Abstract:
Diminutive suffixes as the linguistic expression of the universal category of diminutiveness still serve the subject of much debate in Slavic linguistics. Their structure and functioning in Slavic sociolects have not been explored yet. The hypothesis of this research, conducted on the material of modern Russian criminal argot, is the following: the specificity of argot nomination process, the main result of which is emotionally expressive reduplication of literary language words, leads to the appearance of a large number of words with diminutive suffixes in argot vocabulary, which in their composition and functional properties differ from those of literary language.
