Augmentatives in Italian and German

Abstract

The present paper deals with Italian and German augmentation, analyzed both from a contrastive linguistic and translational perspective. It explores the Italian suffixes ‑one and ‑accio as well as German formatives conveying similar meaning (AUG and PEJ) paralleling the presentation of the Italian augmentation features in their formal, semantic features and pragmatic-interactive dimensions with the equivalent features in German in order to work out similarities and differences between the two languages. In a second step the analysis focuses the parole-level and investigates the bidirectional translation strategies of augmentatives (Italian-German; German-Italian) in bilingual lexicography and in an Italian-German translation corpus. The goal is to verify what happens on the parole-level, checking different possible solutions to translate and express augmentatives in context and contrasting them with the findings of the contrastive analysis on the langue-level.