Abstract:
The author considers verb diminution as formative-semantical modification based on the concepts of fragmentation and limitation (ACTION IS /A DYNAMIC/ ENTITY, MANNER OF ACTION IS FORM OF /A DYNAMIC/ ENTITY; DIMINUTION IS FRAGMENTATION OF ENTITY, VERB DIMINUTION IS TEMPORAL AND ACTION FRAGMENTATION OF A MOTIVE VERB ACTION, FRAGMENTATION IS A DECREASE OF /COHERENT/ ENTITY), from which their meanings with rich adverbial inscripts arise.
The results of survey at the Belgrade Faculty of Philology and researching on suffixally formed deverbatives led to the following conclusions: (a) decreased dynamics and intensity of diminutive verbs in most cases relate to temporal segmentation and/or to partial or incomplete performing; (b) the concept of fragmentation is logically linked with diminution, for incoherence of action leads to a conceptualization of verb diminutives as a number of individual acts (fragmentation ^ multiplication ^ intensification decrease); (c) a significant influence on profiling of adverbial set comes from denotative meaning of motive verb and typical active scenario of an action expressed by a diminutive verb, which is not the same in all deverbative diminutives; (d) diminutive verb’s sememe small is adverbal and more amorphous than for other evaluatives for not only many quantifiers are read in it, but also those bringing into the derivatve sematic data for different action modalities; (e) a basical inhibitor of emotional evaluation in
diminutive verbs is a conceptualization of an action as an abstract entity: since the abstract entities have an unlimited extension thus denying the access to HUMAN EMOTIONAL AREA.
However, these ostensible lacks are compensated by diminutive verbs with their variety of adverbial determiners; they provide expressiveness and simultaneous arousing the whole set of attenuators providing the fuzziness and also adjustability of diminutive verbs to different contexts.
