Did you have a choccie bickie this arvo? A quantitative look at Australian hypocoristics

This paper considers the use and representation of Australian hypocoristics (e.g., choccie→. chocolate, arvo→. afternoon). One-hundred-and-fifteen adult speakers of Australian English aged 17-84 years generated as many tokens of hypocoristics as they could in 10. min. The resulting corpus was analysed along a number of dimensions in an attempt to identify (i) general age- and gender-related trends in hypocoristic knowledge and use, and (ii) linguistic properties of each hypocoristic class. Following Bybee's (1985, 1995) lexical network approach, we conclude that Australian hypocoristics are the product of the same linguistic processes that capture other inflectional morphological processes. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd.