3 Diminutive or singulative? The suffixes -in and -k in Russian
Olga E. Kagan, Silva Nurmio · 2023
This paper investigates the semantics and distribution of two Russian suffixes, -in and -k, each of which has been treated both as singulative and diminutive. However, we argue that -in is singulative and -k diminutive. -in systematically applies to mass nouns and creates count ones with the meaning “a natural unit of N”, where the nature of the unit is lexically fixed and based on our conceptualization of the entity denoted by the stem. We propose that -in is a standardized partition operator ΠNU of type ≪e,t>,