Cognitive Conceptualization in the Russian Diminutives Referring to ‘Wind’, Ветерок, ‘Rain’, Дождик, and ‘Snow’, Снежок: A Corpus Analysis Conducted Through R

The contribution investigates the cognitive conceptualization of the Russian diminutives referring to ‘wind’ (ветерок), ‘rain’ (дождик), and ‘snow’ (снежок), adopting a cognitive linguistic approach primarily grounded in Langacker (1999) and Taylor (2003). According to this perspective, while diminutive morphemes are commonly assumed to indicate the small size of an entity, they also convey various other meanings, such as an affectionate attitude expressed by the speaker or, conversely, a sense of diminished value. Diminutive morphemes can therefore be regarded as inherently polysemous. On this basis, a corpus-based analysis conducted using R examines the distribution and semantic behaviour of ветерок, дождик, and снежок, which belong to the same semantic field. This allows for a controlled comparison of potentially privileged meanings, as well as salient similarities and differences in their contextual usage. The study draws on a set of 300 occurrences each of the three diminutives extracted from the Russian National Corpus and provides a semantic annotation of each instance (primarily drawing on Taylor 2003). The analysis aims to investigate whether diminutive meanings can be understood as emerging from the interaction between different parameters, in particular morphological inflection and syntactic function, within different usage contexts. The analyses conducted and the subsequent comparisons among the three diminutives, although not providing definitive results regarding the correlation between meanings and the other parameters, nevertheless proves insightful by revealing tendencies that support the existence of such correlations.