SCLC 2012 References Divjak, Dagmar and Stefan Th. Gries. 2006 “Ways of trying in Russian: clustering behavioral profiles“. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 2:1, 23–60. Dostál, Antonín. 1954. Studie o vidovém systému v staroslověnštině. Prague: Státní pedagogické nakladatelství. Gries, Stefan Th. and Dagmar Divjak. 2009. “Behavioral profiles: a corpus-based approach towards cognitive semantic analysis”. Evans, Vyvyan and Stephanie S. Pourcel (eds.), New directions in cognitive linguistics. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 57-75.
Tanja Gradečak –Erdeljić University of Osijek Metaphorical basis of diminutive verbs in Croatian One of the most complex fields of Slavic morphology is the treatment of lexical aspect or aktionsart. This complex morphosemantic category is particularly productive in all Slavic languages which boast very rich derivational morphology and have even been claimed to be the source of a Sprachbund organised around the role of preverbs in the development of aktionsart (Kiefer 2010). In studying the relationship of aktionsart and its treatment of temporal element in the construal of verbal meaning, we found a puzzling discord in contemporary Croatian grammars regarding the position of diminutive meaning of Croatian verbs in the taxonomy of verbal affixes (Barić et al. 2003, Silić and Pranjković 2005). A slightly confusing status of the meaning of diminutive in morphological descriptions of verbal derivational processes resulted from rather opposing distribution of particular verb forms into classes of diminutive or pejorative verbs, with the examples such as moljakati or piskarati having only diminutive meaning assigned to them, where we would intuitively attribute to them a degree of pejorative meaning as well. In order to understand what Silić and Pranjković (2005:151) imply when denoting diminutive verbs as those with the decreased meaning we must take into account the conceptual metaphor CATEGORY CENTRALITY IS SIZE when a decrease in size or the scope of meaning of the verb would imply its peripheral status in reference to the prototypical meaning of the verb. This conceptual metaphor relies on the basic ontological metaphor MORE IS UP and thus GOOD IS UP, but with more intriguing repercussions regarding its relationship to the conceptual metaphor TIME IS SPACE. We shall argue that the decreased duration of the process denoted by a diminutive verb may imply a decrease in the scalar concept of value implied by the vertically positioned spatial scale, so that the resulting parallelism in the smaller amount of time spent in doing the activity indicates a smaller degree of attention and appreciation for the activity. Following Jurafsky's (1998) structured polysemy model we would like to present the ranges of meaning denoted by diminutive affixes arranged around the basic meaning of their evaluative force, particularly in reference to their processual value, i.e. duration and intensity. The aims of the paper are threefold: to elicit a corpus of affixes operative in creating diminutive aktionsart in Croatian by comparing the data in Croatian grammar books (but for the sake of crosslinguistic support also by consulting grammar books and dictionaries of Bosnian, Montenegrin and Serbian). Using the corpus data (Croatian National Corpus and Croatian Language Repository) we want to establish the range of contextual uses when the 18