On the grammaticalization of CHILD: The case of Hungarian fia 'son', fióka 'nestling' and fiók 'drawer'?

The lexeme child tends to become grammaticalized in languages of the world, and in this process, it serves as Source for three main Targets: 1) classifier, 2) diminutive and 3) partitive (Heine & Kuteva 2004). This paper intends to examine whether these cross-linguistically frequent grammaticali...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Argumentum 2019-01, Vol.15, p.252-263
Main Author: Hegedus, Irén
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Classifiers
Diminutives and augmentatives
Etymology
Gender
Grammaticalization
Hungarian language
Lexicon
Semantic categories
Semantics
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Summary:The lexeme child tends to become grammaticalized in languages of the world, and in this process, it serves as Source for three main Targets: 1) classifier, 2) diminutive and 3) partitive (Heine & Kuteva 2004). This paper intends to examine whether these cross-linguistically frequent grammaticalization patterns are reflected in Hungarian. By analysing the etymological development of the lexeme fia 'son' and its derivatives, I argue that the Hungarian data a) fit into the established grammaticalization patterns; b) reflect the semantic shifts represented in the radial category model (Jurafsky 1996). The investigation highlights the etymological connection between the Hungarian lexemes fia 'son', fióka 'nestling' and fiók 'drawer', which is no longer transparent for the native speakers.
ISSN:1787-3606
1787-3606