Heritage and Innovation in the Diminutives of the Adverbs of Manner in American Spanish

Abstract

This article aims to study the diminutive forms of the adverbs of manner in the Spanish varieties spoken in Latin America. The diminutive is an identifying feature of American Spanish, even in grammatical categories such as the adverb. In European Spanish it is less commonly used in this category. The starting point is the hypothesis that the most used suffix is –ito/-ita, but we are interested in investigating whether there are other suffixes that are used to derive them. We shall focus on the forms which American Spanish inherited from European Spanish and, at the same time, on the innovations, that is, on the forms created by American Spanish. We used El Corpus del Diccionario histórico de la lengua española (CDH) to identify when these words were documented. Likewise, we consulted the CREA, annotated CREA, CORDE, CORPES XXI and CORDIAM corpora and the Diccionario de americanismos to investigate whether these are forms of widespread, general and continuous use in all Spanishspeaking countries or whether their use is limited to certain areas. Only adverbial cases were selected and analyzed, because some words are also used as adjectives.