Colombian Spanish. It will be demonstrated that this suffix is highly frequent (occurring approximately 600 times in the 70,000-word corpus), and that from its core uses in relation to children and expressing small size it has taken on the pragmatic functions of expressing affection, hedging speech acts and expressing contempt. Wierzbicka (1992) has shown that the frequent use of the diminutive in languages such as Russian and Polish plays a valuable role in realizing the cultural goal of the expression of good feelings towards others. The same can be said of its use in Colombian Spanish, but analysis of the diminutive in conversation reveals that it goes beyond this to realize a range of essential cultural ideals in interaction. Based on a semantic analysis of some of the central uses of the diminutive, I propose a set of cultural scripts to capture the role played by the diminutive in a variety of speech events, scripts which form an important part of the basis for interaction in Colombian society. © Walter de Gruyter Sociolinguistics nationallicence Social groups & communities nationallicence Anthropology nationallicence cultural scripts nationallicence diminutive nationallicence Spanish nationallicence ethnopragmatics nationallicence speech acts nationallicence mitigation nationallicence Intercultural Pragmatics Walter de Gruyter 1/2(2004-11-24), 249-274 1612-295X 1:2<249 2004 1 iprg https://doi.org/10.1515/iprg.2004.1.2.249 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1515/iprg.2004.1.2.249 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Travis Catherine E. NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Intercultural Pragmatics Walter de Gruyter 1/2(2004-11-24), 249-274 1612-295X 1:2<249 2004 1 iprg CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-gruyter