La morfología española en los grupos de WhatsApp: estudio de las funciones de los diminutivos

Diminutives constitute evaluative suffixes whose primary function is reduction, from which a wide range of semantic and pragmatic values emerge, including attenuation, affectivity, contempt, irony, politeness, intensification, and euphemism. To examine their usage, a corpus comprising 574 instances was compiled from WhatsApp conversations. These data were drawn from three interactional domains: family, friendship, and professional contexts. The main aim of this study was to analyse both the frequency of diminutive forms and their denotative and connotative components across the aforementioned groups, based on the assumption that social and communicative context plays a decisive role in diminutive usage. The findings demonstrate that the greater the degree of familiarity and interpersonal closeness between interlocutors, the higher the frequency of diminutive use, particularly in relation to affective values. Accordingly, the results confirm a direct correlation between interlocutors’ social proximity and the productivity of diminutive suffixes. Both the family group (291 instances) and the friendship group (266 instances) exhibit a markedly higher number of occurrences, with affectivity and attenuation emerging as the predominant functions. By contrast, the professional domain shows a substantial decrease, with only 17 instances recorded. In this context, diminutives are restricted to strategies of politeness and mitigation, reflecting social distance and the absence of mutual familiarity. Consequently, this study argues that the high frequency of diminutive usage is intrinsically linked to close personal relationships between interlocutors; where such closeness is absent, the use of diminutives is significantly reduced.