Structural functions of diminutives and their productivity in modern Russian

Diminutives (or derivatives with suffixes expressing small size and/or aff ection) are analyzed in regard of their structural functions with the help of corpus methods. The summary of traditional and recent studies comprises the main semantic, pragmatic and structural functions of diminutives provided by Russian and foreign scholars. The study is based on a randomized list of diminutive derivatives from the Main and the Oral Subcorpora of the Russian National Corpus (RNC). The most frequent diminutives from the list were examined to illustrate the structural function of rhyming of the final syllable that might be a purpose of their productivity in Russian language alongside with such structural functions as the simplifi cation of the system of declension types and accentual homogeneity. Quantitative data on the corpus frequency of five derivational patterns tagged in RNC and on the set of forms of frequent diminutives are provided.