Diminutive -let in English

The diminutive suffix -let is generally considered a peripheral phenomenon in English today. The present study deals with the status of this suffix in present-day language, in comparison to its occurrence over the past two hundred years. Differences between British and American English are also considered. Quantitative methods based on large electronic corpora of English are combined with qualitative methods employed to study the use of diminutives in -let in the context of discourse and the social situation they occur in. A special focus is on the communicative functions of diminutives denoting persons in social roles, e.g. wifelet and princelet. Keywords: diminutive suffix, diminutive use, semantic patterns, communicative functions, qualitative and quantitative methods, corpus-based analysis