Diminutives in the Internet Language Bachelor’S Diploma Thesis

Masaryk University Faculty of Arts

Department of English and American Studies

English Language and Literature

Rebeka Hrubšová

Diminutives in the Internet Language Bachelor’s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: doc. PhDr. Naděžda Kudrnáčová, CSc.

2017

I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

…………………………………………….. Author’s signature

Table of Contents 1. Introduction and Morphology ...... 1 2. Diminutives in the English Language ...... 4 2.1.Morphology ...... 5 2.1.1. Suffixation ...... 6 2.1.2. Prefixation ...... 8 2.1.3. Reduplication ...... 8 2.1.4. Compounding ...... 9 2.1.5. Truncation ...... 9 2.1.6. Inflectional Affixation ...... 9 2.1.7. Periphrastic Constructions ...... 10 2.2.Semantics ...... 11 3. The Internet Language ...... 12 3.1.The Virtual Environments ...... 13 3.1.1. Tumblr ...... 13 3.1.2. Twitter ...... 16 3.1.3. Reddit ...... 16 3.1.4. Facebook ...... 17 3.2.The Internet Culture ...... 18 4. Diminutives in the Internet Language ...... 20 4.1.DoggoLingo ...... 20 4.1.1. Doggo, Suffixation with -o ...... 22 4.1.2. Pupper, Suffixation with -er ...... 24 4.1.3. Pupperino, Gradable Diminution ...... 28 4.1.4. Bork, Onomatopoetic Introflection ...... 29 4.2.Quantification > Qualification ...... 31 4.2.1. Smol ...... 31 4.2.2. Tol ...... 34 4.2.3. Lorge/Lorg ...... 35 4.3.Spoopy and Creppy ...... 36 5. Discussion ...... 40 6. Conclusion ...... 41 7. Works Cited ...... 43

1. Introduction and Methodology

The purpose of this thesis is to make a contribution to the debate about the nature of diminutives in English, first discussing the traditional ways of approaching the diminutive formation, then directing the focus towards the instances of novel usage of diminutives on the

Internet.

The body of the thesis is divided into three main sections and each one of them is further divided into several subsections. The first section deals with morphology and semantics of diminutives in the English language and lists word processes that lead to the formation of diminutives to provide some information on what is recognised as possible in the

English language and a few other languages mentioned. The second section introduces the

Internet language, the culture and trends that influence the shape of it, and provides overview of the social media networks where the novel usage commonly appears to place the novel expressions in context and to explain their demographics. The third part deals directly with the expressions collected from said social media networks and attempts to analyse their origin, meaning, and the word formation processes are made, illustrated with authentic pictures of their usage.

The motivation behind the choice of this topic stems from the daily encounters with the peculiarities of the Internet language and from the observation that despite the fact that they are used by vast numbers of the Internet users worldwide, they are investigated only very marginally. Several questions regarding the novel usage were posed: Can these words be defined as diminutives? If yes, is it a reaction of the modern, flexible language to the restrictions of traditional grammar? Or is it a myth that the Standard English does not possess means of creating diminutives? In what ways are the new expressions similar or different from the traditional views on the morphology of diminutives?

As for methodology, first, a compilation of words for further analysis was made. The selected words meet these conditions: a) they break the rules of standard spelling and grammar; b) if they do not break those rules and they can be found in standard dictionaries, they are used in ways that are not covered in said dictionaries; c) the ways they are used are comparable to the ways of usage of traditional diminutives.

Second, further data about those words were collected: a) data regarding their origin were sought through simple Google searches, by consulting online databases

KnowYourMeme, The Urban Dictionary and Meme Database that are concerned with documenting such phenomena, and by further research of the links and references provided in the online databases; b) data regarding their meaning and usage were obtained by analysing authentic examples found on the Internet, by consulting a corpus English Web 2013 when possible, and by comparing previously gained outcomes to definitions found in The Urban

Dictionary; c) data regarding the rise of their popularity were collected by using the tool

Google Trends.

Apart from that, attempts to compile a specialised corpus in the Sketch Engine were made; however, after reconsideration they were given up. The reasons for that are the specific features of the language on the Internet – if they were to be preserved, the texts would not meet the criteria of the Sketch Engine, such as minimal length and punctuation. But if the texts were adjusted in order to meet the criteria, the resulting texts would not be authentic examples of the language found on the Internet.

The usage of online databases whose content is crowd-sourced in a similar manner to

Wikipedia (i.e. The Urban Dictionary, KnowYourMeme and Meme Database) is justified. As the amounts of content on the Internet are vast and growing every day, the sources of the

Internet phenomena can be lost easily. These crowd-sourced databases are the results of

shared efforts of multiple people, which means there is a bigger likelihood of finding and documenting the actual sources. As for the definitions on The Urban Dictionary, written by ordinary users of the Internet, they are also valuable for the purposes of this thesis, as they reflect their intuitive perceptions and authentic experiences.

2. Diminutives in the English Language

The character of diminutives in the English language is a subject of an ongoing debate.

Since the Standard English has a very limited number of diminutives in comparison with other languages, such as German, Italian, or the Slavic languages, some are prone to contributing to the opinion that the English language does not possess diminutives at all.

Grandi, in his paper Renewal and Innovation in the Emergence of Indo-European

Evaluative Morphology, divides languages into four groups based on their ability to produce diminutives and augmentatives, and places English into the type C languages: languages that have absence of both diminutives and augmentatives. In a footnote, Grandi explains that

“English displays some diminutive suffixes (for example –let: piglet, booklet), but all of them seem to be completely unproductive” (7).

However, such approach overlooks the types of diminution that do not correspond with the traditional understanding of this concept that was derived from Latin. Schneider considers those definitions “circular” and explaining “neither ... what exactly diminutive formation is, nor what diminutive meaning is” (137). Therefore, he is convinced that determining the truth about the nature of diminutives is not a trivial task and opposes to the conviction that English is entirely lacking diminutives.

As the traditional definitions of diminutives are insufficient and limiting, new need to be formulated by broadening the perspective and taking into account not only the morphological structure as an important marker of diminutives, but also the semantics.

2.1. Morphology

Grandi’s claims, and other claims in similar manner, are true only in cases when diminutives are treated purely as a morphological category containing only prototypical diminutives. Schneider defines prototypical diminutives as follows:

Prototypical diminutives, i.e. diminutives generally considered to be the “best” examples of this category, are nouns derived from nouns by attaching a suffix which functions as the diminutive marker (or ‘diminutivizer’): N + suffixdim > Ndim ‘small N’. In this case, the suffix does not change the word class of the base, nor does it crucially change the meaning of the base. The meaning of the base is merely modified by adding the semantic component

SMALL. (Truth 137-138)

This is a description of diminutives in the most traditional sense. Prototypical diminutives seem to be morphologically transparent and unambiguous in their nature.

However, problems arise during attempts to compile an exhaustive list of suffixes that function as diminutive markers in the English language. Various authors list different numbers of diminutive suffixes and treat them according to different criteria, e.g. their origin, productivity, and function. Schneider provides an overview of differing opinions on this matter:

• Wierzbicka (1985): -ie

• Leisi (1969): -ie, -ette (plus sixteen more which he considers unproductive)

• Hansen et al. (1982): -ie/-y, -ette, -let

• Dressler/Merlini Barbaresi (1994): -ie/-y, -ette, -let, -s

• Galinsky (1952): -ie/-y, -ette, -let, -sky (for American English)

• Quirk et al. (1985): -ette, -let, -ling (-y/-ie, -s are classified as ‘familiarity markers’)

• McArthur (1992): -ette, -ie, -let, -ling, -y

• Zandvoort (1969): -y/-ie, -ette, -let, -ling, -et, -kin

• Koziol (1967) mostly agrees with Zandvoort, but includes -een, and excludes -ling

• Mühlhäusler (1983): -s, -ie, -kin, -poo(h)

• Poynton (1989): -y, -kin, -poo, -s, -a, -ers, -le, -o, -pops (for Australian English)

• Marchland (1969): 10 suffixes

• Urdang (1982): 32 elements expressing diminutive meaning

• Charleston (1960): 34 suffixes

• Rotzoll (1910): 50 suffixes (Schneider, Diminutives 76-77)

One more opinion from a more recent publication can be added:

• Albair (2010): -let, -ling, -ette, -y

Even if an agreement about which suffixes result in prototypical diminutives could be reached, dealing with prototypical diminution only would disregard the existence of diminutives formed by other word formation processes. Štekauer et al. identify four word formation processes that result in diminutives (237-303). Those are suffixation, prefixation, reduplication, and compounding, all of them classified as a synthetic type of diminution and as additive processes by Schneider (Truth 138). He adds two more processes to them, one additive – inflectional affixation, and one subtractive – truncation. Apart from that, he lists also periphrastic constructions, an analytic type of diminution (Diminutives 7-10).

2.1.1. Suffixation

Suffixation can be considered the prototypical and the most prominent process of diminutive formation, although, as it was already shown, the question about prototypical suffixes stirs some controversy. It is now clear that not every case of diminutive suffixation

results in prototypical diminutives, but there are two more situations, common in the English language, which violate the basic rules of prototypical diminution:

a) the base word is a noun;

b) the word class is retained in the process of diminution. (Schneider, Diminutives 6)

The English language allows having an adjective as the base word. There are two suffixes that can be attached to adjectives and the word class will remain unchanged: -ish, -y.

Examples of this are A yellow > A yellowish, and A blue > A bluey.

However, the suffix -y is tricky, because it can cause the change of word class, as in the case of deadjectival diminutives. Deadjectival diminutives break both conditions formulated above; they are not nouns before the process of diminution, and after attaching the possible suffixes -y, -ie, they lose their original word class, as in A short > N shorty, or A cute > N cutie.

In other languages, the word class of the base word can move off nouns and adjectives to verbs (e.g. Slovak, Italian), adverbs (e.g. Italian, Dutch), and even function words (e.g.

German, Breton). (Schneider, Diminutives 5-6)

Jovanović notices another distinction between the suffixation processes of English and those of Serbian (and other Slavic languages). After attaching a single suffix, “the

[diminutive] capacity is exhausted at this level” (228), while in Serbian, it is possible to add a single suffix twice, or add two different suffixes, and thus create a case of gradable diminution. Scalise (1986, 132f.) comes to a similar conclusion in Italian. Schneider summarises that such phenomenon “does not apply to languages such as English or German.

The diminutive suffixes of these languages cannot be attached to the same base recursively”

(Diminutives 34).

Regarding the hierarchy of diminutive formation, Schneider formulates a generally applicable set of rules:

1. word class is retained; X > X

2. if not, the outcome is a noun; X > Y, Y = N

2.1.2. Prefixation

According to Schneider (2003), the English language has an inventory of two diminutive prefixes, mini- and micro-; the former originating as a product of clipping from the word ‘miniature’ (Huddleston and Pullum 1678), and the latter being used exclusively in the technical and scientific terminology, as in ‘microscope’ or ‘microprocessor’, and lacking the evaluative component (Jovanović 218). Albair, however, lists also the prefixes nano- and pico- (4).

Huddleston and Pullum remark that in cases when mini- is also used in the technical field and attached to the same base word as micro-, formations with micro- result in “a greater degree of smallness” (1678) – consider comparison between ‘minicomputer’ and

‘microcomputer’.

2.1.3. Reduplication

In several languages, including English, reduplication is a possible way of diminutive formation, formed by a repetition of the base word. Reduplication can be divided into two types, repetitive and rhyming reduplication. The usage of both types has the effect of implying endearment and affection of the speaker to the one they refer to.

Example of the first, repetitive type would be expressions such as ‘John-John’. In the second type, a rhyme, often semantically empty one, is attached behind the base word, e.g.

‘Annie-Pannie’ (Schneider, Diminutives 8).

2.1.4. Compounding

This formation process is not found in English, but it does occur in other Germanic languages; Schneider uses German and Danish as an example. The respective equivalent of the word ‘small’, klein- in German and smaa- and lille- in Danish, can be attached to the base word and becomes a “left-hand component”. Examples include words such as ‘Kleinstadt’

(small town) or ‘smaablomster’ (small flowers).

Other words than translations of ‘small’ can be found in this type of diminutive formation. Schneider lists formations using ‘baby’ and ‘dwarf’ as well (8).

2.1.5. Truncation

As opposed to previous types of diminutive formation, this process is not additive, but a subtractive one. As Schneider points out, it is a subclass of clipping and it occurs in cases when the base word is multisyllabic. The process of truncation shortens the base word to a single syllable and “the syllable which is retained is either the first syllable of the base word or another syllable carrying primary or secondary stress” (Diminutives 9).

Affective alternations of first names are frequently formed by truncations, resulting in, for instance, Pat from Patricia, or Liz from Elizabeth. The truncated forms can be further modified by suffixation, specifically by suffixes -y and -ie: Liz > Lizzie, Pat > Patty (9).

2.1.6. Inflectional Affixation

Cases of inflectional affixation are generally rare and they do not exist in the English language. Schneider states that it occurs in Fula, Swahili, and other Bantu languages and further refers to Bybee who claims that “diminution is one of those concepts predominantly realised by derivation rather than inflection, at least as far as synthetic diminutive formation is concerned” (Diminutives 8).

2.1.7. Periphrastic Constructions

Periphrastic constructions are combinations of adjectives and nouns in which noun is a neutral word whose meaning is modified by adjectives from the semantic field SMALL

(small, little, tiny, wee), while each word belonging to this semantic field has slightly different connotations. As Schneider remarks, this appears to be the preferred, more natural and more productive type of diminutive formation in English that is even able to allow gradation in diminution, for instance, paw > tiny paw > tiny little paw (Diminutives 76). The preference for the analytic type of diminution reflects “the general analytic make-up of present-day English” (Diminutives 84). Many authors do not include this type of diminution in their works, but as it plays such as prominent role in the English language, it should not be marginalised.

To summarise the hierarchy of the diminutive formation process, Schneider formulates another set of generally applicable rules:

1) Synthetic formation > analytic formation,

2) Word-formation > inflection,

3) Additive processes > subtractive processes,

4) Morpheme combination > morpheme repetition,

5) Affixation > compounding,

6) Suffixation > prefixation (Truth 139).

2.2. Semantics

As it was already implied in the parts 1.1.3 and 1.1.5, the diminutive meaning is not limited to adding the element of smallness to the neutral base word describing a normal-sized object. Chesterton explains that a diminutive word “frequently … implies not actual smallness of size but smallness imputed in token of affection, tenderness, sympathy, pity, etc” (120), as the idea of small size can inspire either endearment and fondness in the speaker, or the feelings of contempt and mockery. According to her, diminutives can be divided into three groups:

a. diminutives expressing physical, objective smallness;

b. diminutives expressing positive emotional attitude;

c. and diminutives expressing negative emotional attitude (120).

However, this simple division does not provide an answer for the question that many authors are concerned with – is the expression of smallness or the attitude of the speaker the more important marker of what should be considered a diminutive, or, alternatively, a true diminutive? Just as in the case with the diminutive suffixes in English, this topic is a reason for a lot of disagreement and controversy among the authors. As Schneider summarises,

Bybee rejects the attitudinal meaning and maintains that the real diminutives are those which express the objective smallness exclusively (110), while Strang suggests a natural link between smallness and the emotional response to small things that can be either positive or negative (138) (Diminutives 12).

It is difficult to tell whether a consensus on this matter will ever be reached, however, both the qualifying and the quantifying type of the diminutive meaning have an important function in the language, and neither of them is obligatory for a word to be classified as a diminutive.

3. The Internet Language

According to Crystal, since the times of Shakespeare, nothing has affected the English language on such a great scale as the invention of the Internet and the spread of its usage. This new hybrid medium effectively wipes away the borders between written and spoken communication which have sparked something that Crystal describes as “a language revolution” (Revolution 4).

Soon after its first boom in the 1990s, it was recognised that the Internet as a medium for communication deserves academic attention and, in 1995, the first volume of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) was published. The number of scholarly articles rises year by year, covering a wide range of topics – a proof that the CMC represents a complex and interesting subject of analysis.

The shape of the contemporary CMC is a result of several aspects. The nature of the

Internet as a medium for communication is, of course, one of them; as Crystal remarked “the

Internet is an electronic, global, and interactive medium, and each of these properties has consequences for the kind of language found there” (Language 24). These properties have also enabled the genesis of various Internet communities, the rise of multiple trends, and a very complex Internet culture, and each of these aspects of the matters taking place on the

Internet has influenced the language that can be found there.

Recently, the age of social media networks, marked by the almost unlimited possibilities of sharing, has begun. In the following section, several of these networks will be discussed to provide some basic information about the nature of the environments where the Internet culture and the Internet language have developed.

3.1. The Virtual Environments

In this part of the thesis, the social media networks Tumblr, Twitter, Reddit, and

Facebook will be presented to place the Internet culture and the occurrence of novel language usage in the context of their native environments, and to connect these phenomenon with information about the demographics of their users. Each of these websites has made a contribution to the development of the Internet culture, and to the creation and spread of the linguistic patterns that will be presented in the final part of the thesis. However, a special attention is paid to Tumblr, as it has earned a reputation of having the kind of user base that is most likely to come up with novel usage of language and indulge in spreading and imitating the novel features created elsewhere.

3.1.1. Tumblr

Tumblr, a platform designed for microblogging, originated in 2007 and was founded by an American entrepreneur and web developer David Karp, but was later bought by Yahoo! in the 2013. The platform allows the registered users to publish posts that can contain text, pictures, GIFs, videos, audio recordings, and hyperlinks and can be further adjusted by

HTML. These posts are then visible on one’s own dashboard and on dashboards of those who became followers of the blog, and can be evaluated by likes or reblogs. The number of likes and reblogs combined gives the final number of notes, which determines how popular and viral the post is.

If a user decides to reblog a post, it will appear on their own dashboard, visible for their own followers who can further reblog it and make the post more and more popular. Everyone who decides to reblog a post has also two options of adding commentary of any length to the original content: to the caption section, originally intended for adding commentary, or to the hashtag section, originally intended to serve the purpose of sorting and organizing the posts to

make the process of searching through them easier. The difference between the commentaries found in the caption section and the hashtag section is that the hashtag section supports plain text only, while the commentary in the caption section can contain also pictures, GIFs, and videos. Further, the users can approach each other via personal chat, or the ask section where they can choose to contact the blogger in an anonymous mode.

Due to the wide range of elements that can be included in a single post and an attached string of commentaries, the result that can go trending (become widely popular, viral), can be a pastiche of audio-visual content to which contributed several people who do not have to be in any relationship with each other.

According to a statistics portal The Statista, the community on Tumblr is from roughly

40-50% comprised of native speakers of English, while the other half is made up of the rest of the world, as is illustrated on a graph in Fig. 1.

Figure 1. Tumblr users by country, graph from The Statisa,

www.statista.com/statistics/261413/distribution-of-tumblr-traffic-by-country/

As for the age distribution in the USA, the largest age group, 25%, consists of people within the range from 18 to 24, a generation that is often referred to as ‘the millennials’.

Figure 2. Tumblr users by age, graph from The Statista,

www.statista.com/statistics/244209/age-distribution-of-tumblr-users-in-the-united-states/

However, as the graph of age distribution takes into account US citizens only, it is possible that after including people from all over the world the portion of people younger than

25 would be much higher, as the preferred language of communication on this site is English, and it is the younger generation that is thought to be more confident in communicating in

English and more prone to use the social media. With the age demographic of the Tumblr users in mind, it can be assumed that it is very likely that a blogger will participate in spreading the contemporary language phenomena, and it is also quite possible that they are capable of creating a new trend.

3.1.2. Twitter

This social networking service was founded in 2006 by four co-founders, Dorsey, Glass,

Stone, and Williams. Similarly to Tumblr, it is referred to as a microblogging platform, but there is one important distinguishing feature between them – Twitter has a character limit of

140 characters of every message, tweet, which is the reason behind its occasional nickname

“the SMS of the Internet” (Crystal, Guide 34). Another difference is that tweets do not support other types of content than plain text, pictures, and hyperlinks and, due to the length restriction, the tweets are automatically truncated, so on some occasions users produce several tweets in order to share one complete message.

The users can follow each other, share tweets of other people by retweeting them and evaluate them by adding them to their Favorites. Searching through tweets is made possible by hashtags, a feature whose introduction and promotion was pioneered by Twitter and later on adapted by other websites.

Twitter was a subject of linguistic analysis in Crystal’s Internet Linguistics: A Student

Guide. Crystal described the technological features of Twitter from the linguistic perspective and came to conclusion that “no other use of language combines identity and message in the way that tweets do, or displays messages with the kind of internal structure illustrated above”

(52), meaning that even if a text produced on Twitter was taken out of the environment of this medium and out of the context, it is very likely that it could be still recognised as a tweet.

3.1.3. Reddit

Reddit is a forum-like website founded by Steve Huffman and Alexis Oasian in 2005.

After registration, the users can start freely share content in a form of text posts, pictures, and hyperlinks and vote to evaluate other submissions. For positive evaluation, the term upvoting was coined, for negative downvoting. Submissions with the most positive evaluation are

visible at the front page of the website, or at a top of their category. There is a numerous amount of categories which can be roughly divided based on their theme into educational, humour-oriented, discussion-based, beneficial (crafts, advice, motivation), image-sharing- oriented, and miscellaneous. Within categories, the users can create or contribute to subreddits, Reddit’s equivalent of threads found on forums. To receive updates from the subreddits, one has to subscribe to them. The subreddits are moderated by volunteer users.

Statistics show that the majority of Reddit users are male, which means that, as of the end of 2016, Reddit is the only major social media platform to not have female majority user base (Gray).

3.1.4. Facebook

Probably the most popular social network there is, Facebook was created in 2004 by a group of Harvard College students, among whom the most known is Mark Zuckerberg.

Although originally it was intended as a means of communication only between college students later was the permission to sign up granted to anyone above the age 13. After free registration, the user can create a profile that includes their real name (not a nickname as it is allowed on other social networking sites), profile picture, and, optionally, other pieces of personal information, such as birthday, place of residency, and job. To connect with other people, the user has to friend them and the request for friendship must be confirmed mutually.

Apart from chatting with their friends, the user can share statuses, pictures, videos, hyperlinks, and other content, that is visible for everyone, unless the settings of privacy are changed.

3.2. The Internet Culture

As was already said, the nature of social media itself leads to creation of neologisms that can serve as a part of their brand – people of Twitter tweet, Tumblr users can reblog, - something that is not known to the users of other social media sites. Other individual features, such as the character limit found on Twitter, have also an impact on the language produced there. However, the emergence of social media has led to a phenomenon that has a particular influence on the evolution of the language. This phenomenon is called Internet memes.

The term meme was coined in 1976’s book The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, which was described as “a Darwinian, gene-centred approach to cultural revolution,” (Díaz

83) but since, the concept evolved and grew distant from its original definition, which was recognised by Dawkins himself who then proceeded to alter his views in following books.

However, Dawkins declared that the concept of Internet memes “is a hijacking of the original idea and that instead of mutating by random change and spreading by a form of Darwinian selection, they are altered deliberately by human creativity.” (Wired UK)

Memes, as we know them in the present times, resemble an epidemic of an idea in the form of catchphrases, pictures, viral videos, GIFs, and other types of content that imitate, recreate and produce remixes of the original idea. They can serve the purpose of entertainment, providing critical commentary to an event, a person or an idea in the form of parody, or pointing out the nonsensical character of something, and people share them because they consider them amusing and they can identify with the message of the meme.

In her book Cyberpl@y, Danet provided a description of hacker culture that was in its prime in the 1980s and 1990s and had “a very important influence on emergent Net practices”

(26). The characteristics of hacker culture, according to Danet, include “play with words and symbols,” “apt metaphor and rhyme,” “punning and other clever, irreverent uses of

language” (27), which can be summarised as elements of creativity and playfulness which can be largely found in the kind of language that can occurs on the Internet today, prompting assumptions that the meme culture, currently dominating the social media networks, could have emerged from what was then known as the hacker culture, and could have been appropriated by people who do not identify themselves as hackers.

Current trends in the meme production show two main fields of interest: animals and popular culture (meaning popular books, TV shows, films, bands and YouTube celebrities).

People who share a common interest often establish a community around their interest, a fandom, which can also result in a specific type of slang, sometimes understood only by the members of the community.

4. Diminutives in the Internet Language

As it was already discussed, the nature of English diminutives is not easily found and described, but it is clear that the standard lexicon of the English language is not as rich in diminutives as the lexicons of other languages, and a lot of phenomena commonly found in other languages are not possible in English due to the restrictions of its grammar. However, the language found on the Internet is characteristic by its flexibility and openness towards the usage of nonstandard grammar and vocabulary, foreign cultural and linguistic elements introduced by non-native speakers of English, and by a general atmosphere of playfulness, creativity and explorations of the language boundaries.

It is assumed that some of the novel elements were originally created as nonce words, intended for one situation only, but as they were later noticed by other users and acknowledged as useful for certain contexts or generally entertaining, they were reused and spread.

4.1. DoggoLingo

According to Lee, the origin of DoggoLingo (sometimes alternatively called doggo- speak and doggo-fran), a characteristic variety of language found on the Internet, is tied to a) the existence and increasing popularity of a Facebook group Dogspotting, and b) to the previous trending memes such as LolCats and Doge.

Dogspotting is a group where Facebook users can post photographs of dogs they spotted in the public. Other users then rate the dogs on the scale from 0 to 10 (although ratings 11/10 and 12/10 are not uncommon) and engage in conversations revolved around their common interest – their love for dogs. As it is quite common that people speak to animals in a very affectionate way, similar to the ways they speak to babies; it is not surprising that their choice of words online is marked by similar tendencies.

LOLcats and Doge have attracted a lot of attention in the past due to their characteristic, entertaining language. KnowYourMeme states that the signs of both memes can be traced as far back as in 2005, although doge did not become popular until 2010 when it was integrated with pictures of the dog breed shiba inu. Although LOLspeak and doge speak are quite different, they have this in common: incorrect grammar and spelling that is supposed to imitate the ways cats and dogs would speak if they were able to, and the linguistic features are easily distinguished even without the context of the pictures. Fig. 3 and Fig. 4 show examples of these memes and of the respective language.

Figure 3. Sleeping LOLcat, meme from LOLCATS, www.lolcats.com/featured/51788-shhhh-i-

is-nap-kin.html

Figure 4. Doge, meme from ImgFlip www.imgflip.com/i/10jnhe

DoggoLingo, a successful offspring of these two memes, is now recognised in communities outside the original one, and differs from its predecessors in one important thing

– it mostly does not try to imitate only the imaginary speech of animals, but it captures the cutesy ways the people use to address their dogs as well. This modification of the English language incorporates features such as spelling alternations, nonstandard suffixation, creation of onomatopoetic words, and grammatically incorrect expressions, for instance ‘do me a frighten’. Some of them will be analysed in following sections.

4.1.1 Doggo, Suffixation with -o

The Cambridge Dictionary defines ‘doggo’ as “hiding and disguising”; however,

McCulloch assumes it is a common way of referring to a dog in the Australian English, a statement that can be partly confirmed by analysing the key word doggo in context, using the

English Web 2013 corpus. In spite of the fact that the word doggo does collocate frequently with verbs lie, lay, and go, indicating the meaning and usage suggested by the Cambridge

Dictionary, it is clear that people use doggo to describe dogs in a diminutive, affectionate

way, even though the corpus does not provide enough metadata to confirm the Australian origin of the word (example usage shown on Fig. 5).

Figure 5. Usage of doggo, concordance line from English Web 2013, Sketch Engine

This assumption stems from McCulloch’s observation that there is a popular tendency among Australians to add the suffix -o to words, as in the clipped version of ‘definitely’, resulting in ‘defo’. According to McCulloch, it seems that the current popularity of doggo is a result of an increased number of Australians entering and contributing to the Facebook group

Dogspotting in the 2014 and 2015. It is thought that the word attracted more attention there and suddenly started spreading as a meme in a form of captions attached to pictures of dogs, thus entering the lexicon of the speakers of English outside of Australia, and consistently appearing more and more as a query of Google searches, as is illustrated on Fig. 6.

Figure 6. Interest in doggo over time, graph from Google Trends,

www.trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=doggo

As of April 27, the Urban Dictionary lists 21 definitions of doggo, out of which 6 are unrelated to this usage. It is described as “a cute way of saying dog,” (TEMOTOG, June 13,

2016) and other definitions agree on these two main points: a) it is an affectionate way of

referring to a dog; b) it is associated with the popular dog memes. None of the definitions, however, links the word doggo to Australian slang.

Among the novel usage, diminutives formed by adding the suffix -o, following the pattern of doggo, are quite popular. Terms such as puggo and corgo can be found, both referring to specific breeds of dogs, pug and corgi, that are admired by many users of the

Internet.

Figure 7. Puggo, meme from SIZZLE, www.onsizzle.com/i/as-a-fierce-warrior-the-puggo-

wears-the-skin-of-2930238

4.1.2 Pupper, Suffixation with -er

Young or small dogs are often referred to as a pupper, formed from the base word pup by adding the suffix -er. Just as in the case of doggo, a simple search on English Web 2013 shows that it has been in use longer than since 2014 or 2015 (Fig. 8), but a search on Google

Trends confirms that its popularity started visibly increasing in the middle of summer 2015

(Fig. 9).

Figure 8. Usage of pupper, concordance line from English Web 13, Sketch Engine

Figure 9. Interest in pupper over time, graph from Google Trends,

www.trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=pupper

The fact that the graph shows a consistently high interest in the word pupper before the summer of 2015 is a consequence of the existence of a Norwegian word ‘pupper’, meaning breasts.

Fig. 10 shows an example of playful, creative usage of the word pupper.

Figure 10. Dr Pupper, meme from Tumblr, www.dank-doggos.tumblr.com/post/156020765331

The suffix -er seems to be also quite productive, resulting in usage such as woofer, boofer, or floofer, where the base words are of onomatopoetic character and are descriptions of certain features or qualities that dogs have; woofer and boofer indicate the sounds that dogs produce, while floof is a playful modification of the word fluff that describes the quality of dog fur. Although suffixation is a typical way of diminutive formation process, woofer and boofer are interesting and unique products of suffixation, as the base word is an interjection.

Usage of the suffix -er is not restricted to dog-related situations only. Bellow can be seen two pictures serving as examples of novel usage in conjunction with other animals than dogs:

Figure 11. Footers, image from Tumblr,

www.irisoid.tumblr.com/post/141593827220/toasturbuns-t-ardigrades-wigmund

Figure 12. Hopper anatomy, image from Tumblr, www.irisoid.tumblr.com/post/

160078572250/animal-factbook-hopper-anatomy-is-some-of-the

Neither of the pictures show usages that would be very common or spreading fast and entering the vocabulary of masses of people, but both sufficiently illustrate the fact that the creators are well aware of the possibilities of the English language outside the borders of standard grammar, that they associate the suffix -er with the added element of cuteness and softness, and that they use it to produce playful, affectionate language, as is shown especially on the Fig. 12. It is worth to add that such creative new forms are not entirely uncommon or rare, and although there are not masses of people who would choose to imitate and spread the forms on the pictures to make it the next globally trending meme, there certainly are masses of people who enjoy such forms. Fig. 11 has earned over 300,000 notes on Tumblr and Fig.

12 over 100,000. In fact, when thinking about such creative, playful and melodic forms, two names come to mind – Roald Dahl and Lewis Carroll, two famous British writers whose

works flourish with expressions that are comparable to those presented in Fig. 12 and whose popularity stems precisely from their ability to create surprising and enjoyable expressions.

4.1.3 Pupperino, Gradable Diminution

As it was mentioned in the section 1.1.1, “English affixes of the same category do not exhibit affinity toward recursive application, neither one and the same suffix, nor different suffixes from the same formative group.” (Jovanović, 229) Therefore, gradable diminution is not possible in the traditional English grammar; however, DoggoLingo seems to make attaching a second suffix to words that already went through the process of suffixation once possible, particularly in the case of suffixation using -er. These words can be further modified by adding -ino behind the first suffix, resulting in words such as pupperino, puggerino, or even doggerino. As the suffix -ino is not native to the English language and the English words ending with this suffix have origins in different countries and languages, there is a possibility that this process was influenced by non-native speakers of English that could have taken some elements found in their mother tongues and inserted them into English. These assumptions, however, cannot be confirmed in the current research and the attempts to confirm them would require their own extensive research.

Gradable diminution in cases when the first suffix is not -er have not been observed and the graph obtained from Google Trends (Fig. 13) shows that there have not been any queries about the word pupperino before March 2016, meaning that this word was introduced to the

English language very recently. The records for puggerino show a very similar curve, although it is not as popular as pupperino. As for doggerino, apart from two occasions in

2013 when the word was entered to a Google search for an unknown reason, its popularity has risen over the last year as well.

Figure 13. Interest in pupperino over time, graph from Google Trends, www.trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=pupperino

4.1.4 Bork; Onomatopoetic Introflection

Processes discussed so far were all of additive nature, in which the root, a free morpheme, was modified by adding other bound morphemes. Following expression is a result of a different process, where the change happens within the boundaries of a single morpheme, the root.

One of the keys to creating new words or new modifications of certain words is the usage of onomatopoeia. The occurrence of words boof and woof, and the respective diminutive forms derived from them, was discussed above, but their onomatopoetic character is not very surprising, as they are interjections, and it is in the nature of interjections to imitate the sounds of animals. However, words from other word classes can take on the onomatopoetic character as well, as it is the case of the verb ‘bark’. By replacing the letter a with the letter o, a new modification is created: bork. In the present time, the word bork appears very frequently as a caption describing a picture of a dog or at other, similar occasions (Fig. 14).

Figure 14. Bork, meme from Pinterest, https://sk.pinterest.com/pin/525302744020152137/

Although the interjections woof and boof capture the actual sound of a typical dog bark better, the ways in which bork can be pronounced (/bɔː(r)k/ or /bɔːrk/) do sound more like a dog sound than bark (/baː(r)k/ or /baːrk/), as the vowel /ɔː/ is slightly shorter and less open than /a:/. Apart from that, based on the new visual quality of the word, the perception of it changes, as the letter a that, orthographically, has edges, is replaced with the smoother looking, perfectly round o, which gives the word a rounder, softer, and cuter look – more fitting for cute animals such as doggos and puppers. One of the few relevant definitions on the

Urban Dictionary even describes the word bork as “the sound doggos and puppers make.”

(Get_Shrekt, November 25, 2016) The inflected forms of the verb bork can be found as well: borked and borkin instead of ‘borking’, but the omission of the last letter is not a characteristic feature of DoggoLingo, rather just a typical simplifying and shortening commonly found on the Internet. Naturally, bork can be used also as a noun, and it often appears in a novel compound word borkdrive that describes the situations when dogs start barking and become unstoppable.

The suggested name for this phenomenon is onomatopoetic introflection. Introflection is a word formation process known to English, although it describes cases of irregular inflection of verbs and nouns that were not created by a conscious choice, for example, ‘goose’ >

‘geese’ and ‘sing’ > ‘sang’ > ‘sung’. However, the general definition of introflection still stands when applied to the case of the word bork.

There are more new onomatopoetic words that gained popularity with the spread of

DoggoLingo, such as mlem, blop, or boop, but as they are just novel interjections, not novel diminutives, and they do not seem to be created as variations of previously existing words, they will not be discussed further.

4.2. Quantification > Qualification

As McCulloch remarked, “there is some evidence that replacing a with o is a part of a larger phenomenon,” a phenomenon whose occurrence does not go hand in hand with the intention to convey onomatopoeia. It is not clear how this phenomenon originated, however, if we accept the theory proposed by McCulloch, a new theory could be formulated: it might be a result of popularization of the Australian formations with -o and employing the letter o to the language in other, unexpected and playful ways (Boddy). The dawn of the following meme concerning the alternations of words of quantification is dated to roughly the same time as the popularization of doggo and bork, sometime around late spring and early summer in the

2015.

4.2.1. Smol

It can be said with certainty that ‘small’ was the first word from the quantification word field to be altered; creation of the rest of the words was the result of following the same pattern. To this day, it is probably the only one recognised outside Tumblr, where it originated, and used far more than the rest.

Smol is a truncated version of ‘small’, while the vowel is altered as well. The connotations of this variant are different from the connotations of the correctly spelled

‘small’, therefore the existence of this variant enlarges the semantic field SMALL. While

‘small’ may or may not be used in an affectionate way and its primary meaning is to express objective smallness of size, smol has an added element of cuteness to it and cannot be used in a purely objective way; by using smol the speaker always reveals their positive qualitative evaluation of the animate or inanimate object. McCulloch explains that, apart from the letter o serving the same purpose as was described in the section about bork, the truncation of the letter l makes the word actually smaller which reinforces the cute visual effect of the word.

She further clarifies the usage of the word and that it is not restricted to people or animals that really are diminutive in size. She remarks that “smol is clearly taking on a figurative meaning too—like calling a romantic partner baby” and further presents this example (Fig. 15) of non- literal usage acquired on Twitter, where the creator of the tweet refers to a member of a

British band One Direction, calling him a number of affectionate expressions:

Figure 15. Smol, screenshot from Twitter,

www.twitter.com/bigspoonlwt/status/646807924933853185

KnowYourMeme states that this meme has emerged in mid-2015 which can be confirmed by the following graph (Fig. 16).

Figure 16. Interest in smol over time, graph from Google Trends,

www.trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=smol

Although smol has a general tendency to rise moderately, it is visible that in August

2015 it suddenly became a more popular Google entry. There are also some instances of this word in the English Web 2013 corpus that show that ‘smol’ can either refer to a Hebrew word

‘smol’, and to a surname. The rest of the examples from the corpus appears in texts that lack any kind of coherence and resemble spam.

The Urban Dictionary lists sixteen definitions about the word in question, out of which only one describes a concept that is completely unrelated to the topic of this thesis. The two most descriptive definitions both state that the word smol refers to “something/someone, usually an animal, person or character, who’s extremely cute and small,” (Dapper Pupper 2) or just “really fkn adorable all the time” (8Minimum8 2). Other definitions agree with these two, and further add that this way of spelling ‘small’ is often associated mainly with the users of Tumblr (smolpotato, welcometo221b 1), or with the fans of two Youtube stars, Dan Howell

(known as danisnotonfire) and Phil Lester (known as AmazingPhil) (Iconicchicken 2), – a fandom consisting largely of the users of Tumblr.

Since the time of its creation, smol started to be used as a part of established collocations, especially smol bean and smol birb, that are recognised in several definitions of smol. Smol bean has nineteen entries of its own in The Urban Dictionary, explaining that it is

a way of addressing “someone who is innocent and/or adorable” and that this expression is

“most commonly used in fandoms” (jishwadun 1). The word bean was originally thought to be a simplified spelling variant of ‘being’ but there is no evidence for that. One of the definitions in The Urban Dictionary attempts to provide an explanation for this usage: “Why bean? Because its so tiny and smol” (TwentyOnePhandoms 1), suggesting that beans are considered cute due to their size and possibly also shape.

For birb, The Urban Dictionary states that, similarly to doggo, this “popular culture phenomenon ... is rooted in the mindset cultivated by LOLcats and doge” (birblover 1), although this particular definition fails to explain that birb is a new slang variant of the word

‘bird’. The variant spelling of both words intensifies the intended meaning of the speaker – the strong feelings of affection towards birds.

4.2.2. Tol

Two words that serve as a complement to smol can be found on the Internet, and tol is one of them. It is derived from ‘tall’ by following the same word formation pattern, and this particular spelling suggests a positive, affectionate attitude of the speaker, just as in the case of smol. However, tol is more strongly tied to the quantifying evaluative meaning of ‘tall’, describing mostly people and characters to whom physical smallness cannot be attributed, but who are considered cute in spite of that.

As it was already mentioned, smol reached the greatest amount of popularity among the variants of quantifying words discussed in this section. Despite the fact that tol has twenty- three entries in The Urban Dictionary, only two of them are concerned with this usage and another two can be found under the term tol bean.

The graph for tol on Google Trends shows quite inconsistent results. Although there was an increased amount of interest in it in the summer 2015, the curve does not have any

general tendency which can be caused by its insufficient popularity when compared to the instances of the word ‘tol’ in other languages.

Figure 17. Interest in tol over time, graph from Google Trends,

www.trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=tol

4.2.3. Lorge/lorg

Although the words ‘small’ and ‘tall’ are not antonyms, while ‘small’ and ‘large’ smol and tol work as opposites sufficiently enough, as there is visual similarity achieved. As the original spelling of ‘large’ does not resemble the basis for the pattern applied on the formation of smol and tol, the usage of the variants lorge and lorg is not as established and their existence is recognised even less. However, out of these two variants, the longer one is recognised more – it is mentioned as a complement to smol on Meme Database and acknowledged also by McCulloch in an article where she describes the usage and meaning of smol. Lorg seems to be the result of the process of truncation from lorge, to make the word smaller in order to evoke the notion of cuteness more, and possibly to pursue the pattern first established by smol. This particular spelling, however, suggest a greater change in pronunciation than in the case of lorge – not only the vowel is affected, but also the soft pronunciation of g might change to a hard g. This assumption is based only on an intuitive perception of the English pronunciation, as only one word occurring in the standard

vocabulary that ends with -org comes to mind, ‘cyborg’, which is not a sufficient sample to come to definitive conclusions.

On The Urban Dictionary, there are entries for both spelling variants of ‘large’, however, none of them deals with this usage. As the popularity of lorge and lorg has never been high, and as both of these variants have other meanings that people want to enter to a

Google search, the graphs from Google Trends for both of the words do not show anything that would be relevant for this thesis, therefore, they will not be included.

4.3. Spoopy and creppy

Up to this point, all of the investigated modifications were expressing only positive qualitative attitudes. The cases of the following two words are slightly different.

Spoopy is a variation of the word ‘spooky’ which, as documented in KnowYourMeme database, has started circulating over the Internet after a photograph of an incorrectly spelled

Halloween decoration (Fig. 18), taken by Mike Woodridge, has become popular. Although the photograph was published already in 2009 on Woodridge’s Flickr account, it did not gain attention until sometime around Halloween in 2012, when it was recognised as a Halloween meme for the first time, and it did not become dramatically popular until the next year.

Figure 18. Woodridge, Mike, “Spoopy”, Flickr, 15 Oct 2009,

www.flickr.com/photos/clickfarmer/4015257749/in/photostream/

As the following graph from Google Trends (Fig. 19) shows, the interest in the word spoopy is of recurring character and it has the tendency to fade away shortly after the end of

October and re-emerge rapidly next year, roughly a month before Halloween, which is in itself a spectacular phenomenon.

Figure 19. Interest in spoopy over time, chart from Google Trends,

www.trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=spoopy

Spoopy is used in similar situations as all of the words discussed before – when the speaker chooses non-standard spelling over the standard spelling in order to evoke cuteness or some kind of entertaining quality. However, the concept of spookiness in itself should not possess the elements of cuteness or entertainment, because if it does, it fails to fulfil its primary role – to scare. Therefore, although spoopy is not meant as a derogatory term, to a certain extent it has that effect and the original concept is thus ridiculed. The added element of entertainment goes hand in hand with admitting that the referent is actually laughable. Using the word spoopy could therefore be compared to instances of friendly mockery.

This effect is reinforced by the fact that the variant with alternated spelling contains the word ‘poop’. Although the original Halloween decoration captured on Woodridge’s photograph was probably not intended as a portmanteau of ‘spooky’ and ‘poop’ and it was probably only an unfortunate spelling mistake, the resulting word could be described as an unintentional morphological blend.

The Urban Dictionary lists thirteen definitions of the word spoopy and most of them are related to fear, but not every single one among those fear-related refers to the usage that

emerged from the Halloween meme. The two top definitions both recognise it as something that is intended as spooky, but the meaning is extended by the elements of cuteness and amusement. One of the definitions also links this expression to another popular Halloween meme, 2spooky4me, that eventually merged with spoopy into 2spoopy4me (Spoopy4you,

2spoopy 1).

Apart from the adjective, a noun form and a verb form also exist. They were derived from spoopy by the process of back-formation: after eliminating the suffix -y, the resulting word spoop can be used as both aforementioned word classes and further inflected.

The popularity of creppy is a direct result of the popularity of spoopy which has created a widespread sensation within which people started making collections of pictures that capture Halloween-themed objects and products with incorrectly spelled signs. One such picture was of a cake decorated with a cobweb, a spider, and a sign that spelled creppy (Fig.

20).

Figure 20. Creppy, photograph from CakeWrecks, www.cakewrecks.com/home/2012/10/23/a-

total-dud.html#comment19150442

The inventory of misspelled Halloween labels included more examples, such as spoory, srooky, treak-or-treat, trick-or-troat, Hallowen, etc., but only spoopy and creppy caught more attention, possibly because of the feature they have in common – both of them have an entertaining twist in spelling that suggests the products of bodily waste, crap and poop, what ultimately gives the words a new layer of meaning and thus a potential for novel usage.

The presence of the negative evaluation is stronger here, although it is still more of a jocular term above anything else.

Figure 21.Usage of spoopy and creppy, textpost from Tumblr,

www.irisoid.tumblr.com/post/160182598345/coriander-too-spoopy-to-live-too-creppy-to-die

Although there are several entries for creppy in the Urban Dictionary, all of them have been entered to the database before this Halloween meme has come into existence and therefore none of them is related to this usage. However, the graph form Google Trends shows the same phenomenon as in the case of spoopy (Fig. 22). Annually, the interest in the word creppy in October increases.

Figure 22. Interest in creppy over time, graph from Google Trends,

www.trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=creppy

5. Discussion

Although the graphs included in this thesis show that the interest in the analysed words is generally increasing, and thus potentially gaining them new users every day, the truth is that the future of these words cannot be foretold. The rate of change on the Internet is, at times, dizzying and it is possible that in a few months the analysed words will be swept away from the active vocabulary of the people using them today and replaced by a hot new and catchy meme. However, that is not a sufficient reason for disregarding them, as they are examples of interesting linguistic developments and they reflect the current sense of humour and the mindsets of the people that engage in their creation and popularization, particularly of the generation Y, the millenials.

On the other hand, the possibility that at least some of the new language forms will stick and prevail does exist. Currently, people outside the communities that like the novel features in English often show disdain for them and lament the death of the language; however, as

Crystal remarks, it is a common misconception that the language change going in unexpected directions is an undesirable thing with a bad impact on the general literacy of youngsters and on the language itself (Guide, 3-7).

6. Conclusion

This thesis introduced several issues regarding the nature of diminutives in the English language and presented views and attitudes maintained by several authors. It was proven that the suffixes -o, -er, and -ino, which are often not acknowledged as diminutive suffixes, are productive and they result in diminutive forms that express the positive emotional attitude of the speaker. These findings show that the speakers of English are aware of the possibility to create new diminutive forms by using suffixes, and that the language is capable of it.

It was further shown that gradable diminution, a new type of suffixation that was previously deemed not possible in English, was successfully introduced to the language. Two instances of interjections modified by diminutive suffixes were also presented. The research further informed about the existence of several novel expressions that were partly formed by truncation of the last letter and partly by the replacement of the vowel a by the vowel o within the root, which appears to be a common trend whose origin remained unclear.

Other novel word formation processes resulting in diminutives were also presented, among them morphological blending, and a process that was for the purposes of this thesis named ‘onomatopoetic introflection’.

Regarding the issue of meaning, all of the analysed expressions were preoccupied with expressing the emotional attitude of the speaker, rather than the objective smallness of the referent, although one of the meanings does not exclude the other. Therefore, if the evaluative function of the analysed words is considered as a sufficient marker of diminutives, they can be identified as diminutives.

The research did not cover the topic in its entirety; there is a need for a more detailed one, such that would address the issues of pronunciation, frequency of usage, the context of

linguistic changes of the language that produces such novel forms, and the influence of non- native speakers of English on this category.

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Resumé

This thesis provides the theoretical background about the category of diminutives in the

English language, their morphology, word formation processes, and semantics. It further shifts the focus on the Internet language and the matters that influence it on a great scale – the increased popularity of the social media networks which provide almost unlimited possibilities of sharing, and the Internet culture that is largely revolved around the widespread phenomenon called Internet memes.

These two influences prompted the rise of new varieties of English that ignore the rules and boundaries of traditional grammar and spelling, and creatively explore what is actually possible in the English language, giving birth to a plenty of novel expressions and language patterns. The thesis investigates and analyses those novel expressions that could be identified as diminutives, specifically words found within the variety of DoggoLingo, the word group consisting of expression smol, tol, and lorge/lorg, and with the pair spoopy and creppy. It is concerned with their origin, meaning, connotations, usage, and their formation processes.

Tato práce informuje o teoretickém pozadí kategorie zdrobnělin v anglickém jazyku – jejich morfologií, slovotvornými procesy a sémantikou. Dále se věnuje internetovému jazyku a jevy, které jej ve velkém ovlivňují – zvýšená popularita o sociální sítě, které umožňují téměř neomezené možnosti sdílení, a internetová kultura, která se rozvinula kolem celosvětově rozšířeného fenoménu známého jako internetová meme.

Tyhle dva vlivy umožnily vzestup nových podob angličtiny, které ignorují pravidla a hranice tradiční gramatiky a pravopisu, zatímco kreativně zkoumají, co všechno je v anglickém

jazyku ve skutečnosti možné, a tím vytvářejí množství nových výrazů a jazykových vzorců.

Tato práce zkoumá a analyzuje ty nové výrazy, které by se daly identifikovat jako zdrobněliny

– konkrétně jsou to výrazy nacházející se v DoggoLingu, jedné ze současných podob angličtiny, dále skupina slov smol, tol a lorge/lorg, a také dvojice spoopy a creppy. Práce se o ně zajímá z hlediska vzniku, významu, konotací, použití a slovotvorných procesů, díky kterým vznikly.