A Typological-Functional Study of Diminution in the Luri Variety of Khorramabad

Diminution is a cognitive-conceptual process that exists in all languages, through which a core meaning of “smallness” and other connotative meanings are added to a linguistic form. The present research aims to conduct a typological investigation of the different strategies of diminution in the Luri variety of Khorramabad. To this end, based on the views Schneider (2003) and Štekauer et al. (2012), the semantic and pragmatic functions of these diminutive elements were analyzed. Besides by looking at different ways of diminution in the languages of the world, the appropriate language typology for these elements was identified and some differences and similarities of Luri variety with Persian language were enumerated. The research method was descriptive-analytic and the data were collected through interviews and conversations with native speakers of this variety as well as exploring spoken and written texts. The results showed that in addition to the syntactic and semantic diminution strategies, Luri Khorramabadi variety had the four diminutive suffixes "-ula", "-ila", "-ak", " –ča ", two prefixes "tila-", "kola-" and three morphological strategies including “compounding”, “double diminution” and “repetition” were also used. Furthermore, it was found that the "animacy hierarchy" affected not only the diminutive elements joining various bases, but also the meaning construction of the resulting words, such as “smallness”, “similarity”, “accompaniment”, “relation”, as well as other implicit and pragmatic meanings such as “affection”, “contempt”, and “sympathy”. In other words, it was revealed that the “animacy hierarchy” was in parallel with the continuum of various diminution strategies employed in Luri.