Morphological combinatorics of folk diminutives in the lullabies of Greek, Serbian and Ukrainian languages

Abstract

The article focuses on morphological models of combinatorics of diminutive suffixes in lullabies in Modern Greek, Serbian and Ukrainian. A method of computer and targeted sampling of folklore diminutives in lullabies in the studied languages was developed.
The "Multi Text Finder" software was adapted for computer and targeted sampling of diminutive suffixes in electronic texts of lullabies in Modern Greek, Serbian and Ukrainian and their search was performed according to the following algorithm: search location (document) was selected; diminutives in each language were loaded to search; words with diminutive suffixes were searched; the automatically selected units that are not the object of the scientific research were sorted out. The advantages of the used computer programme proved to be the following: the ability to search multiple word elements, support of basic document formats (TXT, DOC, RTF, etc.), integration with Windows Explorer, preview of search items, good search speed, user-friendliness.
It was established that adding diminutive suffixes to the stem causes combinatorial morphological changes that occur due to the interaction of phonemes because of their distribution. As a result of the interaction of two adjacent phonemes (stem final and diminutive suffix) one of them may feature changes of: qualitative (accommodation, assimilation, dissimilation) or quantitative (simplification, lengthening and contraction) character. The comparative analysis helped to find out that morphological combinatorial changes are almost uncharacteristic of masculine diminutives in Modern Greek and neuter diminutives in Serbian. As for the feminine gender, combinatorial changes occur in all three languages. In Modern Greek the unique characteristic is the addition, which is a combinatorial morphological change, created by joining the feminine suffix -οπούλ-α and the neuter suffix -άκι to the stem.