Asymmetric use of diminutives and hypocoristics to pet animals in Italian, German, English, and Arabic

This paper investigates diminutives and hypocoristics used in asymmetric verbal communication with pet animals in three European languages and a Semitic language. Italian, German, English, and Tunisian Arabic display different structural and communicative richness of diminutives, as well as dissimilar customs and sociocultural norms. The paper focusses on pragmatic meanings and functions, including the usages where pragmatic functions are supplemented by semantic meanings. Our data were collected by parallel semi-formal interviews of native speakers of the four languages investigated in order to test our hypotheses that different cultural environments exploit the pragmatic potentials of hypocoristics and diminutive forms in different ways when addressing pet animals or speaking about them. Diminutives are often used with pets in analogy to child-directed speech, mainly to express empathy and in familiar contexts.