La sufijacion apreciativa en el espanol de Costa Rica. Análisis formal y estilistico

Abstract

By means of diminutive, augmentative and pejorative suffixes it is possible to convey a wide range of meanings. The purpose of this work consists of presenting an inventory of voices with diminutive, augmentative and pejorative suffixes and observing their forms and productivity in informal conversation. All the suffixed words have been listed, then categorized according to the grammatical function they perform and, lastly, analized according to the different values they convey, considering the context and circumstances in which they were used. The material used for this investigation, consisted of a number of interviews of people from rural areas in Costa Rica, without any formal education or with just basic education, women and men, aged between 17 - 78. The forms with suffixes that have a specialized meaning, different from the root-word, have been presented apart from the other voices, with their meanings collected from different sources. The results of the information that has been gathered, show that -ito is the most common suffix used to express diminutive values, while -ón is the augmentative that has the most occurrences. Some other forms, like -ada, -ísimo (with the meaning of very + adjective), -illo (as diminutive and with a pejorative implication) and -azo (with the idea of a blow, in a literal and a figurative sense) have also been observed with some regular percentage. The number of pejoratives in this linguistic corpus was very low. On the other hand, there were not found many examples with -ico, a suffix which is supposed to be very productive in Costa Rica. Concerning the grammatical categories affected by this kind of suffixes, nouns were the most used, followed by adjectives, adverbs and some past participles acting as adjectives or nouns. The other categories were not affected.