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Delimitations in Research – Types, Examples and Writing Guide

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Delimitations

Definition:

Delimitations refer to the specific boundaries or limitations that are set in a research study in order to narrow its scope and focus. Delimitations may be related to a variety of factors, including the population being studied, the geographical location, the time period, the research design , and the methods or tools being used to collect data .

The Importance of Delimitations in Research Studies

Here are some reasons why delimitations are important in research studies:

• Provide focus : Delimitations help researchers focus on a specific area of interest and avoid getting sidetracked by tangential topics. By setting clear boundaries, researchers can concentrate their efforts on the most relevant and significant aspects of the research question.
• Increase validity : Delimitations ensure that the research is more valid by defining the boundaries of the study. When researchers establish clear criteria for inclusion and exclusion, they can better control for extraneous variables that might otherwise confound the results.
• Improve generalizability : Delimitations help researchers determine the extent to which their findings can be generalized to other populations or contexts. By specifying the sample size, geographic region, time frame, or other relevant factors, researchers can provide more accurate estimates of the generalizability of their results.
• Enhance feasibility : Delimitations help researchers identify the resources and time required to complete the study. By setting realistic parameters, researchers can ensure that the study is feasible and can be completed within the available time and resources.
• Clarify scope: Delimitations help readers understand the scope of the research project. By explicitly stating what is included and excluded, researchers can avoid confusion and ensure that readers understand the boundaries of the study.

Types of Delimitations in Research

Here are some types of delimitations in research and their significance:

Time Delimitations

This type of delimitation refers to the time frame in which the research will be conducted. Time delimitations are important because they help to narrow down the scope of the study and ensure that the research is feasible within the given time constraints.

Geographical Delimitations

Geographical delimitations refer to the geographic boundaries within which the research will be conducted. These delimitations are significant because they help to ensure that the research is relevant to the intended population or location.

Population Delimitations

Population delimitations refer to the specific group of people that the research will focus on. These delimitations are important because they help to ensure that the research is targeted to a specific group, which can improve the accuracy of the results.

Data Delimitations

Data delimitations refer to the specific types of data that will be used in the research. These delimitations are important because they help to ensure that the data is relevant to the research question and that the research is conducted using reliable and valid data sources.

Scope Delimitations

Scope delimitations refer to the specific aspects or dimensions of the research that will be examined. These delimitations are important because they help to ensure that the research is focused and that the findings are relevant to the research question.

How to Write Delimitations

In order to write delimitations in research, you can follow these steps:

• Identify the scope of your study : Determine the extent of your research by defining its boundaries. This will help you to identify the areas that are within the scope of your research and those that are outside of it.
• Determine the time frame : Decide on the time period that your research will cover. This could be a specific period, such as a year, or it could be a general time frame, such as the last decade.
• I dentify the population : Determine the group of people or objects that your study will focus on. This could be a specific age group, gender, profession, or geographic location.
• Establish the sample size : Determine the number of participants that your study will involve. This will help you to establish the number of people you need to recruit for your study.
• Determine the variables: Identify the variables that will be measured in your study. This could include demographic information, attitudes, behaviors, or other factors.
• Explain the limitations : Clearly state the limitations of your study. This could include limitations related to time, resources, sample size, or other factors that may impact the validity of your research.
• Justify the limitations : Explain why these limitations are necessary for your research. This will help readers understand why certain factors were excluded from the study.

When to Write Delimitations in Research

Here are some situations when you may need to write delimitations in research:

• When defining the scope of the study: Delimitations help to define the boundaries of your research by specifying what is and what is not included in your study. For instance, you may delimit your study by focusing on a specific population, geographic region, time period, or research methodology.
• When addressing limitations: Delimitations can also be used to address the limitations of your research. For example, if your data is limited to a certain timeframe or geographic area, you can include this information in your delimitations to help readers understand the limitations of your findings.
• When justifying the relevance of the study : Delimitations can also help you to justify the relevance of your research. For instance, if you are conducting a study on a specific population or region, you can explain why this group or area is important and how your research will contribute to the understanding of this topic.
• When clarifying the research question or hypothesis : Delimitations can also be used to clarify your research question or hypothesis. By specifying the boundaries of your study, you can ensure that your research question or hypothesis is focused and specific.
• When establishing the context of the study : Finally, delimitations can help you to establish the context of your research. By providing information about the scope and limitations of your study, you can help readers to understand the context in which your research was conducted and the implications of your findings.

Examples of Delimitations in Research

Examples of Delimitations in Research are as follows:

Research Title : “Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Cybersecurity Threat Detection”

Delimitations :

• The study will focus solely on the use of artificial intelligence in detecting and mitigating cybersecurity threats.
• The study will only consider the impact of AI on threat detection and not on other aspects of cybersecurity such as prevention, response, or recovery.
• The research will be limited to a specific type of cybersecurity threats, such as malware or phishing attacks, rather than all types of cyber threats.
• The study will only consider the use of AI in a specific industry, such as finance or healthcare, rather than examining its impact across all industries.
• The research will only consider AI-based threat detection tools that are currently available and widely used, rather than including experimental or theoretical AI models.

Research Title: “The Effects of Social Media on Academic Performance: A Case Study of College Students”

Delimitations:

• The study will focus only on college students enrolled in a particular university.
• The study will only consider social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
• The study will only analyze the academic performance of students based on their GPA and course grades.
• The study will not consider the impact of other factors such as student demographics, socioeconomic status, or other factors that may affect academic performance.
• The study will only use self-reported data from students, rather than objective measures of their social media usage or academic performance.

Purpose of Delimitations

Some Purposes of Delimitations are as follows:

• Focusing the research : By defining the scope of the study, delimitations help researchers to narrow down their research questions and focus on specific aspects of the topic. This allows for a more targeted and meaningful study.
• Clarifying the research scope : Delimitations help to clarify the boundaries of the research, which helps readers to understand what is and is not included in the study.
• Avoiding scope creep : Delimitations help researchers to stay focused on their research objectives and avoid being sidetracked by tangential issues or data.
• Enhancing the validity of the study : By setting clear boundaries, delimitations help to ensure that the study is valid and reliable.
• Improving the feasibility of the study : Delimitations help researchers to ensure that their study is feasible and can be conducted within the time and resources available.

Applications of Delimitations

Here are some common applications of delimitations:

• Geographic delimitations : Researchers may limit their study to a specific geographic area, such as a particular city, state, or country. This helps to narrow the focus of the study and makes it more manageable.
• Time delimitations : Researchers may limit their study to a specific time period, such as a decade, a year, or a specific date range. This can be useful for studying trends over time or for comparing data from different time periods.
• Population delimitations : Researchers may limit their study to a specific population, such as a particular age group, gender, or ethnic group. This can help to ensure that the study is relevant to the population being studied.
• Data delimitations : Researchers may limit their study to specific types of data, such as survey responses, interviews, or archival records. This can help to ensure that the study is based on reliable and relevant data.
• Conceptual delimitations : Researchers may limit their study to specific concepts or variables, such as only studying the effects of a particular treatment on a specific outcome. This can help to ensure that the study is focused and clear.

Advantages of Delimitations

Some Advantages of Delimitations are as follows:

• Helps to focus the study: Delimitations help to narrow down the scope of the research and identify specific areas that need to be investigated. This helps to focus the study and ensures that the research is not too broad or too narrow.
• Defines the study population: Delimitations can help to define the population that will be studied. This can include age range, gender, geographical location, or any other factors that are relevant to the research. This helps to ensure that the study is more specific and targeted.
• Provides clarity: Delimitations help to provide clarity about the research study. By identifying the boundaries and limitations of the research, it helps to avoid confusion and ensures that the research is more understandable.
• Improves validity: Delimitations can help to improve the validity of the research by ensuring that the study is more focused and specific. This can help to ensure that the research is more accurate and reliable.
• Reduces bias: Delimitations can help to reduce bias by limiting the scope of the research. This can help to ensure that the research is more objective and unbiased.

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Scope and Delimitations – Explained & Example

• By DiscoverPhDs
• October 2, 2020

What Is Scope and Delimitation in Research?

The scope and delimitations of a thesis, dissertation or research paper define the topic and boundaries of the research problem to be investigated.

The scope details how in-depth your study is to explore the research question and the parameters in which it will operate in relation to the population and timeframe.

The delimitations of a study are the factors and variables not to be included in the investigation. In other words, they are the boundaries the researcher sets in terms of study duration, population size and type of participants, etc.

Difference Between Delimitations and Limitations

Delimitations refer to the boundaries of the research study, based on the researcher’s decision of what to include and what to exclude. They narrow your study to make it more manageable and relevant to what you are trying to prove.

Limitations relate to the validity and reliability of the study. They are characteristics of the research design or methodology that are out of your control but influence your research findings. Because of this, they determine the internal and external validity of your study and are considered potential weaknesses.

In other words, limitations are what the researcher cannot do (elements outside of their control) and delimitations are what the researcher will not do (elements outside of the boundaries they have set). Both are important because they help to put the research findings into context, and although they explain how the study is limited, they increase the credibility and validity of a research project.

Guidelines on How to Write a Scope

A good scope statement will answer the following six questions:

• Why – the general aims and objectives (purpose) of the research.
• What – the subject to be investigated, and the included variables.
• Where – the location or setting of the study, i.e. where the data will be gathered and to which entity the data will belong.
• When – the timeframe within which the data is to be collected.
• Who – the subject matter of the study and the population from which they will be selected. This population needs to be large enough to be able to make generalisations.
• How – how the research is to be conducted, including a description of the research design (e.g. whether it is experimental research, qualitative research or a case study), methodology, research tools and analysis techniques.

To make things as clear as possible, you should also state why specific variables were omitted from the research scope, and whether this was because it was a delimitation or a limitation. You should also explain why they could not be overcome with standard research methods backed up by scientific evidence.

How to Start Writing Your Study Scope

Use the below prompts as an effective way to start writing your scope:

• This study is to focus on…
• This study covers the…
• This study aims to…

Guidelines on How to Write Delimitations

Since the delimitation parameters are within the researcher’s control, readers need to know why they were set, what alternative options were available, and why these alternatives were rejected. For example, if you are collecting data that can be derived from three different but similar experiments, the reader needs to understand how and why you decided to select the one you have.

Your reasons should always be linked back to your research question, as all delimitations should result from trying to make your study more relevant to your scope. Therefore, the scope and delimitations are usually considered together when writing a paper.

How to Start Writing Your Study Delimitations

Use the below prompts as an effective way to start writing your study delimitations:

• This study does not cover…
• This study is limited to…
• The following has been excluded from this study…

Examples of Delimitation in Research

Examples of delimitations include:

• research objectives,
• research questions,
• research variables,
• target populations,
• statistical analysis techniques .

Examples of Limitations in Research

Examples of limitations include:

• Issues with sample and selection,
• Insufficient sample size, population traits or specific participants for statistical significance,
• Lack of previous research studies on the topic which has allowed for further analysis,
• Limitations in the technology/instruments used to collect your data,
• Limited financial resources and/or funding constraints.

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Scope and Delimitations in Research

Delimitations are the boundaries that the researcher sets in a research study, deciding what to include and what to exclude. They help to narrow down the study and make it more manageable and relevant to the research goal.

Updated on October 19, 2022

All scientific research has boundaries, whether or not the authors clearly explain them. Your study's scope and delimitations are the sections where you define the broader parameters and boundaries of your research.

The scope details what your study will explore, such as the target population, extent, or study duration. Delimitations are factors and variables not included in the study.

Scope and delimitations are not methodological shortcomings; they're always under your control. Discussing these is essential because doing so shows that your project is manageable and scientifically sound.

This article covers:

• What's meant by “scope” and “delimitations”
• Why these are integral components of every study
• How and where to actually write about scope and delimitations in your manuscript
• Examples of scope and delimitations from published studies

What is the scope in a research paper?

Simply put, the scope is the domain of your research. It describes the extent to which the research question will be explored in your study.

Articulating your study's scope early on helps you make your research question focused and realistic.

It also helps decide what data you need to collect (and, therefore, what data collection tools you need to design). Getting this right is vital for both academic articles and funding applications.

What are delimitations in a research paper?

Delimitations are those factors or aspects of the research area that you'll exclude from your research. The scope and delimitations of the study are intimately linked.

Essentially, delimitations form a more detailed and narrowed-down formulation of the scope in terms of exclusion. The delimitations explain what was (intentionally) not considered within the given piece of research.

Scope and delimitations examples

Use the following examples provided by our expert PhD editors as a reference when coming up with your own scope and delimitations.

Scope example

Your research question is, “What is the impact of bullying on the mental health of adolescents?” This topic, on its own, doesn't say much about what's being investigated.

The scope, for example, could encompass:

• Variables: “bullying” (dependent variable), “mental health” (independent variable), and ways of defining or measuring them
• Bullying type: Both face-to-face and cyberbullying
• Target population: Adolescents aged 12–17
• Geographical coverage: France or only one specific town in France

Delimitations example

Look back at the previous example.

Exploring the adverse effects of bullying on adolescents' mental health is a preliminary delimitation. This one was chosen from among many possible research questions (e.g., the impact of bullying on suicide rates, or children or adults).

Delimiting factors could include:

• Research design : Mixed-methods research, including thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews and statistical analysis of a survey
• Timeframe : Data collection to run for 3 months
• Population size : 100 survey participants; 15 interviewees
• Recruitment of participants : Quota sampling (aiming for specific portions of men, women, ethnic minority students etc.)

We can see that every choice you make in planning and conducting your research inevitably excludes other possible options.

What's the difference between limitations and delimitations?

Delimitations and limitations are entirely different, although they often get mixed up. These are the main differences:

This chart explains the difference between delimitations and limitations. Delimitations are the boundaries of the study while the limitations are the characteristics of the research design or methodology.

Delimitations encompass the elements outside of the boundaries you've set and depends on your decision of what yo include and exclude. On the flip side, limitations are the elements outside of your control, such as:

• limited financial resources
• unplanned work or expenses
• unexpected events (for example, the COVID-19 pandemic)
• time constraints
• lack of technology/instruments
• unavailable evidence or previous research on the topic

Delimitations involve narrowing your study to make it more manageable and relevant to what you're trying to prove. Limitations influence the validity and reliability of your research findings. Limitations are seen as potential weaknesses in your research.

Example of the differences

To clarify these differences, go back to the limitations of the earlier example.

Limitations could comprise:

• Sample size : Not large enough to provide generalizable conclusions.
• Sampling approach : Non-probability sampling has increased bias risk. For instance, the researchers might not manage to capture the experiences of ethnic minority students.
• Methodological pitfalls : Research participants from an urban area (Paris) are likely to be more advantaged than students in rural areas. A study exploring the latter's experiences will probably yield very different findings.

Where do you write the scope and delimitations, and why?

It can be surprisingly empowering to realize you're restricted when conducting scholarly research. But this realization also makes writing up your research easier to grasp and makes it easier to see its limits and the expectations placed on it. Properly revealing this information serves your field and the greater scientific community.

Openly (but briefly) acknowledge the scope and delimitations of your study early on. The Abstract and Introduction sections are good places to set the parameters of your paper.

Next, discuss the scope and delimitations in greater detail in the Methods section. You'll need to do this to justify your methodological approach and data collection instruments, as well as analyses

At this point, spell out why these delimitations were set. What alternative options did you consider? Why did you reject alternatives? What could your study not address?

Let's say you're gathering data that can be derived from different but related experiments. You must convince the reader that the one you selected best suits your research question.

Finally, a solid paper will return to the scope and delimitations in the Findings or Discussion section. Doing so helps readers contextualize and interpret findings because the study's scope and methods influence the results.

For instance, agricultural field experiments carried out under irrigated conditions yield different results from experiments carried out without irrigation.

Being transparent about the scope and any outstanding issues increases your research's credibility and objectivity. It helps other researchers replicate your study and advance scientific understanding of the same topic (e.g., by adopting a different approach).

How do you write the scope and delimitations?

Define the scope and delimitations of your study before collecting data. This is critical. This step should be part of your research project planning.

Answering the following questions will help you address your scope and delimitations clearly and convincingly.

• What are your study's aims and objectives?
• Why did you carry out the study?
• What was the exact topic under investigation?
• Which factors and variables were included? And state why specific variables were omitted from the research scope.
• Who or what did the study explore? What was the target population?
• What was the study's location (geographical area) or setting (e.g., laboratory)?
• What was the timeframe within which you collected your data ?
• Consider a study exploring the differences between identical twins who were raised together versus identical twins who weren't. The data collection might span 5, 10, or more years.
• A study exploring a new immigration policy will cover the period since the policy came into effect and the present moment.
• How was the research conducted (research design)?
• Experimental research, qualitative, quantitative, or mixed-methods research, literature review, etc.
• What data collection tools and analysis techniques were used? e.g., If you chose quantitative methods, which statistical analysis techniques and software did you use?
• What did you find?
• What did you conclude?

Useful vocabulary for scope and delimitations

When explaining both the scope and delimitations, it's important to use the proper language to clearly state each.

For the scope , use the following language:

• This study focuses on/considers/investigates/covers the following:
• This study aims to . . . / Here, we aim to show . . . / In this study, we . . .
• The overall objective of the research is . . . / Our objective is to . . .

When stating the delimitations, use the following language:

• This [ . . . ] will not be the focus, for it has been frequently and exhaustively discusses in earlier studies.
• To review the [ . . . ] is a task that lies outside the scope of this study.
• The following [ . . . ] has been excluded from this study . . .
• This study does not provide a complete literature review of [ . . . ]. Instead, it draws on selected pertinent studies [ . . . ]

Analysis of a published scope

In one example, Simione and Gnagnarella (2020) compared the psychological and behavioral impact of COVID-19 on Italy's health workers and general population.

Here's a breakdown of the study's scope into smaller chunks and discussion of what works and why.

Also notable is that this study's delimitations include references to:

• Recruitment of participants: Convenience sampling
• Demographic characteristics of study participants: Age, sex, etc.
• Measurements methods: E.g., the death anxiety scale of the Existential Concerns Questionnaire (ECQ; van Bruggen et al., 2017) etc.
• Data analysis tool: The statistical software R

Analysis of published scope and delimitations

Scope of the study : Johnsson et al. (2019) explored the effect of in-hospital physiotherapy on postoperative physical capacity, physical activity, and lung function in patients who underwent lung cancer surgery.

The delimitations narrowed down the scope as follows:

Refine your scope, delimitations, and scientific English

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Decoding the Scope and Delimitations of the Study in Research

Scope and delimitations of the study are two essential elements of a research paper or thesis that help to contextualize and convey the focus and boundaries of a research study. This allows readers to understand the research focus and the kind of information to expect. For researchers, especially students and early career researchers, understanding the meaning and purpose of the scope and delimitation of a study is crucial to craft a well-defined and impactful research project. In this article, we delve into the core concepts of scope and delimitation in a study, providing insightful examples, and practical tips on how to effectively incorporate them into your research endeavors.

Table of Contents

What is scope and delimitation in research

The scope of a research paper explains the context and framework for the study, outlines the extent, variables, or dimensions that will be investigated, and provides details of the parameters within which the study is conducted. Delimitations in research , on the other hand, refer to the limitations imposed on the study. It identifies aspects of the topic that will not be covered in the research, conveys why these choices were made, and how this will affect the outcome of the research. By narrowing down the scope and defining delimitations, researchers can ensure focused research and avoid pitfalls, which ensures the study remains feasible and attainable.

Example of scope and delimitation of a study

A researcher might want to study the effects of regular physical exercise on the health of senior citizens. This would be the broad scope of the study, after which the researcher would refine the scope by excluding specific groups of senior citizens, perhaps based on their age, gender, geographical location, cultural influences, and sample sizes. These then, would form the delimitations of the study; in other words, elements that describe the boundaries of the research.

The purpose of scope and delimitation in a study

The purpose of scope and delimitation in a study is to establish clear boundaries and focus for the research. This allows researchers to avoid ambiguity, set achievable objectives, and manage their project efficiently, ultimately leading to more credible and meaningful findings in their study. The scope and delimitation of a study serve several important purposes, including:

• Establishing clarity: Clearly defining the scope and delimitation of a study helps researchers and readers alike understand the boundaries of the investigation and what to expect from it.
• Focus and relevance: By setting the scope, researchers can concentrate on specific research questions, preventing the study from becoming too broad or irrelevant.
• Feasibility: Delimitations of the study prevent researchers from taking on too unrealistic or unmanageable tasks, making the research more achievable.
• Avoiding ambiguity: A well-defined scope and delimitation of the study minimizes any confusion or misinterpretation regarding the research objectives and methods.

Given the importance of both the scope and delimitations of a study, it is imperative to ensure that they are mentioned early on in the research manuscript. Most experts agree that the scope of research should be mentioned as part of the introduction and the delimitations must be mentioned as part of the methods section. Now that we’ve covered the scope and delimitation meaning and purpose, we look at how to write each of these sections.

How to write the scope of the study in research

When writing the scope of the study, remain focused on what you hope to achieve. Broadening the scope too much might make it too generic while narrowing it down too much may affect the way it would be interpreted. Ensure the scope of the study is clear, concise and accurate. Conduct a thorough literature review to understand existing literature, which will help identify gaps and refine the scope of your study.

It is helpful if you structure the scope in a way that answers the Six Ws – questions whose answers are considered basic in information-gathering.

Why: State the purpose of the research by articulating the research objectives and questions you aim to address in your study.

What: Outline the specific topic to be studied, while mentioning the variables, concepts, or aspects central to your research; these will define the extent of your study.

Where: Provide the setting or geographical location where the research study will be conducted.

When : Mention the specific timeframe within which the research data will be collected.

Who : Specify the sample size for the study and the profile of the population they will be drawn from.

How : Explain the research methodology, research design, and tools and analysis techniques.

How to write the delimitations of a study in research

When writing the delimitations of the study, researchers must provide all the details clearly and precisely. Writing the delimitations of the study requires a systematic approach to narrow down the research’s focus and establish boundaries. Follow these steps to craft delimitations effectively:

• Clearly understand the research objectives and questions you intend to address in your study.
• Conduct a comprehensive literature review to identify gaps and areas that have already been extensively covered. This helps to avoid redundancies and home in on a unique issue.
• Clearly state what aspects, variables, or factors you will be excluding in your research; mention available alternatives, if any, and why these alternatives were rejected.
• Explain how you the delimitations were set, and they contribute to the feasibility and relevance of your study, and how they align with the research objectives.
• Be sure to acknowledge limitations in your research, such as constraints related to time, resources, or data availability.

Being transparent ensures credibility, while explaining why the delimitations of your study could not be overcome with standard research methods backed up by scientific evidence can help readers understand the context better.

Differentiating between delimitations and limitations

Most early career researchers get confused and often use these two terms interchangeably which is wrong. Delimitations of a study refer to the set boundaries and specific parameters within which the research is carried out. They help narrow down your focus and makes it more relevant to what you are trying to prove.

Meanwhile, limitations in a study refer to the validity and reliability of the research being conducted. They are those elements of your study that are usually out of your immediate control but are still able to affect your findings in some way. In other words, limitation are potential weaknesses of your research.

In conclusion, scope and delimitation of a study are vital elements that shape the trajectory of your research study. The above explanations will have hopefully helped you better understand the scope and delimitations meaning, purpose, and importance in crafting focused, feasible, and impactful research studies. Be sure to follow the simple techniques to write the scope and delimitations of the study to embark on your research journey with clarity and confidence. Happy researching!

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What Is Delimitation in Research? Examples of Scope & Delimitation

When you’re planning the launch of a study or report, you’ll need to make some important decisions to limit the people you’re researching and the ways you’ll conduct your study. Every credible research study has restrictions and limits in what it covers, and these boundaries are articulated through a research assignment’s delimitations and scope.

Delimitation is the process of drawing boundaries for or fixing the limits of something. Researchers identify and articulate delimitations to explain what their studies will and won’t cover while also defining the methodologies and approaches they’ll use to carry out their studies.

Delimitations help inform the overall scope, which is how deeply a paper, dissertation or study delves into a research question. A scope is the extent of the area or subject matter that something deals with. Often, a well-defined scope addresses the following standard questions:

• Why: What is the point of this research?
• What: What topic is being investigated?
• Where: Where is this research occurring and why?
• When: What is the timeline of this research?
• Who: What are the demographics of the study’s subjects?
• How: What is the methodology of this research (for example, qualitative versus quantitative, which we’ll get into in a bit)?

The key is to explore and clearly define boundaries and barriers on the front end, which will formally become your research study’s delimitations and overall scope. We’ll walk you through how you can identify your study’s delimitations and provide an overview of the important role they play in shaping the overall scope of your research.

Differences Between Limitations and Delimitations

Limitations and delimitations in research both clearly define the boundaries of the research problem that you’re studying. The primary difference between limitations and delimitations comes down to whether the researcher sets the boundaries or those boundaries come from unforeseen factors outside of the researcher’s control.

Delimitations involve a researcher establishing boundaries, whereas limitations are about identifying weaknesses in or barriers to carrying out the study as the researcher originally intended. Limitations disclose what a researcher cannot do (factors outside their control), and delimitations disclose what a researcher won’t do (factors that they chose not to focus on within the scope of the study).

For example, in a study about the impact of arts integration on proficiency levels within an elementary school classroom of 30 students, a limitation may be that the researcher only received parental consent for 25 students to participate. Additional examples of limitations are a lack of previous research on the subject to analyze and work from, a lack of access to the right tools and technology to collect data, and a lack of financial resources to sustain the research. Unlike researcher-defined delimitations, these limitations are initially unforeseen and outside of the researcher’s control.

An example of a delimitation, on the other hand, would be if the researcher opted to focus on third graders and exclude students without special needs from the study. A delimitation tells readers whom the study will cover. In this example, that’s third graders who utilize special education accommodations. The delimitations can also explain how a study is done, which might be through conducting student interviews and an analysis of test results before and after the integration of the arts into the special needs curriculum. Lastly, delimitations provide a picture of where a researcher conducts the study. In the case of this example, the delimitations could include the state, school district and specific school participating in the study.

Examples of Delimitations in Research

Research delimitations can shape and inform a study’s research objectives, methodology, variables and target populations. They can potentially prevent certain outcomes by focusing on sample sizes or population demographics, or they can help in achieving statistical significance. Setting these boundaries helps narrow a researcher’s focus area while increasing the relevance and specificity of the study.

In the example above, the delimitation that narrows the study only to third graders who use special education services ends up removing some potential variables that could impact the outcome of the research. It makes the scope more specific and more relevant. It also opens the door to future research on whether the results are the same for all third graders. Clear delimitations serve research practitioners by defining clear boundaries for what readers and reviewers can expect to find out about in key areas of the study, including where, how and with whom the study is carried out.

Scope and Delimitation in Quantitative Research

Qualitative research involves collecting and analyzing data that aren’t easily reduced to numbers, such as the study of human behaviors or perceptions within specific social environments. Quantitative research, meanwhile, involves collecting numerical data. These data can be helpful in measuring patterns and averages and in testing theories.

In the previous example of a study that reviews arts integration within a classroom, say the scope shifted from measuring changes in average student proficiency levels to measuring student perception of the overall learning experience. This would shift the study from quantitative to qualitative.

Defining the research approach, or the way in which the researcher conducts the study, is a delimitation. In a qualitative research study within an academic environment, a researcher may choose to administer a survey or conduct interviews for data collection around the students’ perceptions of the learning experience. If the study was intended to collect quantitative data as opposed to qualitative, the data-collection approach might instead involve measuring the numeric change in student test scores.

Quantitative research still uses delimitations to explain what the data will reveal and what they won’t. This gives others a reasonable expectation of what your data will explain, how you’ve analyzed it and how accurate your measurements were.

Guidelines in Writing About Scope and Delimitation

You should include a discussion of delimitations in the introduction to your research study, thesis or dissertation. Delimitations, limitations and overall scope are often made through statements like:

• This study covers…
• This study does not cover…
• This study is limited to…
• This study focuses on…
• The following has been excluded from this study…

Once you explicitly state what your delimitations are, you should also clearly list the other options available and the reasons why you did not pursue those alternative approaches. All reasoning should connect back to your research study, outlining the relevance of the study and explaining how and why you narrowed your focus. There’s nothing inherently moral about delimitations; they’re not good or bad, so your tone in writing them should reflect that. This is about being objective and about transparently and explicitly sharing what readers can expect from your research study.

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Research Limitations & Delimitations

What they are and how they’re different (with examples)

By: Derek Jansen (MBA) | Expert Reviewed By: David Phair (PhD) | September 2022

If you’re new to the world of research, you’ve probably heard the terms “ research limitations ” and “ research delimitations ” being thrown around, often quite loosely. In this post, we’ll unpack what both of these mean, how they’re similar and how they’re different – so that you can write up these sections the right way.

Overview: Limitations vs Delimitations

• Are they the same?
• What are research limitations
• What are research delimitations
• Limitations vs delimitations

First things first…

Let’s start with the most important takeaway point of this post – research limitations and research delimitations are not the same – but they are related to each other (we’ll unpack that a little later). So, if you hear someone using these two words interchangeably, be sure to share this post with them!

Research Limitations

Research limitations are, at the simplest level, the weaknesses of the study , based on factors that are often outside of your control as the researcher. These factors could include things like time , access to funding, equipment , data or participants . For example, if you weren’t able to access a random sample of participants for your study and had to adopt a convenience sampling strategy instead, that would impact the generalizability of your findings and therefore reflect a limitation of your study.

Research limitations can also emerge from the research design itself . For example, if you were undertaking a correlational study, you wouldn’t be able to infer causality (since correlation doesn’t mean certain causation). Similarly, if you utilised online surveys to collect data from your participants, you naturally wouldn’t be able to get the same degree of rich data that you would from in-person interviews .

Simply put, research limitations reflect the shortcomings of a study , based on practical (or theoretical) constraints that the researcher faced. These shortcomings limit what you can conclude from a study, but at the same time, present a foundation for future research . Importantly, all research has limitations , so there’s no need to hide anything here – as long as you discuss how the limitations might affect your findings, it’s all good.

Research Delimitations

Alright, now that we’ve unpacked the limitations, let’s move on to the delimitations .

Research delimitations are similar to limitations in that they also “ limit ” the study, but their focus is entirely different. Specifically, the delimitations of a study refer to the scope of the research aims and research questions . In other words, delimitations reflect the choices you, as the researcher, intentionally make in terms of what you will and won’t try to achieve with your study. In other words, what your research aims and research questions will and won’t include.

As we’ve spoken about many times before, it’s important to have a tight, narrow focus for your research, so that you can dive deeply into your topic, apply your energy to one specific area and develop meaningful insights. If you have an overly broad scope or unfocused topic, your research will often pull in multiple, even opposing directions, and you’ll just land up with a muddy mess of findings .

So, the delimitations section is where you’ll clearly state what your research aims and research questions will focus on – and just as importantly, what they will exclude . For example, you might investigate a widespread phenomenon, but choose to focus your study on a specific age group, ethnicity or gender. Similarly, your study may focus exclusively on one country, city or even organization. As long as the scope is well justified (in other words, it represents a novel, valuable research topic), this is perfectly acceptable – in fact, it’s essential. Remember, focus is your friend.

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Conclusion: Limitations vs Delimitations

Ok, so let’s recap.

Research limitations and research delimitations are related in that they both refer to “limits” within a study. But, they are distinctly different. Limitations reflect the shortcomings of your study, based on practical or theoretical constraints that you faced.

Contrasted to that, delimitations reflect the choices that you made in terms of the focus and scope of your research aims and research questions. If you want to learn more about research aims and questions, you can check out this video post , where we unpack those concepts in detail.

Psst... there’s more!

This post was based on one of our popular Research Bootcamps . If you're working on a research project, you'll definitely want to check this out ...

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18 Comments

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I would like you to assist me please. If in my Research, I interviewed some participants and I submitted Questionnaires to other participants to answered to the questions, in the same organization, Is this a Qualitative methodology , a Quantitative Methodology or is it a Mixture Methodology I have used in my research? Please help me

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Setting Limits and Focusing Your Study: Exploring scope and delimitation

As a researcher, it can be easy to get lost in the vast expanse of information and data available. Thus, when starting a research project, one of the most important things to consider is the scope and delimitation of the study. Setting limits and focusing your study is essential to ensure that the research project is manageable, relevant, and able to produce useful results. In this article, we will explore the importance of setting limits and focusing your study through an in-depth analysis of scope and delimitation.

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Table of Contents

Scope and Delimitation – Definition and difference

Scope refers to the range of the research project and the study limitations set in place to define the boundaries of the project and delimitation refers to the specific aspects of the research project that the study will focus on.

In simpler words, scope is the breadth of your study, while delimitation is the depth of your study.

Scope and delimitation are both essential components of a research project, and they are often confused with one another. The scope defines the parameters of the study, while delimitation sets the boundaries within those parameters. The scope and delimitation of a study are usually established early on in the research process and guide the rest of the project.

Types of Scope and Delimitation

Significance of Scope and Delimitation

Setting limits and focusing your study through scope and delimitation is crucial for the following reasons:

• It allows researchers to define the research project’s boundaries, enabling them to focus on specific aspects of the project. This focus makes it easier to gather relevant data and avoid unnecessary information that might complicate the study’s results.
• Setting limits and focusing your study through scope and delimitation enables the researcher to stay within the parameters of the project’s resources.
• A well-defined scope and delimitation ensure that the research project can be completed within the available resources, such as time and budget, while still achieving the project’s objectives.

5 Steps to Setting Limits and Defining the Scope and Delimitation of Your Study

There are a few steps that you can take to set limits and focus your study.

1. Identify your research question or topic

The first step is to identify what you are interested in learning about. The research question should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). Once you have a research question or topic, you can start to narrow your focus.

2. Consider the key terms or concepts related to your topic

What are the important terms or concepts that you need to understand in order to answer your research question? Consider all available resources, such as time, budget, and data availability, when setting scope and delimitation.

The scope and delimitation should be established within the parameters of the available resources. Once you have identified the key terms or concepts, you can start to develop a glossary or list of definitions.

3. Consider the different perspectives on your topic

There are often different perspectives on any given topic. Get feedback on the proposed scope and delimitation. Advisors can provide guidance on the feasibility of the study and offer suggestions for improvement.

It is important to consider all of the different perspectives in order to get a well-rounded understanding of your topic.

4. Narrow your focus

Be specific and concise when setting scope and delimitation. The parameters of the study should be clearly defined to avoid ambiguity and ensure that the study is focused on relevant aspects of the research question.

This means deciding which aspects of your topic you will focus on and which aspects you will eliminate.

5. Develop the final research plan

Revisit and revise the scope and delimitation as needed. As the research project progresses, the scope and delimitation may need to be adjusted to ensure that the study remains focused on the research question and can produce useful results. This plan should include your research goals, methods, and timeline.

Examples of Scope and Delimitation

To better understand scope and delimitation, let us consider two examples of research questions and how scope and delimitation would apply to them.

Research question: What are the effects of social media on mental health?

Scope: The scope of the study will focus on the impact of social media on the mental health of young adults aged 18-24 in the United States.

Delimitation: The study will specifically examine the following aspects of social media: frequency of use, types of social media platforms used, and the impact of social media on self-esteem and body image.

Research question: What are the factors that influence employee job satisfaction in the healthcare industry?

Scope: The scope of the study will focus on employee job satisfaction in the healthcare industry in the United States.

Delimitation: The study will specifically examine the following factors that influence employee job satisfaction: salary, work-life balance, job security, and opportunities for career growth.

Setting limits and defining the scope and delimitation of a research study is essential to conducting effective research. By doing so, researchers can ensure that their study is focused, manageable, and feasible within the given time frame and resources. It can also help to identify areas that require further study, providing a foundation for future research.

So, the next time you embark on a research project, don’t forget to set clear limits and define the scope and delimitation of your study. It may seem like a tedious task, but it can ultimately lead to more meaningful and impactful research. And if you still can’t find a solution, reach out to Enago Academy using #AskEnago and tag @EnagoAcademy on Twitter , Facebook , and Quora .

Frequently Asked Questions

The scope in research refers to the boundaries and extent of a study, defining its specific objectives, target population, variables, methods, and limitations, which helps researchers focus and provide a clear understanding of what will be investigated.

Delimitation in research defines the specific boundaries and limitations of a study, such as geographical, temporal, or conceptual constraints, outlining what will be excluded or not within the scope of investigation, providing clarity and ensuring the study remains focused and manageable.

To write a scope; 1. Clearly define research objectives. 2. Identify specific research questions. 3. Determine the target population for the study. 4. Outline the variables to be investigated. 5. Establish limitations and constraints. 6. Set boundaries and extent of the investigation. 7. Ensure focus, clarity, and manageability. 8. Provide context for the research project.

To write delimitations; 1. Identify geographical boundaries or constraints. 2. Define the specific time period or timeframe of the study. 3. Specify the sample size or selection criteria. 4. Clarify any demographic limitations (e.g., age, gender, occupation). 5. Address any limitations related to data collection methods. 6. Consider limitations regarding the availability of resources or data. 7. Exclude specific variables or factors from the scope of the study. 8. Clearly state any conceptual boundaries or theoretical frameworks. 9. Acknowledge any potential biases or constraints in the research design. 10. Ensure that the delimitations provide a clear focus and scope for the study.

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Exploring Scope and Delimitation in Academic Research

Academic research is a meticulous process that requires precise planning and clear boundaries. Two pivotal components in this process are the scope and delimitations of the study. The definitions and establishment of these parameters are instrumental in ensuring that the research is effective, manageable, and yields relevant results.

The "scope" of a research project refers to the areas that the study will cover. It is the breadth and depth of the investigation. It defines the subject matter, the geographical location, the time frame, and the issues that the study will explore. Essentially, the scope delineates what the researcher aims to cover in the study.

On the other hand, "delimitations" are the boundaries or limitations set by the researcher. They define what the study will not include. Delimitations could involve the choice of research methodology , the selection of respondents, the duration of the study, and more. They help in confining the study to a manageable size while excluding peripheral elements.

Understanding and correctly implementing scope and delimitations are vital to ensuring your research is well-defined and focused, facilitating higher accuracy and relevancy in your findings.

Importance of scope in research

"Scope" in research refers to the comprehensive extent of study—it outlines the parameters of what will be explored and addressed. It defines the topic of the research , the geographical region under study, the timeframe considered, and the issues that the study will address. The scope of a research project is vital because it determines the depth and breadth of your investigation.

Defining the scope of research is a fundamental step in the research process for several reasons. First, it provides a roadmap for the study, giving the researcher clear guidelines about what to include and exclude. Without a well-defined scope, research can become unmanageably vast or lose its focus.

Second, the scope ensures the research's relevance and applicability. It helps the researcher maintain a tight focus on the study's central question , ensuring that all aspects of the research contribute to answering this question. This focus aids in avoiding irrelevant diversions that could dilute the final conclusions.

Finally, a well-defined scope can help ensure the efficient use of resources. Research involves considerable time, effort, and often financial resources. By providing clear boundaries, the scope ensures these resources are utilized effectively without wasted effort on peripheral issues.

Suppose a research study is looking at the impacts of social media usage on mental health. If the scope is too broad—like examining all social media platforms' effects on all demographic groups worldwide—then the research can quickly become unwieldy and hard to manage. It would involve vast amounts of data, requiring considerable time, resources, and computational power to analyze effectively.

However, if the scope is narrowed down—such as investigating the impact of Instagram usage on the mental health of teenagers in a specific city over the past five years—the research becomes far more manageable. This specific focus allows for a more in-depth analysis and likely will provide more meaningful, actionable results. This example illustrates the importance of appropriately defining the scope of research for its successful execution.

Determining the scope of your research

Setting the scope of your research project is a critical and delicate task. Below are steps, tips, and common mistakes to avoid when determining the scope of your research:

Steps to define the scope

• Identify Your Topic: The first step involves identifying and understanding your research topic. This knowledge will serve as a basis for determining the breadth and depth of your study.
• Define Your Research Questions: The research questions are the heart of your study. They will help you determine the specific areas your research should cover.
• Establish Boundaries: Clearly establish the geographical, temporal, and topical boundaries of your research. These boundaries will guide the range of your study.
• Choose Your Methodology: Decide on the research methods you will use as these will directly impact the scope of your study.

Tips for a manageable scope

• Stay Focused: Stay concentrated on your research questions. Do not stray into areas that aren't directly relevant.
• Be Realistic: Consider the resources (time, money, manpower) available. Ensure your scope is feasible given these resources.
• Seek Guidance: Consult with your academic advisor or peers for feedback on your proposed scope.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Overly Broad Scope: Avoid setting an overly broad scope which could result in an unmanageable and unfocused study.
• Too Narrow Scope: Conversely, a scope that is too narrow may miss important aspects of the research topic.
• Ignoring Resources: Not taking into account available resources when setting the scope can lead to a project that is impossible to complete.

Defining the scope of your research is a delicate balance, requiring careful consideration of your research questions, resources, and the depth and breadth of investigation needed to answer these questions effectively.

Importance of delimitations in research

In the context of academic research, "delimitations" refers to the choices made by the researcher which define the boundaries of the study. These are the variables that lead the researcher to narrow the scope of the study from its potential vastness to a manageable size.

Delimitations might include the geographic area where the study is confined, the participants involved in the study, the methodology used, the time period considered, or the specific incidents or aspects the study will focus on. Essentially, delimitations are the self-imposed limitations on the scope of the study.

Defining the delimitations of a research project is crucial for several reasons. Firstly, they establish the context or setting in which the study occurs. This, in turn, allows for the work to be reproduced in a similar context for verification or refutation in future studies.

Secondly, delimitations provide a way to narrow the scope of the research to a manageable size, thus avoiding the pitfall of an overly ambitious project. They help researchers to stay focused on the main research questions and prevent diversion into irrelevant aspects.

Finally, clearly defined delimitations enhance the credibility of the research. They offer transparency about the research design and methodology, which adds to the validity of the results.

For instance, in a research study examining the impact of technology on student achievement in a certain district, examples of delimitations might include focusing only on public schools, considering only high school students, and confining the study to a particular school year. These choices help to focus the research and ensure its manageability. Therefore, delimitations play a pivotal role in structuring and guiding an effective and efficient research study.

Setting delimitations for your research

Establishing appropriate delimitations for your research project is an important part of research design. Here are some steps, guidelines, and common mistakes to consider when setting your research delimitations:

Steps to establish delimitations

• Identify the boundaries: Begin by deciding the geographical region, time period, and subject matter your research will cover.
• Determine Your Research Population: Identify the specific population your study will focus on. This could be based on age, profession, geographical location, etc.
• Choose Your Research Methods: Decide the specific methods you will use to collect and analyze data, as these decisions will also set limitations on your study.

Guidelines for choosing delimitations

• Align with Your Research Objectives: The delimitations should be in line with your research questions and objectives. They should help focus your study without detracting from its goals.
• Be Practical: Consider the resources available, including time, funds, and access to data. Your delimitations should be feasible given these constraints.
• Seek Input: Consult with your research advisor or peers. Their feedback can help ensure your delimitations are appropriate and well thought out.

Common errors to avoid:

• Unrealistic Delimitations: Be wary of setting delimitations that are too stringent or ambitious to be feasible given your resources and timeframe.
• Undefined Delimitations: Avoid leaving your delimitations vague or undefined. This can lead to scope creep, where your project expands beyond its initial plan, making it unmanageable.
• Ignoring Delimitations: Once set, stick to your delimitations. Deviating from them can lead to a loss of focus and can compromise the integrity of your results.

Setting delimitations is a crucial step in research planning. Properly defined delimitations can make your research project more manageable, maintain your focus, and ensure the effective use of your resources.

The interplay between scope and delimitations

The relationship between scope and delimitations in academic research is a dynamic and interdependent one. Each aspect serves to shape and refine the other, ultimately leading to a focused, feasible, and effective research design.

The scope of a research project describes the breadth and depth of the investigation—what it aims to cover and how far it intends to delve into the subject matter. The delimitations, on the other hand, identify the boundaries and constraints of the study—what it will not cover.

As such, the scope and delimitations of a research study are intimately connected. When the scope of a study is broad, the delimitations must be carefully considered to ensure the project remains manageable and focused. Conversely, when the scope is narrow, the delimitations might be less constraining, but they still play a critical role in defining the specificity of the research.

Balancing the scope and delimitations is crucial for an efficient research design. Too broad a scope without carefully defined delimitations can lead to a study that is unwieldy and lacks depth. On the other hand, a very narrow scope with overly rigid delimitations might result in a study that overlooks important aspects of the research topic.

Thus, researchers must strive to maintain a balance—establishing a scope that is wide enough to fully explore the research topic, but also setting appropriate delimitations to ensure the study remains feasible and focused. In doing so, the research will be well-structured and yield meaningful, relevant findings.

Role of scope and delimitations in research validity

Scope and delimitations are fundamental aspects of research design that directly influence the validity, reliability, and replicability of a study.

Research validity refers to the degree to which a study accurately reflects or measures the concept that the researcher intends to investigate. A well-defined scope is critical to research validity because it clearly delineates what the study will cover. This clear definition ensures that the research focuses on relevant aspects of the topic and that the findings accurately reflect the concept under investigation.

Similarly, carefully thought-out delimitations contribute to research validity by identifying what the study will not cover. This clarity helps to prevent the study from straying into irrelevant areas, ensuring that the research stays focused and relevant.

In addition to contributing to research validity, scope and delimitations also influence the reliability and replicability of a study. Reliability refers to the consistency of a study's results, while replicability refers to the ability of other researchers to repeat the study and obtain similar results.

A clearly defined scope makes a study more reliable by providing a detailed outline of the areas covered by the research. This clarity makes it more likely that the study will produce consistent results. Moreover, clearly defined delimitations enhance the replicability of a study by providing explicit boundaries for the research, which makes it easier for other researchers to repeat the study in a similar context.

In summary, a well-defined scope and carefully thought-out delimitations contribute significantly to the validity, reliability, and replicability of academic research. They ensure that the research is focused, that the findings are relevant and accurate, and that the study can be reliably repeated by other researchers.

Examples of scope and delimitation in well-known research

• The Milgram Experiment: Stanley Milgram's famous psychology experiment sought to understand obedience to authority figures. The scope of this study was clearly defined—it focused on how far individuals would go in obeying an instruction if it involved harming another person. However, delimitations were set to ensure manageability. Participants were delimited to male individuals, and the experiment was confined to a controlled laboratory setting. These delimitations allowed Milgram to manage the research effectively while maintaining the depth of his study on human behavior.
• The Framingham Heart Study: This ongoing cardiovascular study began in 1948 and is aimed at identifying common factors that contribute to cardiovascular disease. The scope of the research is broad, covering many aspects of lifestyle, medical history, and physical characteristics. However, the study set clear delimitations: it initially only involved adult residents of Framingham, Massachusetts. This geographical delimitation made this broad-scope study manageable and eventually yielded influential results that shaped our understanding of heart disease.
• The Marshmallow Test: This well-known study by Walter Mischel explored delayed gratification in children. The scope was clearly defined: the study aimed to understand the ability of children to delay gratification and how it related to future success. The delimitations of the study included the age of the participants (preschool children), the setting (a controlled experiment with a treat), and the measure of future success (academic achievement, ability to cope with stress, etc.). These delimitations helped keep the study focused and manageable.

In all these examples, the researchers set a clear scope to outline the focus of their studies and used delimitations to restrict the boundaries. This balance between scope and delimitation was key in conducting successful and influential research.

In academic research, defining the scope and delimitations is a pivotal step in designing a robust and effective study. The scope outlines the breadth and depth of the investigation, offering a clear direction for the research. Meanwhile, delimitations set the boundaries of the study, ensuring that the research remains focused and manageable. Together, they play a crucial role in enhancing the validity, reliability, and replicability of a study.

Understanding the interplay between scope and delimitations is key to conducting efficient research. A well-defined scope paired with thoughtfully set delimitations contribute to a study's feasibility and its potential to yield meaningful and applicable results. Mistakes in setting the scope and delimitations can lead to unwieldy, unfocused research or a study that overlooks important aspects of a research question.

Reviewing famous studies, like the Milgram Experiment, the Framingham Heart Study, and the Marshmallow Test, we observe how a balanced approach to setting scope and delimitations can result in influential and valuable findings. Therefore, researchers should give careful thought to defining the scope and delimitations of their studies, keeping in mind their research questions, available resources, and the need for balance between breadth and focus. By doing so, they pave the way for successful and impactful research outcomes.

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Home » Blog » Research Delimitation: Meaning and Why You Should Consider

Research Delimitation: Meaning and Why You Should Consider

Table of Contents

Research Delimitation

Research delimitation means, focus on concrete terms in our area of ​​interest, specify its scope, determine its limits. That is, taking the research problem from a very large situation to a concrete reality, easy to handle.

Academics have commonly agreed that the delimitation of research will have to be made in terms of time and space, to place our problem in a defined and homogeneous context. In such a way, delimiting a research means specifying in concrete terms our areas of interest in the search, establishing its scope, and deciding the boundaries of space, time, and circumstances that we will impose on our study. The extent that the phenomenon under study is formulated and delimited determines a high percent of the researcher’s chances of not getting lost in the research. It is easier to work in specific situations than general ones.

How to delimit research

When the student intends to research, the process of delimiting the topic to be addressed requires that the academic be attentive to the main theoretical discussions present within his course.

There are always certain subjects that students tend to focus more on, whether due to the ease factor or to the topics covered in curricular components or scientific research that are sympathetic to the students’ ideas.

The recommendation is that students stay on these thematic lines that are familiar to them, which truly attract them to the development of their research work. However, the delimitation must establish the limits of the investigation in terms of space, time, universe, and content. Below are some common ways to delimit a research.

Spatial Delimitation: It refers to the geographical and/or spatial area where the research will be carried out.

Temporal Delimitation: Refers to the period selected to carry out the investigation. Choose which period on this topic you will focus on. It is the stage to determine the period and the time you will research. Take a subject and narrow it down until you reach a point where it is possible to research and work on it.

Delimitation of the sample size: This item refers to the population, units, sector in which some techniques will be applied in the collection of information. Responds to those who, in other words, units of analysis to be investigated.

Content Delimitation: Refers to the specific aspect of the topic that you want to investigate. Answer what specific aspects will be studied. For example, in a law research, it would be essential to delimit the content of the right to know when it is limiting the right, and if this limitation is constitutional. The limitations on rights are those established by the Constitution or that it authorizes the legislator to do so, limiting the right with constitutive effect.

From the above, we can see that the delimitation must clarify in particular that person, materials, situations, factors, and causes that will be considered or not.

Importance of delimiting the problem

There are several aspects that a research can present, according to which a series of parameters can be developed, which will help the researcher to correctly generate the study and offer the desired results. Thus, as one of the most preponderant aspects that all research presents are summarized in the problem, and this is the centre from which all the research starts. It marks the beginning of the study and positions the guidelines that must be followed. But for all this to be possible, it is necessary that according to the problem certain aspects must be taken into consideration, such as its correct delimitation, let us see in the next section what delimiting research is about or what it consists of.

Concept of problem delimitation

As is well known, in the area of ​​knowledge, a term and its elements cannot be established or described without first having established a concept. That is why you must know what the delimitation of the problem is about, to understand its importance.

To delimit the problem is to proceed to establish the limits according to which it will be treated and evaluated, that is, to specify what is the field of action according to which the expert will work.

Like it has been mentioned earlier, this field of action has been delimited by three aspects, which is the temporal one, that is, it must establish the time during which the study will be carried out or the time during which the phenomenon will be contemplated, in such a way that it is conceived that no investigation is eternal.

On the other hand, a spatial delimitation must be carried out, which contemplates a series of conditions, according to which the establishment of the space according to which the study will be carried out must be carried out, that is, the research area must be indicated. This seeks to establish the limits of the study, make it specific and not extensive, to determine the space in which the data will be collected and worked on.

And finally, if the research contemplates it and is appropriate, the population delimitation must be carried out, that is, the subjects must be specified, according to which the research will proceed, that is, the people with the specific characteristics that will be studied.

The relevance of delimiting the problem

As you may have seen from the concept itself, proceeding to establish the limits of the investigation is necessary, since they will provide the researcher with the parameters according to which it should proceed. That is to say, the delimitation of the problem is in itself, the delimitation of the research, understanding that it contributes to keeping the study at bay, within the levels of research assumed and contemplated.

In any case, it must be understood that establishing the study parameters serve to maintain the investigative thread, between logic, coherence, and congruence. Pillars that will help the expert to carry out an objective investigation, which will not suffer from any act that may affect the results, thus allowing to draw truthful conclusions that are useful for the area and the scientific community.

In the same way, it is necessary to understand that reality is one, while the limits of the researcher himself are others, which must be manifested in the investigation, starting from the fact that the human mind can assume a problem at the same time. For this reason, it must be considered that the delimitation of the research keeps in itself the relevance that the student can, through it, establish a relationship harmoniously with the phenomenon and be able to treat it with the available tools.

In Conclusion

In conclusion, it is important not to produce themes that are too broad and complex, as these leads, in the vast majority of cases, to works with superficial theses and of little scientific or social relevance, considering that the student ends up facing a series of difficulties to complete the research. or even in the analysis of the results obtained.

In sum, to delimit your research topic, you must:

• Seek to limit the scope (target) of the research: The need for a theoretical approach is fundamental for the elaboration of good academic work.
• The objective of the study: with the theme of the research delimited, the student must be able to explain who his object of study will be, how he intends to carry out his intervention, or how his approach will be (theoretical or practical) and why.

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  Stating the Obvious: Writing Assumptions, Limitations, and Delimitations

  

  During the process of writing your thesis or dissertation, you might suddenly realize that your research has inherent flaws. Don’t worry! Virtually all projects contain restrictions to your research. However, being able to recognize and accurately describe these problems is the difference between a true researcher and a grade-school kid with a science-fair project. Concerns with truthful responding, access to participants, and survey instruments are just a few of examples of restrictions on your research. In the following sections, the differences among delimitations, limitations, and assumptions of a dissertation will be clarified.

  Delimitations

  Delimitations are the definitions you set as the boundaries of your own thesis or dissertation, so delimitations are in your control. Delimitations are set so that your goals do not become impossibly large to complete. Examples of delimitations include objectives, research questions, variables, theoretical objectives that you have adopted, and populations chosen as targets to study. When you are stating your delimitations, clearly inform readers why you chose this course of study. The answer might simply be that you were curious about the topic and/or wanted to improve standards of a professional field by revealing certain findings. In any case, you should clearly list the other options available and the reasons why you did not choose these options immediately after you list your delimitations. You might have avoided these options for reasons of practicality, interest, or relativity to the study at hand. For example, you might have only studied Hispanic mothers because they have the highest rate of obese babies. Delimitations are often strongly related to your theory and research questions. If you were researching whether there are different parenting styles between unmarried Asian, Caucasian, African American, and Hispanic women, then a delimitation of your study would be the inclusion of only participants with those demographics and the exclusion of participants from other demographics such as men, married women, and all other ethnicities of single women (inclusion and exclusion criteria). A further delimitation might be that you only included closed-ended Likert scale responses in the survey, rather than including additional open-ended responses, which might make some people more willing to take and complete your survey. Remember that delimitations are not good or bad. They are simply a detailed description of the scope of interest for your study as it relates to the research design. Don’t forget to describe the philosophical framework you used throughout your study, which also delimits your study.

  Limitations

  Limitations of a dissertation are potential weaknesses in your study that are mostly out of your control, given limited funding, choice of research design, statistical model constraints, or other factors. In addition, a limitation is a restriction on your study that cannot be reasonably dismissed and can affect your design and results. Do not worry about limitations because limitations affect virtually all research projects, as well as most things in life. Even when you are going to your favorite restaurant, you are limited by the menu choices. If you went to a restaurant that had a menu that you were craving, you might not receive the service, price, or location that makes you enjoy your favorite restaurant. If you studied participants’ responses to a survey, you might be limited in your abilities to gain the exact type or geographic scope of participants you wanted. The people whom you managed to get to take your survey may not truly be a random sample, which is also a limitation. If you used a common test for data findings, your results are limited by the reliability of the test. If your study was limited to a certain amount of time, your results are affected by the operations of society during that time period (e.g., economy, social trends). It is important for you to remember that limitations of a dissertation are often not something that can be solved by the researcher. Also, remember that whatever limits you also limits other researchers, whether they are the largest medical research companies or consumer habits corporations. Certain kinds of limitations are often associated with the analytical approach you take in your research, too. For example, some qualitative methods like heuristics or phenomenology do not lend themselves well to replicability. Also, most of the commonly used quantitative statistical models can only determine correlation, but not causation.

  Assumptions

  Assumptions are things that are accepted as true, or at least plausible, by researchers and peers who will read your dissertation or thesis. In other words, any scholar reading your paper will assume that certain aspects of your study is true given your population, statistical test, research design, or other delimitations. For example, if you tell your friend that your favorite restaurant is an Italian place, your friend will assume that you don’t go there for the sushi. It’s assumed that you go there to eat Italian food. Because most assumptions are not discussed in-text, assumptions that are discussed in-text are discussed in the context of the limitations of your study, which is typically in the discussion section. This is important, because both assumptions and limitations affect the inferences you can draw from your study. One of the more common assumptions made in survey research is the assumption of honesty and truthful responses. However, for certain sensitive questions this assumption may be more difficult to accept, in which case it would be described as a limitation of the study. For example, asking people to report their criminal behavior in a survey may not be as reliable as asking people to report their eating habits. It is important to remember that your limitations and assumptions should not contradict one another. For instance, if you state that generalizability is a limitation of your study given that your sample was limited to one city in the United States, then you should not claim generalizability to the United States population as an assumption of your study. Statistical models in quantitative research designs are accompanied with assumptions as well, some more strict than others. These assumptions generally refer to the characteristics of the data, such as distributions, correlational trends, and variable type, just to name a few. Violating these assumptions can lead to drastically invalid results, though this often depends on sample size and other considerations.

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  What Is Scope And Limitation In Research?

  
  • Post author By admin
  • April 16, 2024

  Research is the cornerstone of progress in any field, be it science, social sciences, or humanities. But behind every research endeavor lies a crucial aspect that often goes unnoticed by many: the scope and limitation. In this blog, we’ll delve into what is scope and limitation in research, why they matter, and how they influence the outcome of a study.

  Table of Contents

  What Are The Main 10 Stages Of Research Process?

  The research process typically involves several stages, each crucial for the successful completion of a study. Here are the main 10 stages of the research process:

  • Identifying the Research Problem: This stage involves identifying a topic or issue that warrants investigation. Researchers should ensure the problem is significant, relevant, and feasible for study.
  • Reviewing the Literature: Conducting a thorough review of existing literature on the chosen topic is essential. This helps researchers figure out what we already know, spot where there are holes in our knowledge, and make their research questions clearer.
  • Formulating Research Questions or Hypotheses: Based on the identified research problem and literature review, researchers develop specific research questions or hypotheses that they aim to address through their study.
  • Designing the Research Methodology: This stage involves selecting the appropriate research design, methods, and techniques for data collection and analysis. Researchers must consider factors such as the research objectives, the nature of the data, and ethical considerations.
  • Sampling: Researchers need to determine the sampling strategy and select participants or samples that represent the population of interest. Sampling methods may vary depending on the research design and objectives.
  • Data Collection: This stage involves collecting data using the chosen methods and techniques. Data collection may involve surveys, interviews, observations, experiments, or analysis of existing data, among other methods.
  • Data Analysis: After collecting data, researchers look at it carefully using the right tools to figure out what it means. They want to find important ideas, check if their guesses are right, and answer the questions they’re studying.
  • Interpreting Results: Researchers analyze the results of their data to understand how they relate to the questions or guesses they had at the beginning of their study. They assess the significance of the results, identify patterns or trends, and draw conclusions.
  • Drawing Conclusions and Implications: Based on the interpretation of results, researchers draw conclusions regarding the research questions or hypotheses. They discuss the implications of their findings, their relevance to theory or practice, and any recommendations for future research or applications.
  • Writing and Presenting the Research Report: Finally, researchers write a comprehensive research report detailing the entire research process, from problem identification to conclusions. The report typically includes an introduction, literature review, methodology, results, discussion, and conclusion. Researchers may also present their findings at conferences or publish them in academic journals.

  Scope in Research

  • Definition: The scope of research outlines the boundaries and extent of the study.
  • Components: It includes various elements such as research objectives, questions, methodology, timeframe, and geographic coverage.
  • Guiding Factor: Scope guides researchers in determining what aspects of the topic will be included in the study and what will be excluded.
  • Clarity: Defining the scope ensures clarity and focus, preventing researchers from straying off-topic.
  • Relevance: It helps in ensuring that the research addresses pertinent issues and contributes meaningfully to the existing body of knowledge.

  Limitation in Research

  • Definition: Limitations refer to constraints or weaknesses within the research study that may impact its validity or generalizability.
  • Types: Limitations can arise due to various factors such as methodological constraints, resource limitations, scope constraints, ethical considerations, and time constraints.
  • Acknowledgement: Researchers should openly acknowledge limitations to maintain transparency and credibility.
  • Mitigation: While some limitations may be unavoidable, researchers can mitigate their impact through careful planning, rigorous methodology, and transparent reporting.
  • Future Implications: Identifying and addressing limitations can provide valuable insights for future research, guiding researchers in overcoming similar challenges in subsequent studies.

  What Is Scope And Limitation In Research Example?

  Scope in research example.

  Let’s consider a research study investigating the impact of social media usage on teenagers’ mental health in urban areas of a particular city over the past three years. The scope of this study would include:

  • Research Goals: We want to understand how using social media affects how teenagers feel.
  • Research Questions: How much do teenagers in cities use social media, and for how long? Does using social media relate to how teenagers feel, like if they feel sad or anxious?
  • Research Methodology: Utilizing surveys and interviews to gather data on social media usage patterns and mental health indicators.
  • Timeframe: The study will focus on data collected over the past three years to capture recent trends and changes.
  • Geographic Coverage: The study will concentrate on urban areas within a specific city, ensuring relevance and context specificity.

  Limitation in Research Example

  In the same study, limitations may arise due to various factors:

  • Methodological Limitation: The reliance on self-reported data from surveys and interviews may introduce response bias and inaccuracies.
  • Resource Limitation: Limited funding and time constraints may restrict the sample size and the depth of data collection, potentially affecting the study’s comprehensiveness.
  • Scope Limitation: Focusing solely on urban areas may limit the generalizability of the findings to rural or suburban populations.
  • Ethical Limitation: Ensuring informed consent and protecting the privacy of participants may pose ethical challenges, especially when dealing with sensitive topics like mental health.
  • Time Limitation: The study’s timeframe of three years may not capture long-term effects or trends in social media usage and mental health outcomes.

  In this example, the scope defines the parameters and objectives of the study, while the limitations highlight potential constraints and challenges that may impact the research process and findings.

  How Do You Write Scope And Limitations In Research?

  Writing the scope and limitations section in a research paper involves clearly defining the parameters of your study and acknowledging any constraints or weaknesses that may impact its validity or generalizability. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to write the scope and limitations in research:

  • Begin with the Scope
  • Start by defining the scope of your research. This involves outlining the boundaries and extent of your study.
  • Clearly state the objectives of your research and the specific aspects you will investigate.
  • Identify the research questions or hypotheses that you aim to address.
  • Describe the methodology you will use, including data collection and analysis techniques.
  • Specify the timeframe and geographic coverage of your study.
  • Be Concise and Specific
  • Avoid ambiguity by being concise and specific in your description of the scope. Clearly define what will be included in your study and what will be excluded.
  • Use clear and precise language to convey the scope of your research to your readers.
  • Acknowledge Limitations
  • After defining the scope, acknowledge any limitations or constraints that may impact your study.
  • Identify potential methodological limitations, such as sample size, data collection methods, or measurement tools.
  • Consider resource limitations, including funding, time, and access to data or participants.
  • Discuss any scope limitations, such as geographic or demographic restrictions.
  • Address ethical considerations and any potential biases or confounding factors.
  • Provide Justification
  • Explain why these limitations are relevant to your study and how they may affect the interpretation of your results.
  • Justify your choices and decisions regarding the scope and limitations of your research.
  • Demonstrate awareness of potential challenges and demonstrate transparency in your reporting.
  • Offer Recommendations
  • Despite limitations, suggest ways to mitigate their impact or address them in future research.
  • Provide recommendations for researchers who may encounter similar constraints in their own studies.
  • Highlight the implications of your research findings in light of the acknowledged limitations.
  • Review and Revise
  • Review your scope and limitations section to ensure clarity, coherence, and accuracy.
  • Revise as needed to ensure that your description accurately reflects the parameters of your study and acknowledges any potential constraints.

  In conclusion (of what is scope and limitation in research), scope and limitation are integral components of any research project. Understanding the scope helps researchers define the boundaries and parameters of their study, while acknowledging limitations ensures transparency and credibility.

  By carefully considering scope and limitation, researchers can conduct more rigorous and meaningful studies that contribute to the advancement of knowledge in their respective fields.

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  Definition of delimit

  transitive verb

  • circumscribe

  Examples of delimit in a Sentence

  These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'delimit.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

  Word History

  French délimiter , from Latin delimitare , from de- + limitare to limit, from limit-, limes boundary, limit

  1852, in the meaning defined above

  Dictionary Entries Near delimit

  Cite this entry.

  “Delimit.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/delimit. Accessed 8 Jul. 2024.

  Kids Definition

  Kids definition of delimit, more from merriam-webster on delimit.

  Britannica English: Translation of delimit for Arabic Speakers

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  Meaning of delimit in English

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  • anti-libertarian
  • box someone out
  • box someone/something in
  • cripplingly
  • keep ( herself ) to herself idiom
  • suffocatingly
  • tie someone down
  • tie someone up

  Examples of delimit

  Translations of delimit.

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  Word of the Day

  accidentally on purpose

  If you do something accidentally on purpose, you do it intentionally but pretend it happened by chance.

  

  Fakes and forgeries (Things that are not what they seem to be)

  

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  Sentence examples for delimit from inspiring English sources

  To mark or fix the limits of.

  The word "delimit" is correct and usable in written English. You can use it to describe the process of creating boundaries or parameters for something, usually a situation or concept. For example, "The government attempted to delimit the citizens' rights within the new law.".

  You are reluctant to delimit the scope of such a policy ("anything from armed intervention to a statement in parliament").

  Because economists could not measure spillovers or delimit their scope ("How far does a technological spillover spill?" Mr Krugman wondered), they could invoke them to explain just about anything.Mr Krugman's models instead identified a less elusive benefit of proximity.

  Thus, we need to precisely delimit the area where the money will work.

  This is grossly misleading; what a taxonomist does in the course of his research and what a conservationist does with the results of that research are independent activities, and by conflating the two, the author of the article implies, incorrectly, that taxonomists delimit species boundaries for political reasons.

  That is why both sides often seem so determined to delimit the outcome of any negotiating procedure before they even begin it.In this section What are they really for?

  Israel has yet to delimit its economic zone with Lebanon.

  Well known are the urine, feces, and scent markings employed by most mammals to delimit their breeding territories and to advertise their sexual state.

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  Definition of delimit verb from the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary

  present simple I / you / we / they delimit	/diːˈlɪmɪt/ /diːˈlɪmɪt/
  he / she / it delimits	/diːˈlɪmɪts/ /diːˈlɪmɪts/
  past simple delimited	/diːˈlɪmɪtɪd/ /diːˈlɪmɪtɪd/
  past participle delimited	/diːˈlɪmɪtɪd/ /diːˈlɪmɪtɪd/
  -ing form delimiting	/diːˈlɪmɪtɪŋ/ /diːˈlɪmɪtɪŋ/

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  Find out which words work together and produce more natural-sounding English with the Oxford Collocations Dictionary app. Try it for free as part of the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary app.

  
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  Why Are Companies That Lose Money Still So Successful?

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  In a well-functioning capital market, profits should be the sole criterion for firm survival; that is, firms reporting losses should disappear. Of late, however, loss-making firms are highly sought after by investors — often more than some profitable firms. Unicorns, or startups with valuations exceeding a billion dollars, are examples of such loss-making firms. What has changed over time? When and why did losses lose their meaning? The authors’ series of new research papers provide some answers, guiding managers to make the right investments: those that produce delayed but real profits — not just those that produce short-term accounting profits but decimate shareholder wealth in long run.

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  July 3, 2024 / 1:07 PM EDT / CBS/AP

  Scientists have revealed fossils of a giant salamander-like beast with sharp fangs that ruled waters before the first dinosaurs arrived . The animal, researchers say, is roughly 272-million-year-old.

  The findings were published Wednesday in the journal Nature . The researchers dubbed the species Gaiasia jennyae , an hommage to Gai-as Formation in Namibia, where the fossil was found, and to Jenny Clack, a paleontologist who studied how vertebrates moved from water to land .

  "Gaiasia jennyae was considerably larger than a person, and it probably hung out near the bottom of swamps and lakes," said Jason Pardo, an NSF postdoctoral fellow at the Field Museum in Chicago and the co-lead author of the study, in a news release .

  

  Pardo added that the species had a "big, flat, toilet seat-shaped head," "huge fangs" and "giant teeth."

  The predator likely used its wide, flat head and front teeth to suck in and chomp unsuspecting prey, researchers said. Its skull was about 2 feet (60 centimeters) long. 

  "It's acting like an aggressive stapler," said Michael Coates, a biologist at the University of Chicago who was not involved with the work.

  Fossil remnants of four creatures collected about a decade ago were analyzed in the Nature study, including a partial skull and backbone. The creature existed some 40 million years before dinosaurs evolved.

  

  While Gaiasia jennyae was an aquatic animal, it could move on land, albeit slowly . The species belonged to a superclass of animals called tetrapods: four-legged vertebrates that clambered onto land with fingers instead of fins and evolved to amphibians, birds and mammals including humans.

  Most early tetrapod fossils hail from hot, prehistoric coal swamps along the equator in what's now North America and Europe. But these latest remnants, dating back to about 280 million years ago, were found in modern-day Namibia, an area in Africa that was once encrusted with glaciers and ice.

  The discovery of Gaiasia was a big victory for paleontologists who continue to piece together how the world was evolving during the Permian period. 

  "The fact that we found Gaiasia in the far south tells us that there was a flourishing ecosystem that could support these very large predators," said Pardo. "The more we look, we might find more answers about these major animal groups that we care about, like the ancestors of mammals and modern reptiles."

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  regreSSHion: Remote Unauthenticated Code Execution Vulnerability in OpenSSH server

  

  Last updated on: July 3, 2024

  Table of Contents

  About openssh: securing enterprise communications and infrastructure, affected openssh versions:, potential impact of regresshion, immediate steps to mitigate risk, technical details, qualys qid coverage, discover vulnerable assets using qualys cybersecurity asset management (csam), enhance your security posture with qualys vulnerability management, detection, and response (vmdr).

  • Gain exposure visibility and remediation tracking with the regreSSHion Unified Dashboard
  • Automatically Patch regreSSHion vulnerability With Qualys Patch Management

  Detect and remediate CVE-2024-6387 with Qualys TotalCloud Container Security

  Qualys products and customer responsibilities, frequently asked questions (faqs).

  

  The  Qualys Threat Research Unit (TRU)  has discovered a Remote Unauthenticated Code Execution (RCE) vulnerability in OpenSSH’s server (sshd) in glibc-based Linux systems. CVE assigned to this vulnerability is CVE-2024-6387.

  The vulnerability, which is a signal handler race condition in OpenSSH’s server (sshd), allows unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) as root on glibc-based Linux systems; that presents a significant security risk. This race condition affects sshd in its default configuration.

  Based on searches using Censys and Shodan, we have identified over 14 million potentially vulnerable OpenSSH server instances exposed to the Internet. Anonymized data from Qualys CSAM 3.0 with External Attack Surface Management data reveals that approximately 700,000 external internet-facing instances are vulnerable. This accounts for 31% of all internet-facing instances with OpenSSH in our global customer base. Interestingly, over 0.14% of vulnerable internet-facing instances with OpenSSH service have an End-Of-Life/End-Of-Support version of OpenSSH running.

  In our security analysis, we identified that this vulnerability is a regression of the previously patched vulnerability CVE-2006-5051, which was reported in 2006. A regression in this context means that a flaw, once fixed, has reappeared in a subsequent software release, typically due to changes or updates that inadvertently reintroduce the issue. This incident highlights the crucial role of thorough regression testing to prevent the reintroduction of known vulnerabilities into the environment. This regression was introduced in October 2020 (OpenSSH 8.5p1).

  Qualys has developed a working exploit for the regreSSHion vulnerability. As part of the disclosure process, we successfully demonstrated the exploit to the OpenSSH team to assist with their understanding and remediation efforts. We do not release our exploits, as we must allow time for patches to be applied. However, even though the exploit is complex, we believe that other independent researchers will be able to replicate our results.

  OpenSSH (Open Secure Shell) is a suite of secure networking utilities based on the Secure Shell (SSH) protocol, which is vital for secure communication over unsecured networks. It provides robust encryption to ensure privacy and secure file transfers, making it an essential tool for remote server management and secure data communication. Known for its extensive security and authentication features, OpenSSH supports various encryption technologies and is standard on multiple Unix-like systems, including macOS and Linux.

  OpenSSH’s implementation serves as a critical tool for secure communication. Its enterprise value lies in its scalability and the ability to enforce robust access controls and secure automated processes across various environments. This includes everything from automated backups and batch processing to complex DevOps practices, which involve the secure handling of sensitive data across multiple systems and locations. Its continued development and widespread adoption highlight its importance in maintaining the confidentiality and integrity of network communications worldwide.

  OpenSSH stands as a benchmark in software security, exemplifying a robust defense-in-depth approach. Despite the recent vulnerability, its overall track record remains exceptionally strong, serving as both a model and an inspiration in the field.

  • OpenSSH versions earlier than 4.4p1 are vulnerable to this signal handler race condition unless they are patched for CVE-2006-5051 and CVE-2008-4109.
  • Versions from 4.4p1 up to, but not including, 8.5p1 are not vulnerable due to a transformative patch for CVE-2006-5051, which made a previously unsafe function secure.
  • The vulnerability resurfaces in versions from 8.5p1 up to, but not including, 9.8p1 due to the accidental removal of a critical component in a function.

  OpenBSD systems are unaffected by this bug, as OpenBSD developed a secure mechanism in 2001 that prevents this vulnerability.

  This vulnerability, if exploited, could lead to full system compromise where an attacker can execute arbitrary code with the highest privileges, resulting in a complete system takeover, installation of malware, data manipulation, and the creation of backdoors for persistent access. It could facilitate network propagation, allowing attackers to use a compromised system as a foothold to traverse and exploit other vulnerable systems within the organization.

  Moreover, gaining root access would enable attackers to bypass critical security mechanisms such as firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and logging mechanisms, further obscuring their activities. This could also result in significant data breaches and leakage, giving attackers access to all data stored on the system, including sensitive or proprietary information that could be stolen or publicly disclosed.

  This vulnerability is challenging to exploit due to its remote race condition nature, requiring multiple attempts for a successful attack. This can cause memory corruption and necessitate overcoming Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR). Advancements in deep learning may significantly increase the exploitation rate, potentially providing attackers with a substantial advantage in leveraging such security flaws.

  Addressing the regreSSHion vulnerability in OpenSSH, which enables remote code execution on Linux systems, demands a focused and layered security approach. Here are concise steps and strategic recommendations for enterprises to safeguard against this significant threat:

  • Patch Management : Quickly apply available patches for OpenSSH and prioritize ongoing update processes.
  • Enhanced Access Control : Limit SSH access through network-based controls to minimize the attack risks.
  • Network Segmentation and Intrusion Detection : Divide networks to restrict unauthorized access and lateral movements within critical environments and deploy systems to monitor and alert on unusual activities indicative of exploitation attempts.
  • Custom Assessment and Remediation: Quickly execute mitigation script on required assets. To find out more, check out the FAQ section ‘Are there any mitigations for this vulnerability?’

  You can find the technical details of this vulnerability at:  

  https://www.qualys.com/2024/07/01/cve-2024-6387/regresshion.txt

  Qualys is releasing the QIDs in the table below as they become available, starting with vulnsigs version VULNSIGS-2.6.83-4 and in Linux Cloud Agent manifest version LX_MANIFEST-2.6.83.4-5

  513833	Alpine Linux 3.20 Security Update for openssh (regreSSHion)	Alpine Linux
  513832	Alpine Linux 3.19 Security Update for openssh (regreSSHion)	Alpine Linux
  513831	Alpine Linux 3.18 Security Update for openssh (regreSSHion)	Alpine Linux
  513830	Alpine Linux 3.17 Security Update for openssh (regreSSHion)	Alpine Linux
  285635	Fedora Security Update for openssh (FEDORA-2024-213f33544e) (regreSSHion)	Fedora Security
  756591	SUSE Enterprise Linux Security Update for openssh (SUSE-SU-2024:2275-1) (regreSSHion)	SUSE Enterprise
  357791	Amazon Linux Security Advisory for openssh : ALAS2023-2024-649 (regreSSHion)	Amazon Linux
  710942	Gentoo Linux OpenSSH Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (GLSA 202407-09) (regreSSHion)	Gentoo Linux
  6081987	VMware Photon OS Security Update for openssh (PHSA-2024-4.0-0642) (regreSSHion)	VMware Photon
  6081986	VMware Photon OS Security Update for openssh (PHSA-2024-5.0-0307) (regreSSHion)	VMware Photon
  6122971	Google Container OS-Optimized OS 101 Security Update for net-misc/openssh (CVE-2024-6387) (regreSSHion)	Google Container OS
  6122969	Google Container OS-Optimized OS 105 Security Update for net-misc/openssh (CVE-2024-6387) (regreSSHion)	Google Container OS
  6122965	Google Container OS-Optimized OS 109 Security Update for net-misc/openssh (CVE-2024-6387) (regreSSHion)	Google Container OS
  6122961	Google Container OS-Optimized OS 113 Security Update for net-misc/openssh (CVE-2024-6387) (regreSSHion)	Google Container OS
  161766	Oracle Enterprise Linux Security Update for openssh (ELSA-2024-12468) (regreSSHion)	Oracle Enterprise
  691562	Free Berkeley Software Distribution (FreeBSD) Security Update for openssh (f1a00122-3797-11ef-b611-84a93843eb75) (regreSSHion)	Free Berkeley
  200455	Debian/Ubuntu Notification for OpenSSH Vulnerability (USN-6859-1) (regreSSHion)	Debian/Ubuntu
  6007430	Debian 11 Security Update for openssh (CVE-2024-6387) (regreSSHion)	Debian 11 Security
  6007429	Debian/Ubuntu Update for openssh (DSA 5724-1) (regreSSHion)	Debian/Ubuntu
  42046	OpenSSH Remote Unauthenticated Code Execution Vulnerability (regreSSHion)	OS agnostic

  243964	Red Hat Update for openssh (RHSA-2024:4312)	Red Hat

  It is recommended that Qualys customers use OS-specific QIDs to scan for backported packages on supported Linux distributions.

  Please check the Qualys Vulnerability Knowledgebase for the full list of coverage for this vulnerability.

  The initial and crucial step in managing this critical vulnerability and mitigating associated risks involves pinpointing all assets susceptible to this specific issue. Use CSAM 3.0 with External Attack Surface Management to identify your organization’s internet-facing instances that have vulnerable versions of OpenSSH or are at their End of Life (EOL) or End of Support (EOS).

  Identify internet-facing instances with vulnerable versions of OpenSSH

  In the following example, we aim to identify all assets running the OpenSSH:

  

  Qualys VMDR  offers comprehensive coverage and visibility into vulnerabilities, empowering organizations to rapidly respond to, prioritize, and mitigate the associated risks. Additionally, Qualys customers can leverage Qualys Patch Management to remediate these vulnerabilities effectively.

  Leverage the power of Qualys VMDR alongside TruRisk and the Qualys Query Language (QQL) to efficiently identify and prioritize vulnerable assets, effectively addressing the vulnerabilities highlighted above.

  Try Qualys VMDR at no cost for 30 days

  Use this QQL statement:

  

  Gain exposure visibility and remediation tracking with the “regreSSHion” Unified Dashboard

  With the Qualys Unified Dashboard, you can track the vulnerability exposure within your organization and view your impacted hosts, their status, distribution across environments, and overall management in real time, allowing you to see your mean time to remediation (MTTR).

  

  To make it easier for customers to track and manage regreSSHion vulnerability in their subscriptions, we have created the Manage regreSSHion dashboard , which you can download and import into your subscription.

  Automatically Patch “regreSSHion” vulnerability With Qualys Patch Management

  We expect vendors to release patches for this vulnerability shortly. Qualys Patch Management can  automatically deploy those patches to vulnerable assets, when available.

  Customers can use the “patch now” button found to the right of the vulnerability to add regreSSHion to a patch job. Once patches are released, Qualys will find the relevant patches for this vulnerability and automatically add those patches to a patch job. This will allow customers to deploy those patches to vulnerable devices, all from the Qualys Cloud Platform.

  Qualys Patch Management No-Cost 45-Day Trial

  Qualys TotalCloud Container Security offers comprehensive coverage and visibility into vulnerabilities across all your container environments, including managed Kubernetes and on-premises Kubernetes. This empowers organizations to rapidly respond to, prioritize, and mitigate associated risks effectively.

  Leverage the power of Qualys TotalCloud Container Security and the Qualys Query Language (QQL) to efficiently identify and prioritize vulnerable assets, ensuring prompt and effective remediation of the vulnerabilities highlighted by CVE-2024-6387.

  Qualys is cutting the release cycle short for certain products that are deployed on customer premises. At least one of those products depends on a supplier that will publish a fix release shortly. We intend to release fixes for this Severity HIGH CVE in the coming days to ensure that customers are safe from regreSSHion. Once builds have cleared Quality Assurance, we will provide updates to help customers patch.

  Will the Qualys Research Team publish exploit code or include proof-of-concept code for this vulnerability?

  No, as part of our commitment to responsible disclosure and maintaining high-security standards, we will not publish exploit codes. Given the complexity of this vulnerability, it is crucial to allow organizations to apply patches effectively without the immediate pressure of public exploits.

  Are there any mitigations for this vulnerability?

  If sshd can’t be updated or recompiled, set LoginGraceTime to 0 in the config file. This exposes sshd to a denial of service by using up all MaxStartups connections, but it prevents the remote code execution risk.

  Using Qualys Custom Assessment and Remediation (CAR), you can easily apply this mitigation across affected assets in one go. Just follow these easy steps:

  1. Go to CAR Library, look for Zero Day Utilities, and import the mitigation script.

  

  2. You can approve while importing or later on.

  

  3. Execute it across required assets/asset tags.

  

  To execute this mitigation, enable your free trial of CAR – https://www.qualys.com/forms/custom-assessment-remediation/

  Is this vulnerability remotely exploitable?

  Yes, this vulnerability can be exploited remotely and allows unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) as root, posing a significant security risk.

  Why is the vulnerability named “regreSSHion”?

  This is a pun/reference to this being a regression bug affecting OpenSSH.

  Should organizations patch these vulnerabilities urgently?

  Yes, we would encourage organizations to patch this vulnerability urgently, especially on their internet-facing assets.

  How will the new security fix be implemented for different versions?

  This fix is part of a major update, making it challenging to backport. Consequently, users will have two update options: upgrading to the latest version released on Monday, July 1st (9.8p1) or applying a fix to older versions as outlined in the advisory, which is the approach most vendors will take.

  Does this vulnerability affect macOS or Windows?

  While it is likely that the vulnerability exists in both macOS and Windows, its exploitability on these platforms remains uncertain. Further analysis is required to determine the specific impact.

  How can users identify exploitation attempts of this vulnerability?

  Exploitation attempts for this vulnerability can be identified by seeing many many lines of “Timeout before authentication” in the logs.

  What is the exposure to Qualys infrastructure?

  The Qualys security team has taken immediate steps to protect our corporate infrastructure and products from any impact regarding the exploitation of this vulnerability. At this time, we have not experienced any negative impacts or detected any exploitation attempts. In addition, the Qualys security team has implemented enhanced monitoring and response plans to detect and respond to future exploit attempts. Emergency patching procedures have been initiated to fully remediate the vulnerability. To further help the broader security community, we are sharing our detection logic (see FAQ: “How to identify exploitation attempts of this vulnerability?”) to help customers respond should attacks occur before patching and mitigation efforts are completed.

  How can users identify systems vulnerable to the OpenSSH regreSSHion vulnerability?

  Users can determine if their systems are vulnerable by verifying the version of the OpenSSH server installed. Systems running affected versions should be considered at risk and prioritized for updates.

  Under what circumstances might QID 42046 fail to report accurately?

  Accurate detection with QID 42046 requires root privileges, as the command used only runs with root access.

  Why is a QID categorized as a confirmed or potential vulnerability?

  A QID is reported as confirmed in authenticated scan results because these scans can access detailed information that verifies the vulnerability more reliably. On the other hand, remote unauthenticated scans categorize a QID as potential because they primarily depend on the information presented by the OpenSSH service banner. This banner might display a partial version of details, leading to less definitive conclusions about the presence of a vulnerability.

  When will the Qualys Detection Score (QDS) be updated?

  As the vulnerability begins to trend across various threat intelligence sources, our QDS will utilize these intelligent feeds for dynamic updates. We expect its effectiveness to reach a score of 90 or above.

  Has the threat feed been updated to include the regreSSHion vulnerability?

  Yes, the Qualys threat feed is updated when emerging threats are tracked and reported from the dark web and other sources. The update activates as soon as a vulnerability trends across various threat intelligence platforms.

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  No record found for this QID or CVE in Qualys KB. Great job on reporting however the data set is not published.

  “Immediate Steps to Mitigate Risk” there’s a config-based mitigation, this section is just marketing nonsense and it’s irresponsible of you to hide the actual immediate mitigation in the “technical details”

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  Human Subjects Office

  Medical terms in lay language.

  Please use these descriptions in place of medical jargon in consent documents, recruitment materials and other study documents. Note: These terms are not the only acceptable plain language alternatives for these vocabulary words.

  This glossary of terms is derived from a list copyrighted by the University of Kentucky, Office of Research Integrity (1990).

  For clinical research-specific definitions, see also the Clinical Research Glossary developed by the Multi-Regional Clinical Trials (MRCT) Center of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard  and the Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC) .

  Alternative Lay Language for Medical Terms for use in Informed Consent Documents

  A   B   C   D   E   F   G   H   I  J  K   L   M   N   O   P   Q   R   S   T   U   V   W  X  Y  Z

  ABDOMEN/ABDOMINAL body cavity below diaphragm that contains stomach, intestines, liver and other organs ABSORB take up fluids, take in ACIDOSIS condition when blood contains more acid than normal ACUITY clearness, keenness, esp. of vision and airways ACUTE new, recent, sudden, urgent ADENOPATHY swollen lymph nodes (glands) ADJUVANT helpful, assisting, aiding, supportive ADJUVANT TREATMENT added treatment (usually to a standard treatment) ANTIBIOTIC drug that kills bacteria and other germs ANTIMICROBIAL drug that kills bacteria and other germs ANTIRETROVIRAL drug that works against the growth of certain viruses ADVERSE EFFECT side effect, bad reaction, unwanted response ALLERGIC REACTION rash, hives, swelling, trouble breathing AMBULATE/AMBULATION/AMBULATORY walk, able to walk ANAPHYLAXIS serious, potentially life-threatening allergic reaction ANEMIA decreased red blood cells; low red cell blood count ANESTHETIC a drug or agent used to decrease the feeling of pain, or eliminate the feeling of pain by putting you to sleep ANGINA pain resulting from not enough blood flowing to the heart ANGINA PECTORIS pain resulting from not enough blood flowing to the heart ANOREXIA disorder in which person will not eat; lack of appetite ANTECUBITAL related to the inner side of the forearm ANTIBODY protein made in the body in response to foreign substance ANTICONVULSANT drug used to prevent seizures ANTILIPEMIC a drug that lowers fat levels in the blood ANTITUSSIVE a drug used to relieve coughing ARRHYTHMIA abnormal heartbeat; any change from the normal heartbeat ASPIRATION fluid entering the lungs, such as after vomiting ASSAY lab test ASSESS to learn about, measure, evaluate, look at ASTHMA lung disease associated with tightening of air passages, making breathing difficult ASYMPTOMATIC without symptoms AXILLA armpit

  BENIGN not malignant, without serious consequences BID twice a day BINDING/BOUND carried by, to make stick together, transported BIOAVAILABILITY the extent to which a drug or other substance becomes available to the body BLOOD PROFILE series of blood tests BOLUS a large amount given all at once BONE MASS the amount of calcium and other minerals in a given amount of bone BRADYARRHYTHMIAS slow, irregular heartbeats BRADYCARDIA slow heartbeat BRONCHOSPASM breathing distress caused by narrowing of the airways

  CARCINOGENIC cancer-causing CARCINOMA type of cancer CARDIAC related to the heart CARDIOVERSION return to normal heartbeat by electric shock CATHETER a tube for withdrawing or giving fluids CATHETER a tube placed near the spinal cord and used for anesthesia (indwelling epidural) during surgery CENTRAL NERVOUS SYSTEM (CNS) brain and spinal cord CEREBRAL TRAUMA damage to the brain CESSATION stopping CHD coronary heart disease CHEMOTHERAPY treatment of disease, usually cancer, by chemical agents CHRONIC continuing for a long time, ongoing CLINICAL pertaining to medical care CLINICAL TRIAL an experiment involving human subjects COMA unconscious state COMPLETE RESPONSE total disappearance of disease CONGENITAL present before birth CONJUNCTIVITIS redness and irritation of the thin membrane that covers the eye CONSOLIDATION PHASE treatment phase intended to make a remission permanent (follows induction phase) CONTROLLED TRIAL research study in which the experimental treatment or procedure is compared to a standard (control) treatment or procedure COOPERATIVE GROUP association of multiple institutions to perform clinical trials CORONARY related to the blood vessels that supply the heart, or to the heart itself CT SCAN (CAT) computerized series of x-rays (computerized tomography) CULTURE test for infection, or for organisms that could cause infection CUMULATIVE added together from the beginning CUTANEOUS relating to the skin CVA stroke (cerebrovascular accident)

  DERMATOLOGIC pertaining to the skin DIASTOLIC lower number in a blood pressure reading DISTAL toward the end, away from the center of the body DIURETIC "water pill" or drug that causes increase in urination DOPPLER device using sound waves to diagnose or test DOUBLE BLIND study in which neither investigators nor subjects know what drug or treatment the subject is receiving DYSFUNCTION state of improper function DYSPLASIA abnormal cells

  ECHOCARDIOGRAM sound wave test of the heart EDEMA excess fluid collecting in tissue EEG electric brain wave tracing (electroencephalogram) EFFICACY effectiveness ELECTROCARDIOGRAM electrical tracing of the heartbeat (ECG or EKG) ELECTROLYTE IMBALANCE an imbalance of minerals in the blood EMESIS vomiting EMPIRIC based on experience ENDOSCOPIC EXAMINATION viewing an  internal part of the body with a lighted tube  ENTERAL by way of the intestines EPIDURAL outside the spinal cord ERADICATE get rid of (such as disease) Page 2 of 7 EVALUATED, ASSESSED examined for a medical condition EXPEDITED REVIEW rapid review of a protocol by the IRB Chair without full committee approval, permitted with certain low-risk research studies EXTERNAL outside the body EXTRAVASATE to leak outside of a planned area, such as out of a blood vessel

  FDA U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the branch of federal government that approves new drugs FIBROUS having many fibers, such as scar tissue FIBRILLATION irregular beat of the heart or other muscle

  GENERAL ANESTHESIA pain prevention by giving drugs to cause loss of consciousness, as during surgery GESTATIONAL pertaining to pregnancy

  HEMATOCRIT amount of red blood cells in the blood HEMATOMA a bruise, a black and blue mark HEMODYNAMIC MEASURING blood flow HEMOLYSIS breakdown in red blood cells HEPARIN LOCK needle placed in the arm with blood thinner to keep the blood from clotting HEPATOMA cancer or tumor of the liver HERITABLE DISEASE can be transmitted to one’s offspring, resulting in damage to future children HISTOPATHOLOGIC pertaining to the disease status of body tissues or cells HOLTER MONITOR a portable machine for recording heart beats HYPERCALCEMIA high blood calcium level HYPERKALEMIA high blood potassium level HYPERNATREMIA high blood sodium level HYPERTENSION high blood pressure HYPOCALCEMIA low blood calcium level HYPOKALEMIA low blood potassium level HYPONATREMIA low blood sodium level HYPOTENSION low blood pressure HYPOXEMIA a decrease of oxygen in the blood HYPOXIA a decrease of oxygen reaching body tissues HYSTERECTOMY surgical removal of the uterus, ovaries (female sex glands), or both uterus and ovaries

  IATROGENIC caused by a physician or by treatment IDE investigational device exemption, the license to test an unapproved new medical device IDIOPATHIC of unknown cause IMMUNITY defense against, protection from IMMUNOGLOBIN a protein that makes antibodies IMMUNOSUPPRESSIVE drug which works against the body's immune (protective) response, often used in transplantation and diseases caused by immune system malfunction IMMUNOTHERAPY giving of drugs to help the body's immune (protective) system; usually used to destroy cancer cells IMPAIRED FUNCTION abnormal function IMPLANTED placed in the body IND investigational new drug, the license to test an unapproved new drug INDUCTION PHASE beginning phase or stage of a treatment INDURATION hardening INDWELLING remaining in a given location, such as a catheter INFARCT death of tissue due to lack of blood supply INFECTIOUS DISEASE transmitted from one person to the next INFLAMMATION swelling that is generally painful, red, and warm INFUSION slow injection of a substance into the body, usually into the blood by means of a catheter INGESTION eating; taking by mouth INTERFERON drug which acts against viruses; antiviral agent INTERMITTENT occurring (regularly or irregularly) between two time points; repeatedly stopping, then starting again INTERNAL within the body INTERIOR inside of the body INTRAMUSCULAR into the muscle; within the muscle INTRAPERITONEAL into the abdominal cavity INTRATHECAL into the spinal fluid INTRAVENOUS (IV) through the vein INTRAVESICAL in the bladder INTUBATE the placement of a tube into the airway INVASIVE PROCEDURE puncturing, opening, or cutting the skin INVESTIGATIONAL NEW DRUG (IND) a new drug that has not been approved by the FDA INVESTIGATIONAL METHOD a treatment method which has not been proven to be beneficial or has not been accepted as standard care ISCHEMIA decreased oxygen in a tissue (usually because of decreased blood flow)

  LAPAROTOMY surgical procedure in which an incision is made in the abdominal wall to enable a doctor to look at the organs inside LESION wound or injury; a diseased patch of skin LETHARGY sleepiness, tiredness LEUKOPENIA low white blood cell count LIPID fat LIPID CONTENT fat content in the blood LIPID PROFILE (PANEL) fat and cholesterol levels in the blood LOCAL ANESTHESIA creation of insensitivity to pain in a small, local area of the body, usually by injection of numbing drugs LOCALIZED restricted to one area, limited to one area LUMEN the cavity of an organ or tube (e.g., blood vessel) LYMPHANGIOGRAPHY an x-ray of the lymph nodes or tissues after injecting dye into lymph vessels (e.g., in feet) LYMPHOCYTE a type of white blood cell important in immunity (protection) against infection LYMPHOMA a cancer of the lymph nodes (or tissues)

  MALAISE a vague feeling of bodily discomfort, feeling badly MALFUNCTION condition in which something is not functioning properly MALIGNANCY cancer or other progressively enlarging and spreading tumor, usually fatal if not successfully treated MEDULLABLASTOMA a type of brain tumor MEGALOBLASTOSIS change in red blood cells METABOLIZE process of breaking down substances in the cells to obtain energy METASTASIS spread of cancer cells from one part of the body to another METRONIDAZOLE drug used to treat infections caused by parasites (invading organisms that take up living in the body) or other causes of anaerobic infection (not requiring oxygen to survive) MI myocardial infarction, heart attack MINIMAL slight MINIMIZE reduce as much as possible Page 4 of 7 MONITOR check on; keep track of; watch carefully MOBILITY ease of movement MORBIDITY undesired result or complication MORTALITY death MOTILITY the ability to move MRI magnetic resonance imaging, diagnostic pictures of the inside of the body, created using magnetic rather than x-ray energy MUCOSA, MUCOUS MEMBRANE moist lining of digestive, respiratory, reproductive, and urinary tracts MYALGIA muscle aches MYOCARDIAL pertaining to the heart muscle MYOCARDIAL INFARCTION heart attack

  NASOGASTRIC TUBE placed in the nose, reaching to the stomach NCI the National Cancer Institute NECROSIS death of tissue NEOPLASIA/NEOPLASM tumor, may be benign or malignant NEUROBLASTOMA a cancer of nerve tissue NEUROLOGICAL pertaining to the nervous system NEUTROPENIA decrease in the main part of the white blood cells NIH the National Institutes of Health NONINVASIVE not breaking, cutting, or entering the skin NOSOCOMIAL acquired in the hospital

  OCCLUSION closing; blockage; obstruction ONCOLOGY the study of tumors or cancer OPHTHALMIC pertaining to the eye OPTIMAL best, most favorable or desirable ORAL ADMINISTRATION by mouth ORTHOPEDIC pertaining to the bones OSTEOPETROSIS rare bone disorder characterized by dense bone OSTEOPOROSIS softening of the bones OVARIES female sex glands

  PARENTERAL given by injection PATENCY condition of being open PATHOGENESIS development of a disease or unhealthy condition PERCUTANEOUS through the skin PERIPHERAL not central PER OS (PO) by mouth PHARMACOKINETICS the study of the way the body absorbs, distributes, and gets rid of a drug PHASE I first phase of study of a new drug in humans to determine action, safety, and proper dosing PHASE II second phase of study of a new drug in humans, intended to gather information about safety and effectiveness of the drug for certain uses PHASE III large-scale studies to confirm and expand information on safety and effectiveness of new drug for certain uses, and to study common side effects PHASE IV studies done after the drug is approved by the FDA, especially to compare it to standard care or to try it for new uses PHLEBITIS irritation or inflammation of the vein PLACEBO an inactive substance; a pill/liquid that contains no medicine PLACEBO EFFECT improvement seen with giving subjects a placebo, though it contains no active drug/treatment PLATELETS small particles in the blood that help with clotting POTENTIAL possible POTENTIATE increase or multiply the effect of a drug or toxin (poison) by giving another drug or toxin at the same time (sometimes an unintentional result) POTENTIATOR an agent that helps another agent work better PRENATAL before birth PROPHYLAXIS a drug given to prevent disease or infection PER OS (PO) by mouth PRN as needed PROGNOSIS outlook, probable outcomes PRONE lying on the stomach PROSPECTIVE STUDY following patients forward in time PROSTHESIS artificial part, most often limbs, such as arms or legs PROTOCOL plan of study PROXIMAL closer to the center of the body, away from the end PULMONARY pertaining to the lungs

  QD every day; daily QID four times a day

  RADIATION THERAPY x-ray or cobalt treatment RANDOM by chance (like the flip of a coin) RANDOMIZATION chance selection RBC red blood cell RECOMBINANT formation of new combinations of genes RECONSTITUTION putting back together the original parts or elements RECUR happen again REFRACTORY not responding to treatment REGENERATION re-growth of a structure or of lost tissue REGIMEN pattern of giving treatment RELAPSE the return of a disease REMISSION disappearance of evidence of cancer or other disease RENAL pertaining to the kidneys REPLICABLE possible to duplicate RESECT remove or cut out surgically RETROSPECTIVE STUDY looking back over past experience

  SARCOMA a type of cancer SEDATIVE a drug to calm or make less anxious SEMINOMA a type of testicular cancer (found in the male sex glands) SEQUENTIALLY in a row, in order SOMNOLENCE sleepiness SPIROMETER an instrument to measure the amount of air taken into and exhaled from the lungs STAGING an evaluation of the extent of the disease STANDARD OF CARE a treatment plan that the majority of the medical community would accept as appropriate STENOSIS narrowing of a duct, tube, or one of the blood vessels in the heart STOMATITIS mouth sores, inflammation of the mouth STRATIFY arrange in groups for analysis of results (e.g., stratify by age, sex, etc.) STUPOR stunned state in which it is difficult to get a response or the attention of the subject SUBCLAVIAN under the collarbone SUBCUTANEOUS under the skin SUPINE lying on the back SUPPORTIVE CARE general medical care aimed at symptoms, not intended to improve or cure underlying disease SYMPTOMATIC having symptoms SYNDROME a condition characterized by a set of symptoms SYSTOLIC top number in blood pressure; pressure during active contraction of the heart

  TERATOGENIC capable of causing malformations in a fetus (developing baby still inside the mother’s body) TESTES/TESTICLES male sex glands THROMBOSIS clotting THROMBUS blood clot TID three times a day TITRATION a method for deciding on the strength of a drug or solution; gradually increasing the dose T-LYMPHOCYTES type of white blood cells TOPICAL on the surface TOPICAL ANESTHETIC applied to a certain area of the skin and reducing pain only in the area to which applied TOXICITY side effects or undesirable effects of a drug or treatment TRANSDERMAL through the skin TRANSIENTLY temporarily TRAUMA injury; wound TREADMILL walking machine used to test heart function

  UPTAKE absorbing and taking in of a substance by living tissue

  VALVULOPLASTY plastic repair of a valve, especially a heart valve VARICES enlarged veins VASOSPASM narrowing of the blood vessels VECTOR a carrier that can transmit disease-causing microorganisms (germs and viruses) VENIPUNCTURE needle stick, blood draw, entering the skin with a needle VERTICAL TRANSMISSION spread of disease

  WBC white blood cell

  ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

  Expressing diminutive meaning in heritage spanish: linking the heritage experience to diminutive use in everyday speech.

  
  • Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA, United States

  Introduction: This paper studies the pragmatic force that heritage speakers may convey through the use of the diminutive in everyday speech. In particular, I analyze the use of the Spanish diminutive in 49 sociolinguistic interviews from a Spanish–English bilingual community in Southern Arizona, U.S. where Spanish is the heritage language. I compare the use of the diminutive in heritage Spanish to the distribution of the diminutive in the speech of a Spanish monolingual community (18 sociolinguistic interviews) from the same dialectal region. Although Spanish and English employ different morphosyntactic strategies to express diminutive meaning, the analysis reveals that the diminutive morpheme -ito/a is a productive morphological device in the Spanish-discourse of heritage speakers from Southern Arizona (i.e., similar diminutive distributions to their monolingual counterparts). While heritage speakers employed the diminutive -ito/a to express the notion of “smallness” in their Spanish-discourse, the analysis indicates that these language users are more likely to invoke a subjective evaluation through the diminutive -ito/a when talking about their family members and/or childhood experiences. This particular finding suggests that the concept “child” is the semantic/pragmatic driving force of the diminutive in heritage Spanish as a marker of speech by, about, to, or with some relation to children. The analysis further suggests that examining the pragmatic dimensions of the diminutive in everyday speech can provide important insights into how heritage speakers encode and create cultural meaning in their heritage languages.

  Methods: In this study, I analyze the use of Spanish diminutives in two U.S.-Mexico border regions. The first data set is representative of a Spanish–English bilingual community in Southern Arizona, U.S., provided in the Corpus del Español en el Sur de Arizona (The CESA Corpus). The CESA Corpus comprises 49 sociolinguistic interviews of ~1 h each for a total of ~305,542 words. The second data set comprises 18 sociolinguistic interviews of predominantly monolingual Spanish speakers from the city of Mexicali, Baja California in Mexico, provided in the Proyecto Para el Estudio Sociolingü í stico del Español de España y de América (PRESEEA). The Mexicali data set consists of ~119,162 words.

  Results: The analysis revealed that the Spanish diminutive morpheme -ito/a is a productive morphological device in the Spanish-discourse of heritage speakers from Southern Arizona. In addition to its prototypical meaning (i.e., the notion of “smallness”), the diminutive morpheme -ito/a conveyed an array of pragmatic functions in the everyday speech of Spanish heritage speakers and their monolingual counterparts from the same dialectal region. Importantly, these pragmatic functions are mediated by speakers' subjective perceptions of the entity in question. Unlike their monolingual counterparts, heritage speakers are more likely to invoke a subjective evaluation through the diminutive -ito/a when talking about their family members and/or childhood experiences. Altogether, the study suggests that the concept “child” is the semantic/pragmatic driving force of the diminutive in heritage Spanish as a marker of speech by, about, to, or with some relation to children.

  Discussion: In this study, I followed Reynoso's framework to study the pragmatic dimensions of the diminutive in everyday speech, that is, speakers' publicly conveyed meaning. The analysis revealed that heritage speakers applied most of the pragmatic functions and their respective values observed in Reynoso's cross-dialectal study of Spanish diminutives, and hence providing further support for her framework. Similarly, the study provides further evidence to Jurafsky's proposal that morphological diminutives arise from semantic or pragmatic links with children. Finally, the analysis indicated that examining the semantic/pragmatic dimensions of the diminutive in everyday speech can provide important insights into how heritage speakers encode and create cultural meaning in their heritage languages, which can in turn have further ramifications for heritage language learning and teaching.

  1 Introduction

  Diminutive formation is a morphological process of word formation through suffixation, prefixation, reduplication and infixation ( Grandi and Körtvélyessy, 2015 ). This morphological device has been characterized as a marker of speech by, about, to, or with some relation to children ( Jurafsky, 1996 ). Diminutives are, then, a sub-class of evaluative morphology expressing at least two pragmatic dimensions: a quantitative evaluation relying on the real and objective properties of the entity in context (i.e., an object's tangible characteristics such as size or shape) and/or a qualitative evaluation involving the speaker's subjective perceptions of the referred entity ( Dressler and Merlini Barbaresi, 1994 ; Reynoso, 2001 , 2005 ; Grandi and Körtvélyessy, 2015 ). The use of the diminutive in everyday speech is, therefore, semantically and pragmatically driven where the same diminutive affix (or any other morphological device) attached to the same lexical base can express different pragmatic senses. 1 For instance, the Spanish diminutive morpheme -ito attached to the lexical base chico “small” in (1a) refers to the tangible characteristics of the head noun “radio,” whereas the same morpheme conveys the speaker's subjective perception of age in (1b). 2

  (1a) Me acuerdo un tiempo, mi papá me compró un radio chiquito (CESA006)

  I remember one time, my dad bought me a radio small-DIM

  (1b) Quisiera decir que cuando yo era chiquito no teníamos celulares (CESA070)

  “I would say that when I was small-DIM there were no cell phones”

  The examples in (1) illustrate that contextually based inferences play a crucial role in mediating the pragmatic force that speakers wish to convey through the diminutive in everyday speech.

  Current studies on diminutives in heritage bilingualism are primarily concerned with diminutive formation ( El Haimeur, 2019 ; Vanhaverbeke and Enghels, 2021 ; Kpogo et al., 2023 ). Examining the semantic/pragmatic dimensions of the diminutive in everyday speech can provide important insights into how heritage speakers encode and create cultural meaning in their heritage languages. The present study, then, aims to provide a framework to study (i) how Spanish heritage speakers express diminutive meaning in their Spanish-discourse, (ii) the pragmatic force that heritage speakers may convey through the use of the diminutive in everyday speech compared to their monolingual counterparts from the same dialectal region, and (iii) to explore the role of sociocultural meaning unique to the heritage experience through the use of the diminutive in heritage Spanish. 3 In this paper, “pragmatic force” refers to the illocutionary force of an utterance ( Leech, 1983 ), and hence the current study aims to relate the sense of the diminutive to its pragmatic force in the everyday speech of Spanish–English bilinguals from Southern Arizona, U.S.

  The present study adopts a sociolinguistic perspective to examine the use of diminutives in heritage Spanish. In particular, I analyze spontaneous speech from two U.S.-Mexico border regions. The first data set comprises 49 sociolinguistic interviews (31 female and 18 male informants) from a Spanish–English bilingual community in Southern Arizona, U.S. where Spanish is the heritage language, provided in the Corpus del Español en el Sur de Arizona (The CESA Corpus, Carvalho, 2012 ). The second data set comprises 18 sociolinguistic interviews (10 females, eight males) of predominantly monolingual Spanish speakers from Mexicali, Baja California, Mexico, provided in the Proyecto Para el Estudio Sociolingü í stico del Español de España y de América (PRESEEA, https://preseea.uah.es/ ). Importantly, in the Methods section I provide evidence indicating that Spanish heritage speakers in Southern Arizona and their monolingual counterparts in Baja California are language users of the Spanish variety spoken in Northern Mexico.

  Heritage bilingualism is well-documented in Southern Arizona, U.S. In particular, previous studies examining linguistic and sociolinguistic features in this bilingual community indicate that Spanish is the socio-politically minority language acquired from birth as a first language or together with English ( DuBord, 2004 ; Casillas, 2013 ; Bessett, 2015 ; Llompart, 2016 ; Kern, 2017 , 2020 ; Cruz, 2018 , 2021 ; Fernández Flórez, 2022 ). That is, Spanish heritage speakers in this geographical region of the U.S. experience a short period of Spanish monolingual learning but are subsequently exposed to English during the first years of life through daycare and/or preschool. Conditions of reduced exposure and language use during late childhood can negatively affect the heritage language ( Montrul, 2023 ), but previous studies indicate that the Spanish heritage population in Southern Arizona is highly proficient in both Spanish and English ( Bessett, 2015 ; Kern, 2017 , 2020 ; Cruz, 2021 , 2022 ). Moreover, Spanish is well-represented across many social domains, including churches and supermarkets, in this geographical region of the U.S. ( Jaramillo, 1995 ; Francom, 2012 ).

  In this study, I adopt Reynoso's (2001 , 2005) framework to study the pragmatic force that Spanish heritage speakers from Southern Arizona and their monolingual counterparts from Mexicali, Mexico may convey through the use of the Spanish diminutive in everyday speech. In this framework, speakers can employ a pragmatic force ranging from an objective (i.e., expressing an object's tangible characteristics such as size or shape) to a subjective evaluation of the entity in question. Moreover, sociocultural norms play a crucial role in modulating the degree of subjectivity that speakers may employ when evaluating an entity in context. For example, Mexican Spanish speakers are more likely to use the diminutive to embrace sociocultural norms linked to their Mexican identity and culture ( Reynoso, 2001 , 2005 ; Company, 2002 ). Considering that the diminutive is a means of social interaction in child-directed speech ( Melzi and King, 2003 ; Marrero et al., 2007 ), in this paper “sociocultural norms” refer to the indexical relationship between sociocultural meaning and language form, that is, how speech acts are expressed in the heritage language within and across social scales ( Pinto and Raschio, 2007 ; Park, 2008 ; He, 2011 ).

  2 Diminutives in heritage bilingualism

  In this section, I discuss the morphosyntactic strategies that Spanish and English employ to express diminutive meaning in relation to how the Spanish–English bilingual may express diminutive meaning in her heritage language.

  There are cross-linguistic differences between Spanish and English that make the study of diminutives in heritage Spanish an intriguing one. While there are many diminutive suffixes in Spanish (-ito, -illo, -ín, -ico, -ete, -ejo, -uelo, among others), the -ito/a morpheme (i.e., carr-ito “car-DIM.MASC” and cas-ita “house-DIM.FEM') is the most productive form across the Spanish-speaking regions ( Reynoso, 2001 ; Travis, 2004 ; Regúnaga, 2005 ; Paredes García, 2015 ), especially in child-directed speech ( Melzi and King, 2003 ; Marrero et al., 2007 ). 4 In terms of its morphological formation, the -ito/a morpheme has two allomorphs conditioned by word class (in the sense of Harris, 1991 ) for realization: the -ito/a allomorph attaches to word classes with a terminal element (terminal elements are -a, -o and -e) and the -cito/a allomorph attaches to words with no terminal element, that is, words that do not end in -a, -o, or -e (i.e., luz → lucecita “light-DIM.FEM”) ( Colina, 2003 , see also Vadella, 2017 on the syntax of diminutives in Spanish). These allomorphs can appear with most Spanish words including nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and interjections ( Reynoso, 2001 ). The prototypical meaning of the diminutive in Spanish is the notion of “smallness,” but pragmatic values such affection, intimacy, contempt and politeness are also attributed to this semantic/pragmatic category ( Travis, 2004 ; Mendoza, 2005 ; Regúnaga, 2005 ; Marrero et al., 2007 ; Eddington, 2017 ).

  Similar to Spanish, English also has morphological devices for expressing diminutive meaning (i.e., the suffixes -y/-ie, -let and -ette ) ( Dressler and Merlini Barbaresi, 1994 ; Schneider, 2013 ), but this morphological strategy is limited to a set of semantic categories pertaining to animals and proper names ( Sifianou, 1991 ; Bysrov et al., 2020 ). For example, in a study of English diminutives in children's books, Bysrov et al. (2020) reported 169 diminutive forms, whereby only 19 of these are morphological diminutives and 104 are analytic (or paraphrastic) diminutives of the form “little + either common or proper noun” as in little child . That is, analytic diminutives of the form “little + noun” are more prevalent than the morphological diminutive in English. In addition to expressing “smallness,” English analytic diminutives can convey positive or negative emotions, contempt, and affection, among other pragmatic values ( Schneider, 2013 ; Bysrov et al., 2020 ). Similar to English, Spanish also has analytic forms to express the notion of “smallness” (i.e., pequeño or chico “little/small”), but these analytic forms are relatively infrequent in Spanish ( Jurafsky, 1996 ), especially in heritage Spanish as I show next. In terms of diminutive formation, then, it is fair to say that English employs an analytic strategy to express diminutive meaning, whereas Spanish applies a morphological strategy for this linguistic function.

  In a cross-linguistic study, Jurafsky (1996) presented empirical evidence for the claim that the origin of the morphological diminutive is the sense/concept of “child.” In Jurafsky's terms, “every case in which a historical origin can be determined for a diminutive morpheme, the source was either semantically related to “child” (e.g., a word meaning “child” or “son”), or pragmatically related to “child” (e.g., a hypocoristic suffix on names)” (1996, p. 562). Based on these observations, Jurafsky developed a universal radical category (a graphical representation) for the semantics/pragmatics of the diminutive. In this radical category, “child” is the central sense of the diminutive, and pragmatic values such as “affection” and “sympathy” are extensions of the diminutive as “a marker of speech by, about, to, or with some relation to children” ( Jurafsky, 1996 p. 563). On the other hand, Jurafsky (1996) further suggested that the core meaning of analytic diminutives in languages like English is the sense “small.” That is, semantic values such as approximation (i.e., little tired) and small type (i.e., little finger) of English diminutives arise from the sense “small,” which can also convey contempt as a pragmatic value (i.e., you little-so-and-so) [see Bysrov et al. (2020) for more pragmatic values of English analytic diminutives, though it is not clear whether the concept “child” is the pragmatic source of the pragmatic functions reported in Bysrov et al. (2020) ]. In Jurafsky's proposal, then, morphological diminutives in languages like Spanish convey pragmatic values attributed to the central sense/concept “child,” whereas English analytic “little + noun” expresses semantic/pragmatic values arising from the sense “small.” In short, Spanish and English employ different morphosyntactic strategies arising from different semantic senses to express diminutive meaning.

  Considering these cross-linguistic differences in bilingual contexts, a crucial question arises: what diminutive strategies do Spanish–English bilinguals employ to express diminutive meaning in their two languages? This question concerns, on the one hand, the everyday use of the Spanish morphological diminutive (i.e., -ito/a , or other suffixes) compared to its analytic counterpart pequeño or chico “little,” and, on the other hand, the use of English analytic diminutives (i.e., “little”) compared to its morphological counterpart (i.e., the suffixes -y/-ie ). A bilingual corpus where Spanish–English bilingual informants freely alternate between their two languages throughout their spontaneous conversations would be the ideal data source to test out these predictions. The Bangor Miami Corpus ( Deuchar, 2008 ) provides a first insight into the question that concern us here.

  The Bangor Miami Corpus ( Deuchar, 2008 ) consists of 56 spontaneous Spanish–English bilingual conversations involving 84 informants who lived in Miami, Florida, U.S. at the time of the data collection, for a total of 35 h of recorded conversation. The bilingual practices of this bilingual community are well-documented in the literature ( Fricke and Kootstra, 2016 ; Valdés Kroff, 2016 ; Vanhaverbeke and Enghels, 2021 ). In an analysis of Spanish and English diminutives in this corpus, Vanhaverbeke and Enghels (2021) found that, in their Spanish-discourse, Spanish–English bilinguals produced the morphological strategy (i.e., - ito/a ) at an 88.57% (527/595) rate compared to a 11.43% (68/595) rate for its analytic counterpart (i.e., pequeño “ small'). 5 In their English-discourse, on the other hand, the same bilinguals produced the English analytic strategy at an 86.15% (255/296) rate compared to a 13.85% (41/296) rate for its morphological counterpart. Interestingly, the diminutive morpheme -ito/a represented 91.08% (480/527) of the morphological strategy applied in Spanish-discourse, while English “little” represented 89.01% of the analytic strategy in English-discourse. When these morphological/analytic strategies were further analyzed for their pragmatic function, Vanhaverbeke and Enghels reported that these bilinguals used English analytic diminutives to express real and objective properties of the entity in question (a quantitative value), while the same bilinguals used the Spanish morphological strategy to convey a qualitative evaluation based on the speaker's subjective perception of the entity in context. 6

  While the diminutive category is a productive morphological device for expressing diminutive meaning in the Spanish-discourse of heritage speakers from Miami, diminutive formation (a morphological process) has in fact been reported to be a challenging feature in heritage languages in contact with English. For example, Kpogo et al. (2023) noted that Twi and English use a morphological strategy (i.e., diminutive morpheme) and an analytic strategy to express diminutive meaning, but Twi speakers prefer the morphological strategy, whereas English speakers prefer the analytic one (similar to the Spanish–English contrast discussed above). In an experimental study, Kpogo et al. (2023) then investigated the linguistic strategy that second-generation (G2) Twi speakers in the U.S. preferred compared to the strategy preferred by first-generation (G1) Twi speakers. They found that G2 Twi heritage speakers preferred the analytic over the morphological strategy to express the notion of “smallness” in heritage Twi, whereas the G1 Twi speakers exhibited the opposite preference. The authors suggested that the complexity of linguistic options for expressing diminutive meaning in Twi combined with cross-linguistic influence at the level of preferences can explain Twi heritage speakers' preferences for the analytic over the morphological strategy in heritage Twi (see also El Haimeur, 2019 for similar findings for diminutive formation in heritage Moroccan Arabic in France).

  Summarizing, Vanhaverbeke and Enghels' (2021) analysis of the Bangor Miami Corpus indicates that Spanish–English bilinguals from Miami resorted to the morphosyntactic strategies of their two respective languages to express diminutive meaning in bilingual contexts. Moreover, and similar to other Spanish-speaking regions in non-contact situations, the diminutive morpheme -ito/a is the most productive morphological device in their Spanish-discourse conveying “affective” pragmatic values. On the other hand, Twi heritage speakers in the U.S. preferred the analytic over the morphological strategy to express diminutive meaning in their heritage language, while G1 Twi speakers preferred the morphological strategy in this language. A possible explanation for the preference of the morphological over the analytic strategy in the Bangor Miami Corpus is the possibility that these bilinguals were, more likely than not, exposed the morphological strategy early in their language learning trajectory because diminutives are a salient feature of child-directed speech. Twi heritage speakers in the U.S., on the other hand, may experience a different language learning trajectory (i.e., more English exposure during childhood) compared to the Spanish heritage population and this could explain the preference for the analytic strategy in heritage Twi, although only experimental data has been reported for the Twi heritage population in the U.S. The studies discussed in this section provide important insights into diminutive formation in heritage bilingualism, but the pragmatic force that heritage speakers may convey through the use of the diminutive in everyday speech remains unexplored territory. The present study aims to fill this gap in the literature.

  3 A framework to study the pragmatics of the diminutive in heritage bilingualism

  Jurafsky's (1996) universal structure for the semantics/pragmatics of the diminutive is primarily based on historical empirical evidence, that is, it does not concern the everyday use of diminutives. While the pragmatic extensions of the central sense “child” in this universal structure can be studied independently for any language, a framework that can capture the pragmatic force of the diminutive as a collective force deriving from the speaker's subjective evaluation of the entity in context is desirable. I believe Reynoso's (2001 , 2005) framework offers a promising approach to studying the pragmatic force that heritage speakers wish to convey through the use of the diminutive in everyday speech. It should be noted that Jurafsky's (1996) proposal for the semantics/pragmatics of the diminutive and Reynoso's framework to study the everyday use of the diminutive should be conceived as two frameworks that can complement each other, rather than two different frameworks examining the same linguistic phenomenon.

  In a study of Argentine, Andean, Peninsular and Mexican Spanish, Reynoso (2001) found that historical events (i.e., colonization) and sociocultural norms motivate the presence or absence of the diminutive in these Spanish-speaking regions. In particular, Reynoso emphasized that some Spanish-speaking regions, but not others, exploit diminutive morphology to manifest sociocultural norms unique to a speech community (i.e., attenuating negative or positive events in life such as death or fortune), which in turn leads to higher frequency of the diminutive in these communities. Based on these observations, she developed a framework to study the pragmatic force of the Spanish diminutive across the Spanish-speaking regions included in her study. Reynoso (2001) identified three pragmatic functions in her cross-dialectal data, which together make a continuum ranging from an objective to an extremely subjective conceptualization of the entity in question, as illustrated in Table 1 . 7

  

  Table 1 . Pragmatic functions of the Spanish diminutive based on Reynoso (2001 , 2005) .

  At the objective end of the spectrum (+ objective ) in Table 1 , the speaker can apply a QUANTIFYING function that involves almost no subjective evaluation of the entity in question, but rather a purely objective evaluation where the use of the diminutive refers to an entity's tangible characteristics such as size and shape. For example, in (2a) the diminutive form -ita is used to express the dimensional characteristics of a physical object. 8 Within the QUANTIFYING function in Table 1 , the speaker can further “diminish” or “intensify/centralize” her evaluation by invoking a certain degree of subjectivity. For instance, in (2b), the speaker applies the diminutive form -ita to the lexical base cosa “thing” to diminish the canonical meaning of “dinner.”

  (2a) el chofer no sé por qué decidió estacionarse en la pura orillita de un cerro (CESA004)

  ‘the driver, I don't know why he decided to park right by the edge-DIM of a hill'

  (2b) Y la cena, pues cenan muy liviano, algo, cualquier cosita (CESA016)

  “As for dinner, well they eat very light, like, any-thing-DIM really”

  When the speaker applies the QUALIFYING function in Table 1 , s/he invokes a greater degree of subjectivity to conceptualize the entity in question and assigns a positive or negative pragmatic value to this evaluation. Importantly, sociocultural norms play a crucial role in determining the positive/negative pragmatic value of the speaker's evaluation. For example, grandparents and children are often conceived as family members that deserve affection in Mexican culture ( Reynoso, 2001 ), and other cultures as well. Thus, the use of the diminutive is likely to express a positive value when referring to children or grandparents as illustrated in (3a), but a negative value when the speaker expresses despair or anger about other human beings (3b), or any other entity in general.

  (3a) Desde que se murieron mis abuelitos no regreso [a México] (CESA013)

  ‘Since my grandparent-DIM.PL died I haven't returned [to Mexico]'

  (3b) Conozco a una cubana, a una cubanita por ahí que no sé. Nunca le he caído bien (CESA013)

  “I know a Cuban, a Cuban-DIM.FEM somewhere that I am not sure (of what she thinks of me). I have never gotten along with her”

  At the other end of the spectrum in Table 1 , the speaker can apply the RELATIONAL function, which involves the maximum degree of subjectivity by manipulating the discourse or expressing respect toward entities that are highly respected in a speech community such as religious figures like God or Virgen Mary. With this pragmatic function, the speaker establishes a relationship with the interlocutor who must be able to decode the pragmatic force of the diminutive; if the speaker believes the interlocutor cannot decode this pragmatic force, s/he would not apply such force to the diminutive in first place. Similar to the QUALIFYING function, sociocultural norms play a crucial role in the RELATIONAL function as illustrated in (4), where the interlocutor presumably understands what woman-like behavior looks like.

  (4) y jugaba allá a las muñecas y así. XY es muy diferente, es más mujercita (CESA016)

  “and she would play with dolls and things like that. XY [girl's name] is different, she is more woman-like-DIM”

  Reynoso's (2001) work revealed that speakers across all four Spanish varieties included in her study applied the pragmatic functions and their respective pragmatic values illustrated in Table 1 . Interestingly, the Andean and Mexican varieties, which represent the mestizo population in Reynoso's study, applied the pragmatic functions that involve a more subjective evaluation more frequently than the Peninsular and Argentine Spanish varieties. Based on these results, Reynoso (2001 , 2005) suggested that sociocultural norms are particularly relevant for the use of the diminutive in Mexican and Andean Spanish. More recent studies have also adopted Reynoso's framework to study the pragmatic force of the Spanish diminutive in other Spanish-speaking regions and have provided further support for this framework ( Paredes García, 2015 ; Słowik, 2017 ; Malaver and Paredes García, 2020 ).

  Thus, I believe that Reynoso's (2001 , 2005) framework is suitable for studying the pragmatic force that Spanish heritage speakers wish to convey through the use of the diminutive in their heritage language. In the next section, I provide some empirical evidence indicating that Spanish heritage speakers from Southern Arizona and their monolingual counterparts from Mexicali, Mexico are language users of the Spanish variety spoken in Northern Mexico. I further compare the use of the diminutive in heritage Spanish to their monolingual counterparts in Mexicali to tease out sociocultural norms unique to each speech community. The next section presents the methodology of the present study.

  4 Methodology: a sociolinguistic perspective on heritage pragmatics

  Considering that Spanish and English employ different morphosyntactic strategies arising from different semantic senses to express diminutive meaning as described above, this study addresses the following research questions (RQs):

  4.1 Research questions

  RQ1: What is the relative frequency of the Spanish morphological diminutive compared to its analytic counterpart in the Spanish-discourse of Spanish heritage speakers from Southern Arizona?

  RQ2: What pragmatic force do heritage speakers from Southern Arizona convey through the use of the morphological diminutive in their Spanish-discourse and how does it compare to their monolingual counterparts from the same dialectal region?

  RQ3: What role do sociocultural norms unique to the heritage experience play in the everyday use of Spanish diminutives in the Spanish-discourse of heritage speakers from Southern Arizona?

  4.2 The corpora

  In this study, I analyze the use of Spanish diminutives in two U.S.-Mexico border regions. The first data set is representative of a Spanish–English bilingual community in Southern Arizona, U.S., provided in the Corpus del Español en el Sur de Arizona (The CESA Corpus, Carvalho, 2012 ). The CESA Corpus is an on-going research project directed by linguist Ana M. Carvalho and aims at documenting and disseminating Spanish varieties spoken in Arizona, U.S., which borders with the state of Sonora in Mexico. At the time of the data collection, the CESA informants lived, worked and/or studied in Tucson, Arizona, U.S, which has a population of 542,629 habitants, 42.17% of whom identify as Hispanic or Latino ( United States Census Bureau, 2020 ). According to the 2020 Census data, 69.2% of Tucson's habitants speak English at home and 26.1% speak Spanish. Although English is the majority language spoken in Tucson, Arizona, Spanish is well-represented across different social domains in this bilingual community, including the church and supermarkets ( Jaramillo, 1995 ; Francom, 2012 ).

  Currently, the CESA Corpus consists of 78 sociolinguistic interviews of ~1 h each. The sociolinguistic interviews archived in this corpus were carried out by graduate and undergraduate students, the researcher included, who were trained in conducting a sociolinguistic interview following Labov (1972) protocol ( Bessett et al., 2024 ). In particular, informants were asked about childhood memories, current social issues at their local community, and questions about language use in their communities and within their families, among other questions. The interviews were conducted in Spanish, but informants were encouraged to freely alternate between languages if they wished to. The CESA informants provided demographic information about themselves and their parents.

  Only 49 of the existing 78 sociolinguistic interviews in the CESA Corpus are included in the present study. The remaining interviews were excluded because (i) informants were born or raised in Mexico, (ii) the interview lacks informant's language background information, or (iii) the informant did not produce any instances of the target token; two informants who were born in Mexico but raised in the U.S. from childhood are included in the 49 total sample because their bilingual profile is not different from that of informants born in the U.S. All the informants included in the current sample were raised in Southern Arizona, mainly in the cities of Tucson and Phoenix, and all of them lived in Tucson at the time of the data collection. The CESA data set analyzed here consists of ~305,542 words.

  The second data set comprises 18 sociolinguistic interviews of predominantly monolingual Spanish speakers from the city of Mexicali, Baja California in Mexico, which borders with the state of California in the U.S. side and the state of Sonora in the Mexican side of the border. These sociolinguistic interviews are provided in the Proyecto Para el Estudio Sociolingü í stico del Español de España y de América (PRESEEA, https://preseea.uah.es/ ), a large research project coordinated by the University of Alcalá in Spain. This project aims at documenting the speech of Spanish speakers who live and work in urban settings across the Spanish-speaking regions ( Moreno-Fernández, 2005 ). Similar to the CESA Corpus, the PRESEEA Corpus follows a sociolinguistic interview protocol for data collection. The interviews analyzed here include informants' demographic information, including sex, age, and level of education. These interviews are ~40 min long and were conducted by a team of sociolinguists at the Autonomous University of Baja California in Mexico. All the informants lived and worked in the city of Mexicali in Mexico at the time of the data collection. The Mexicali data set consists of ~119,162 words.

  Spanish speakers in these two U.S.-Mexico border regions are representative language users of the Northern variety of Mexican Spanish. For instance, Bessett (2015) analyzed the use of variable copula estar “to be” (i.e., estar occurring in contexts where one would normally expect the use of copula ser “to be”) in the Spanish-discourse of heritage speakers from Southern Arizona compared to variable copula estar in the speech of Spanish monolinguals from the state of Sonora, Mexico. Bessett's study revealed that Spanish heritage speakers (or bilinguals in his terms) exhibited similar usage patterns to their monolingual counterparts from the state of Sonora, Mexico regarding the extension of variable estar : i.e., 20.8% for heritage speakers from Southern Arizona vs. 16.2% for monolinguals from Sonora, Mexico. Similarly, the implementation of the diagraph “ch” as either an affricate [ t ∫] or a fricative [∫] is a key phonetic feature of Northern Mexican Spanish ( López Velarde and Simonet, 2019 ), and Casillas (2012) found that Spanish heritage speakers from Southern Arizona also produced this phonetic variation in their Spanish-discourse. Finally, it is important to mention that Spanish speakers from Baja California, Mexico have positive attitudes about bilingualism and the U.S. culture in general ( Rábago et al., 2008 ). It is therefore fair to suggest that the informants in the present study are language users of the same Spanish variety.

  4.3 informants

  Bilingual informants from the CESA Corpus are 31 females and 17 males ranging between the ages of 18 and 55 ( M = 25.08; SD = 7.80), while those from the Mexicali corpus are 10 females and 8 males ranging from 21 to 68 ( M = 46.11; SD = 16.77) years old. Bilingual informants completed a bilingual language profile (BLP) questionnaire adopted from Birdsong et al. (2012) . They reported acquiring both Spanish ( M = 1.97; SD = 1.56 years-old) and English ( M = 3.57; SD = 2.01 years-old) relatively early in life and assigned themselves overall high proficiency in speaking, listening, reading and writing for both Spanish ( M = 4.61; SD = 0.01) and English ( M = 4.45; SD = 0.01) as shown in Table 2 . Most bilingual informants reported to use both Spanish and English on a regular basis with friends, family and at school/work (see Table 2 ). Furthermore, 41 of the 49 bilingual informants have a parent who was born in Mexico, and most of them ( n = 47) have visited Mexico at least once and/or have close family in Mexico ( n = 39). That is, Mexican heritage is an important factor for this bilingual sample. And thus, our bilingual sample is representative of heritage Spanish speakers who were immersed in a bilingual experience from early on in life and have high fluency in the heritage language (i.e., Valdés, 2005 ). While the Mexicali corpus does not provide data on informants' linguistic profiles, the interviews indicate that these speakers are predominantly monolingual in Spanish (i.e., some informants explicitly state in the interviews that they only speak Spanish).

  

  Table 2 . Characteristics of 49 Spanish–English bilingual informants from the CESA Corpus.

  4.4 Data coding procedure

  Every interview from the CESA and Mexicali corpora was carefully analyzed for the target token, both audio and the written text of the interviews were considered. Target tokens (diminutives) were coded for the following parameters in both data sets:

  (a) Diminutive suffix: -ito, -illo, -ín, -ico, -ete, -ejo, -uelo

  (b) Allomorph of the -ito/a morpheme: -ito/a and -cito/a

  (c) Word category: noun, verb, adjective, adverb or interjection

  (d) Lexicalization: lexicalized form vs. pragmatic force

  (e) Pragmatic force: the macro-pragmatic functions in Table 1 and their respective pragmatic values

  (f) Semantic sense: child sense vs. small sense

  Every diminutive token that conveyed a pragmatic force was coded according to Reynoso's (2001 , 2005) framework in Table 1 . In the coding procedure, the macro-pragmatic functions in Table 1 were determined on the basis of the degree of subjectivity that the speaker applied when using the diminutive in context. Speaker's intentions (i.e., what kind of pragmatic force is the speaker conveying through the diminutive) further helped us determine the sub-functions (pragmatic values) in Table 1 . The researcher carefully analyzed the context where the diminutive occurred to determine the pragmatic force for each diminutive token in both corpora. It is important to mention that the researcher is a language user of Mexican Spanish and participated in the data collection of the CESA Corpus while living in the community. Next, I provide examples from the CESA Corpus to illustrate each of the pragmatic values in Table 1 .

  Within the QUANTIFYING function in Table 1 , which is more objective than subjective, the speaker can “minimize,” “diminish,” or “intensify/centralize” the pragmatic force of the diminutive in a given context. For example, in (5a) the diminutive “minimizes” the dimensional characteristics of the entity in question, whereas in (5b) it “diminishes” the prototypical meaning of the referred entity where palabritas implies “irrelevant words.” The speaker can also intensify/centralize the prototypical meaning of a base form, as illustrated in (5c) where the diminutive morpheme attaches to the adjective exacto “exact” that expresses a precise measure or idea. The diminutive in (5c), then, intensifies or centralizes the meaning of the adjective exacto .

  (5a) El dedo se le cortó y lo tenía colgando como por un hilito (CESA021)

  ‘He cut his finger and it was hanging by a string-DIM'

  (5b) A ella nunca le hablo en inglés. Nunca, nada más palabritas (CESA045)

  I never speak English to her. Never, just little word-DIM.PL.

  (5c) Así como lo tiene ella [el pelo], así exactito (CESA041)

  ‘the way she has it [the hair], like that exact-DIM'

  Importantly, note that the speaker's evaluation is maximally objective in (5a), but it involves a degree of subjectivity in (5b) and (5c) because the speaker deliberately chooses to diminish or intensify the meaning of the base form, respectively. The examples in (5), then, illustrate the QUANTIFYING function and its respective pragmatic values in the coding system adopted here.

  Unlike the QUANTIFYING function, the QUALIFYING function in Table 1 involves a greater degree of subjectivity and can trigger a positive or a negative value as illustrated in examples (6a) and (6b), respectively.

  (6a) Ay me encantaba ir a México porque era en el campo o sea mis abuelitos eran campesinos

  “I loved going to Mexico because it was in the countryside, I mean, my grandparent-DIM-PL were peasants” (CESA009)

  (6b) Usualmente la gente [risa] con los carritos más feitos …son la gente más especial (CESA021)

  “Usually, people who have ugly-DIM.PL car-DIM-PL…are more especial”'

  In a positive evaluation, the speaker applies the diminutive to express affection toward something or someone as clearly demonstrated in (6a). The example in (6b) further illustrates that a subjective evaluation can also trigger a negative value, that is, the speaker uses the diminutive forms carritos “car-DIM-PL” and feitos “ugly-DIM.PL” in (6b) to express his/her annoyance about clients' complaints. Similarly, a positive evaluation can also be conveyed when referring to institutions that deserve respect or places that trigger nostalgia as illustrated in (6c), where use of the possessive pronoun mi “my” indicates that the speaker feels nostalgia toward his/her hometown, which could in fact be much bigger than the prototypical size of a small town.

  (6c) Me acuerdo de mi pueblito porque así se veía (CESA036)

  ‘I remember my hometown-DIM because it looked just like that'

  In short, the examples in (6a)–(6c) illustrate how the diminutive form can convey a positive or negative subjective evaluation in the everyday speech of Spanish heritage speakers from Southern Arizona.

  The RELATIONAL function in Table 1 involves the maximum degree of subjectivity, namely because this function conveys pragmatic values that are socio-culturally sensitive in the sense that some cultures are more likely to buffer positive or negative events in society through the use of the diminutive ( Reynoso, 2001 , 2005 ; Company, 2002 ). Another key feature of this pragmatic function is the manipulation of discourse, that is, the speaker assumes that the interlocutor is part of the speech community who will be able to decode the pragmatic force assigned to the diminutive. For instance, in (7a) the speaker applies the diminutive to attenuate the speaker's perception that s/he is becoming of age. The use of the adjective vieja “old” instead of its diminutive form can be interpreted as a face-threatening act, and so the speaker applied the diminutive in (7a) to buffer the reality of becoming of age. In fact, the interlocutor may very well compliment the speaker's youth-looking as a way of adhering to the community's sociocultural norms (i.e., in a society that privileges young-looking).

  (7a) ya me estoy haciendo viejita (CESA018)

  “I am getting old-DIM already”

  (7b) Pues agarré una idea bien, bien suave…se me prendió el foquito (CESA022)

  “I had a very, very cool idea. I had an aha-DIM moment”

  In (7b) the speaker uses the diminutive form to explain his/her aha moment. The speaker further presumes that the interlocutor will be able to decode this idiomatic expression. And thus, (7b) is an example of the “irony” value in Table 1 because the speaker engages the interlocutor in decoding the meaning of the diminutive form. Reynoso's (2001 , 2005) study further revealed that speakers can apply the diminutive to express respect for religious figures or events (i.e., Diosito “God-DIM”), but there are no instances of this pragmatic value in either the CESA or the Mexicali corpora.

  In order to test RQ1 in the CESA Corpus, I further analyzed all 49 sociolinguistic interviews for the use of the adjectives pequeño and chico “little/small.” Moreover, recall that Jurafsky (1996) proposed that morphological diminutives arise from the sense “child,” whereas the meaning of analytic diminutives stems from the sense “small.” Therefore, I also explored the pragmatic dimensions that the analytic forms pequeño and chico may convey in their diminutive form (i.e., chiquito/a ). And thus, the parameter “semantic sense” above refers to whether the use of the diminutive morpheme -ito/a attached to the adjectives pequeño and chico denotes the tangible characteristics of the entity in question (“size sense”) or conveys the speaker's subjective perception of age and/or childhood experience (“child sense”).

  A final note is in order to highlight the fact that some instances of the diminutive morpheme -ito/a do not convey a pragmatic force in the speech of heritage speakers or their monolingual counterparts. In other words, there are some lexicalized tokens of the diminutive in both data sets. Any instance of the diminutive that does not convey a pragmatic value was excluded from further analysis. Excluded tokens are food labels (8a) and continuous repetitions of a particular diminutive form (8b); in (8b), for example, the speaker used the diminutive form pueblito “town-DIM” early in the interview and throughout the interview when referring to the place where s/he was born.

  (8a) Las alitas, me encantan las alitas (CESA031)

  ‘Wings, I love wings'

  (8b) Yo nací: en un pueblito que se llama Morenci Arizona (CESA036)

  ‘I was born in a town-DM called Morenci Arizona'

  In the Supplementary material that go along with this paper, the reader has access to the entire data sets where s/he can see the pragmatic value assigned to each target token in both corpora as well as all instances of the analytics pequeño and chico in the CESA Corpus.

  4.5 Analysis

  As shown in Table 1 , speakers' choice of the diminutive involves a continuum ranging from an objective to a subjective evaluation with three categories: a quantifying, a qualifying and a relational function. Multinomial logistic regression is then well-suited as an analytical tool to explore speakers' use of the diminutive morpheme -ito/a in everyday speech. This statistical tool tests the probability or risk of being in a given category or level compared to other categories ( Hilbe, 2009 ). Similar to logistic regression with a binary dependent variable, multinomial regression relies on log-odds ratios of the predictor variables for interpretation, providing direct analysis of a choice between two values of the dependent variable ( Rosemeyer and Enrique-Arias, 2016 ; Fahy et al., 2021 ). Importantly, multinomial regression specifies one level of the dependent variable as the reference value (the baseline), and thus a fitted model “calculates the log odds of the other levels of the dependent variable relative to this reference value” ( Fahy et al., 2021 , p. 205). In multinomial regression, the independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA) assumption states that characteristics of one particular choice alternative do not impact the relative probabilities of choosing other alternatives, and can be tested employing the Hausman-McFadden test ( Hilbe, 2009 ).

  For the purpose of the present study, multinomial regressions were carried out using the multinom() function within the “nnet” R package ( Ripley and Venables, 2023 ) in the statistical software application R (R Core Team, 2021 ). Since the “nnet” package does not provide built-in tests for the Hausman-McFadden test, I tested the IIA assumption using the mlogit package for R ( Croissant, 2020 ). Following Hilbe (2009) suggestion, I checked the IIA by estimating the full model and then fitting a model reduced by a level (category) and employing the Hausman-McFadden test of IIA. As mentioned above, this study probes speakers' objective vs. subjective use of the diminutive, and so I tested the IIA assumption for the quanti (fying) and the quali (fying) subset of alternatives. The Hausman-McFadden test indicated that there is no violation of the IIA assumption for this subset of alternatives [χ 2 (3) = 0.068, p = 0.995].

  Since the IIA is valid, I fitted a multinomial regression using the multinom() function to analyze speakers' use of the quanti (fying), quali (fying), and rela (tional) functions, which represent the dependent variable. In this model, the quanti (fying) function served as the reference value because this particular function expresses speaker's more objective use of the diminutive, and so speakers' more subjective use of the diminutive are compared against a more objective use. In other words, the model will identify the log-odds ratios of using the quali (fying) function over the quanti (fying) function and of using the rela (tional) function over the quanti (fying) function, based on the influence of the predictor variables. Corpus (heritage vs. monolingual) and informants' sex (female vs. male) are the predictor variables. In building this first model, I ran an “intercept-only model” (a model with no predictors) and then fitted a model for the predictors. The fitted model was significantly different from the intercept-only model [χ 2 (4) = 21.13, p = 000; AIC finalmodel = 1526.66; AIC nullmodel = 1539.79], which confirmed that the final model is more parsimonious. I checked variance inflation factors (VIFs) for corpus = 1.35 and sex = 1.73, which confirmed that these predictors are not correlated. For a better interpretation of the model's coefficients, coefficients were transformed into probabilities using the package “effects” within R ( Fox et al., 2019 ).

  I ran a second multinomial regression using the multinom() function to explore whether Spanish proficiency modulates heritage speakers' use of the diminutive. For this second model, Spanish proficiency was coded for “mid” and “high” proficiency based on informants' self-reported proficiency in the bilingual language profile (BLP) questionnaire reported in Table 2 . In this questionnaire, bilingual informants were asked to self-rate their Spanish proficiency on a scale of 0 to 6 for speaking, listening, reading, and writing. The ratings in Table 2 indicate that informants' overall Spanish proficiency across these four language skills ranged from 3.25 to 6 points. Consequently, informants who scored 5 and above for Spanish proficiency in the BLP ( n = 25) were classified as the “high” proficiency group, and those who scored below 5 average points ( n = 24) were classified as “mid” proficiency groups. Similar to the first model, this second model included speakers' use of the quanti (fying), quali (fying), and rela (tional) functions in Table 1 as the dependent variable, with quanti (fying) as the baseline. Spanish proficiency is the predictor variable. The same statistical tools used in the first model were applied to the second model to test the IIA assumption of multinomial regression. The Hausman-McFadden test indicated that there is no violation of the IIA assumption for the subset of alternatives [χ 2 (2) = −4304.3, p = 1].

  In building this second model, I first ran a model with no predictors and then fitted a model with Spanish proficiency as a predictor. The fitted model was not significantly different from the intercept-only model [χ 2 (2) = 1.83, p = 0.40; AIC finalmodel = 1106.38; AIC nullmodel = 1104.21]. The data files and the scripts used for these analyses are available at Open Science Framework (OSF: https://osf.io/m5gu8/ ).

  The analysis revealed a total of 946 diminutive tokens in the Spanish-discourse of heritage speakers from Southern Arizona and a total of 369 diminutive tokens in the Mexicali corpus. While the diminutive suffixes -illo/a ( n = 12) and - í n ( n = 1) were observed in the Mexicali corpus in addition to -ito/a , only the morpheme -ito/a was observed in the speech of heritage speakers. All diminutive tokens were further classified into their word category as reported in Table 3 for both corpora.

  

  Table 3 . Overall frequency of Spanish diminutives in the CESA Corpus and the Mexicali Corpus by word category.

  As we can see in Table 3 , diminutive morphology is well-represented across nouns, adjectives, and adverbs in both corpora. Recall that the diminutive morpheme -ito/a has two allomorphs in Spanish, namely -ito/a and - cito/a . There are 20 instances of the -cito/a allomorph in the CESA Corpus, and one of these tokens appeared with the unexpected word class, that is, the lexical base banco “stool” would normally take the -ito/a allomorph, and not -cito/a as applied in (9). As for the Mexicali corpus, there are 26 instances of the -cito/a allomorph, and all occurred with the expected word class.

  (9) Cuando yo lavo los trastes, ella agarra su banquecito y me ayuda (CESA006)

  ‘When I wash the dishes, she gets her stool-DIM and helps me'

  Interestingly, one bilingual informant also applied the diminutive morpheme -ito/a to English-origin words as illustrated in (10).

  (10a) Y luego me agarré un Jeepesito , un nineteen ninety (CESA031)

  “And then I bought a Jeep-DIM, a nineteen ninety”

  (10b) Un muchacho que se pone unos shortsitos así y que anda enseñando el cuerpo

  “A guy who wears some short-DIM-PL like that and is showing off his body” (CESA031)

  As mentioned in the previous section, there are some diminutive tokens that do not convey a pragmatic force in the data sets analyzed here. These include food labels, continuous repetitions of a diminutive form, and proper names for a total of 29 tokens in the CESA Corpus and 3 tokens in the Mexicali corpus, all excluded from further analysis. In addition, a careful analysis of the adverb ahorita and its variant horita “now-DIM” indicates that this diminutive form encodes primarily the meaning “at the present moment” in both corpora as illustrated in following examples.

  (11a) De hecho ahorita estoy hablando mejor que hace un mes porque he estado en una clase de español (CESA047)

  ‘In fact, right now-DIM I am speaking better than I did a month ago because I have been in a Spanish class'

  (11b) Y ahorita apenas acabo de ver que están haciendo el tren (MXLI_H22_015)

  ‘And right now-DIM I saw that they are building the train'

  According to Reynoso (2001) and Malaver and Paredes García (2020) , when attached to the adverb ahora “now,” the diminutive form -ito/a augments the immediateness of the event being described or narrated. In Reynoso's (2001 , 2005) framework adopted here, the “immediateness” pragmatic force of ahorita falls within the intensifying/centralizing value of the QUANTIFYING function in Table 1 . However, Reynoso (2001) also noted that ahorita seems to be losing its intensifying force in Mexican Spanish, and she suggested that the duplication of the diminutive (i.e., ahoritita “now-DIM”) can serve as a testing ground to tease out whether ahorita conveys a pragmatic force or functions as a lexicalized form; duplication would presumably express the intensifying force of the diminutive. Indeed, ahorita is a very frequent form in the corpora analyzed here (248 tokens in the CESA Corpus and 106 in the Mexicali corpus), but there are no instances of diminutive duplication with ahorita in either corpora. In other words, we cannot carry out Reynoso's duplication test to delimit the pragmatic force of ahorita “ now-DIM” in the data sets that concern us here. And thus, ahorita and its variant horita were excluded from further analysis in the present study.

  The final data sets examined for the pragmatic force that heritage speakers and their monolingual counterparts wish to convey through the use of the diminutive consists of 669 diminutive tokens in the CESA Corpus ( n = 49 informants) and 260 tokens in the Mexicali corpus (17 informants, one of the 18 informants in the initial data set produced lexicalized forms only). Of the 669 total diminutive tokens in the CESA Corpus, 57.55% (385) were produced by female bilingual informants and 42.45% (284) by male bilingual informants; similarly, 56.15% (146) were produced by female and 43.85% (114) by male informants in the Mexicali corpus.

  Table 4 reports the relative frequencies of the macro-functions and their respective pragmatic values found in the heritage corpus and the monolingual corpus.

  

  Table 4 . Percentages of pragmatic functions of the Spanish diminutive in the CESA Corpus and the Mexicali corpus.

  The analysis revealed that heritage speakers and their monolingual counterparts employed most of the pragmatic values reported in Table 1 ; the “respect” pragmatic value is the only missing value in both corpora. In particular, the quantifying function represents 57.40% (384/669) of the heritage corpus and 66.92% (174/260) of the monolingual corpus. Within this function, the “minimizing force,” which involves an objective evaluation, is well-represented in the heritage corpus (25.78%) but is more prevalent in the monolingual corpus (46.55%). Similarly, the “intensifying force,” which centralizes the dimensional characteristics of the referred entity by invoking a certain degree of subjectivity from the speaker's perspective, is the most prevalent pragmatic force with a 71.09% (273/384) rate in the heritage corpus and a 49.43% (86/174) rate in the monolingual corpus. On the other hand, the “diminishing force” is relatively infrequent in both corpora (3.13% in the heritage corpus and 4.02% in the monolingual corpus). It should be noted, however, that several diminutive forms are very frequent in the quantifying function; for instance, there are 137 tokens of the adverb poquito/a “little,” 28 tokens of the adverb cerquita(s) “near-DIM” and 17 tokens of adjective chiquito/a “small-DIM,” which together represent 66.66% (182/273) of the total tokens in the “intensifying force” within the quantifying function in the heritage corpus as illustrated in Table 4 .

  The qualifying function in Table 4 represents 38.27% (256/669) of the heritage corpus and 25.78% (67/260) of the monolingual corpus. Within this function, a “positive evaluation” is overwhelmingly preferred (96.87%) over a “negative evaluation” (3.13%) in the heritage corpus and a similar pattern is observed in the monolingual corpus. The relative frequencies of the “positive evaluation” in Table 4 include 50 tokens of the diminutive form abuelito/as “grandparent-DIM” and 114 tokens of the diminutive chiquito/a “small-DIM,” which together represent 66.12% (164/248) of this pragmatic value within the qualifying function in the heritage corpus as illustrated in Table 4 . Paredes García (2015) pointed out that “negative evaluations” within the qualifying function are relatively infrequent in sociolinguistic interviews because the interviewee may not feel comfortable sharing “negative evaluations” with the interviewer because they may not know each other.

  Finally, the relational function, which involves the maximum degree of subjectivity from the speaker's perspective, represents only 4.33% (29/669) of the heritage corpus and 7.30% (19/260) of the monolingual corpus. Within this function, the “attenuating” force is more frequent than the “irony” force in both corpora. By employing the “attenuating” force, the speaker aims to buffer the literal meaning of the base form to be socio-culturally appropriate/acceptable.

  In order to draw statistical inference on the use of the diminutive across heritage speakers and their monolingual counterparts as per RQ2, I ran a multinomial logistic regression as described in the Analysis section of this paper. The fitted model identified the log-odds ratios of using the quali (fying) function over the quanti (fying) function and of using the rela (tional) function over the quanti (fying) function, based on the influence of the predictor variables. The “sign” and “magnitude” of the model coefficients indicate the direction and relative size, respectively, of the influence of a particular predictor variable on the dependent variable.

  Table 5 reports the multinomial regression model coefficients for the corpus (heritage vs. monolingual) and informants' sex (female vs. male) predictors, where the quanti (fying) value is the baseline. In this model, the intercept log odds indicate that the probability of using the qualifying function over the quantifying function decreases by 0.30 ( SE = 0.09) in the overall data set, which is a statistically significant decrease according to a z-test at p < 0.05 significance level. Similarly, the probability of using the relational function over the quantifying function decreases by 2.82 ( SE = 0.25), which is also statistically significant as illustrated in Table 5 . In other words, heritage speakers and their monolingual counterparts are significantly more likely to use a quantifying function over the relational or the qualifying function when employing the diminutive morpheme -ito/a in their everyday speech.

  

  Table 5 . Summary of multinomial logistic regression model for speakers' subjective evaluations of the diminutive morpheme -ito/a .

  As for the predictors, the log-odds ratios (coefficient estimates) of the qualifying function occurring in place of the quantifying function (the baseline) decreased by 0.54 ( SE = 0.16) in the monolingual corpus relative to the heritage corpus, a compassion that is statistically significant. On the other hand, the log-odds ratios of the relational function occurring in place of the quantifying function increased by 0.36 ( SE = 0.30) in the monolingual corpus relative to the heritage corpus, a comparison that is not statistically significant as shown in Table 5 . In other words, compared to the baseline value, heritage speakers are significantly more likely to apply a more subjective use of the diminutive (the qualifying function) relative to their monolingual counterparts, whereas monolingual speakers are more likely to apply a more objective use of the diminutive relative to their heritage counterparts, although this last comparison is not statistically significant as shown in Table 5 . Figure 1 provides a visual illustration of these findings via predicted probabilities. In the next section, I explain the implications of this particular finding in relation to RQ2 of this paper.

  

  Figure 1 . Corpus effect plot for predicted probabilities across the macro-functions quanti(fying), quali(fying) and rela(tional).

  As for informants' sex, the log-odds ratios of the qualifying function occurring in place of the quantifying function (the baseline) decreased by 0.24 ( SE = 0.14) for male informants relative to female informants, a compassion that is not statistically significant, p = 0.09. On the other hand, the log-odds ratios of the relational function occurring in place of the quantifying function increased by 0.48 ( SE = 0.30) for male informants relative to female informants, a comparison that is not statistically significant either, p = 0.11. In other words, informants' sex did not play a role in determining speakers' selection of the diminutive morpheme -ito/a in their everyday speech.

  As pointed out in the previous section, I ran a second multinomial model to explore whether Spanish proficiency modulates heritage speakers' selection of the diminutive morpheme -ito/a in their Spanish-discourse. Bilingual informants were divided into “mid” and “high” proficiency based on their self-reported Spanish proficiency in the BLP questionnaire. Table 6 reports the coefficients for this second model. In this model, which includes the heritage speakers' data only, the log-odds ratios (coefficient estimates) of the qualifying function occurring in place of the quantifying function (the baseline) increased by 0.11 ( SE = 0.16) for the “mid” proficiency group, a compassion that is not statistically significant, p = 0.49. On the other hand, the log-odds ratios of the relational function occurring in place of the quantifying function decreased by 0.45 ( SE = 0.44) for the “mid” proficiency group, a comparison that is not statistically significant either, p = 0.31. In fact, it should also be noted that the fitted model was not significantly different from the intercept-only model. The analysis, then, indicated that, regardless of their proficiency in Spanish, heritage speakers apply a similar degree of subjectivity when using the diminutive morpheme -ito/a in their Spanish-discourse.

  

  Table 6 . Summary of multinomial logistic regression model for Spanish proficiency in modulating heritage speaker's use of the diminutive morpheme -ito/a .

  A final note on the use of the analytic forms pequeño/a and chico/a is in order here. In particular, there are 33 instances of pequeño/as and 52 instances of chico/as in the heritage corpus, and 61.17% (52/85) of these expresses speakers' perception of age in relation to childhood experiences as illustrated in (12), and the remaining 38.83% refers to size or quantity of the referent.

  (12a) So era casi igual como cuando yo estaba chica (CESA001)

  ‘So it was almost the same when I was little-FEM'

  (12b) Me acuerdo que cuando estábamos pequeñas teníamos un Nintendo (CESA016)

  ‘I remember that when we were small-FEM we had a Nintendo'

  Interestingly, the analysis further revealed that the diminutive counterpart (i.e., chiquito/as ) of the analytic “chico” represents 26.15% (175/669) of the heritage corpus, and 67.42% (118/175) of these diminutive forms express the sense “child” as illustrated in (13a); the remaining 57 instances (or 32.58%) of the diminutive form chiquito/as refers to the referent's size or shape. There are only two instances of the diminutive form pequeñito/a in the heritage corpus and both refer to size or shape. On the contrary, the diminutive form chiquito/as represents only 7.30% (19/260) of the monolingual corpus, and 68.42% (13/19) of these expresses the sense “child” as illustrated in (13b); there are no tokens of the pequeñito/as form in the monolingual corpus. In short, the diminutive form chiquito/a is more prevalent in the speech of heritage speakers relative to their monolingual counterparts from the same dialectal region.

  (13a) Cuando estaba chiquita era un [ sic ] tradición de ir a México (CESA023)

  ‘When I was mall-DIM it was a tradition to go to Mexico'

  (13b) Nunca me han gustado [las películas de terror] de chiquita me dan pánico

  ‘I have never liked them [horror movies], never since I was little-DIM (MXLI_M21_050)

  Summarizing, the study revealed that the diminutive morpheme -ito/a is a productive morphological device is the Spanish-discourse of Spanish heritage speakers from Southern Arizona, whereas its analytic counterparts pequeño and chico are relatively infrequent in the everyday speech of this heritage community. The analysis further showed that the diminutive is a polysemous category conveying an array of pragmatic forces in the Spanish-discourse of heritage speakers and their monolingual counterparts from the same dialectal region. In particular, heritage speakers are significantly more likely to apply a more subjective use of the diminutive involving positive attitudes toward family members and/or childhood experiences. This positive perception is evident in the use of the diminutive form chiquito/a whose semantic core is the sense “child.” In the next section, I provide a possible interpretation of the results and their implications for the study of diminutives in heritage bilingualism.

  6 Discussion

  In this paper, I highlighted that the Spanish language employs a morphological strategy to express diminutive meaning, whereas English prefers an analytic strategy. Following Jurafsky's (1996) universal structure of the semantics/pragmatics of the diminutive, I further emphasized that different semantic senses mediate these morphosyntactic strategies: the morphological strategy is semantically and pragmatically linked to the concept “child,” whereas the sense “small” is the semantic/pragmatic source of the analytic strategy. Importantly, only the concept “child,” but not “small,” can trigger pragmatic values such as “affection” and “sympathy” as extensions of the diminutive as a marker of speech by, about, to, or with some relation to children. Given these cross-linguistic differences, the present study examined how Spanish heritage speakers from Southern Arizona, U.S. express diminutive meaning in their Spanish-discourse.

  In particular, the current study examined the relative frequency of the morphological diminutive (i.e., -ito/a , or other suffixes) compared to its analytic counterparts pequeño and chico “little/small” in the Spanish-discourse of heritage speakers (RQ1). Excluding lexicalized items, heritage speakers produced 669 morphological diminutives conveying an array of pragmatic forces and 85 analytic forms ( pequeño and chico “small”) expressing speakers' perceptions of an entity's size and/or age. As per RQ1, then, the results revealed that the diminutive morpheme -ito/a is a productive morphological device in the everyday speech of Spanish heritage speakers from Southern Arizona. For example, the relative frequency of the diminutive -ito/a in the heritage corpus yielded similar frequencies across all the grammatical categories attested in the monolingual corpus (see Table 3 ). Interestingly, heritage speakers produced only the diminutive morpheme -ito/a , whereas other diminutive suffixes were observed in the speech of their monolingual counterparts from the same dialectal region. Moreover, the morphological diminutive chiquito/a , which is the counterpart of the analytic form chico , represents 26.15% (175/669) of the heritage corpus, and 67.42% (118/175) of these diminutive forms express the sense “child.” In short, the results indicated that Spanish heritage speakers overwhelmingly preferred the morphological strategy over its analytic counterpart in their Spanish-discourse.

  RQ2 further explored the pragmatic force of the morphological diminutive in the Spanish-discourse of heritage speakers from Southern Arizona compared to their monolingual counterparts from the same dialectal region. In order to address this question, I followed Reynoso's (2001 , 2005) framework in which speakers can employ a pragmatic force ranging from an objective to a subjective evaluation of the entity in question. The analysis revealed that heritage speakers and their monolingual counterparts applied most the pragmatic values attested in Reynoso's (2001) cross-dialectal study of the Spanish diminutive. As we can see in Table 4 , the analysis indicated that these groups exhibited a similar distribution of the diminutive morpheme - ito/a in their everyday speech. First, the quantifying function in Table 1 includes the notion of “smallness,” which is often taken to represent the prototypical meaning of the diminutive in Spanish ( Eddington, 2017 ). The present analysis then suggests that Spanish heritage speakers from Southern Arizona maintain the prototypical meaning of the Spanish diminutive in their heritage language—though their everyday use of this prototypical meaning is less frequent compared to their monolingual counterparts (i.e., 25.78% vs. 46.55%, respectively). In this sense, heritage speakers maintain the semantics/pragmatics of the Spanish diminutive morpheme -ito/a , but the heritage experience triggers a greater degree of subjectivity in relation to family members and/or childhood experiences as I explain next.

  In particular, a multinomial logistic regression revealed that heritage speakers are significantly more likely to apply a more subjective use of the diminutive (i.e., more likely to apply the qualifying function compared to the quantifying function) compared to their monolingual counterparts. As we can see in Table 1 , the qualifying function involves a positive or a negative evaluation. The analysis showed that heritage speakers conveyed a positive rather than a negative evaluation through the use of the diminutive morpheme - ito/a . In particular, within the qualifying function, heritage speakers employed the morpheme -ito/a primarily to convey affection or endearment toward family members, including grandparents, siblings, cousins, and nephews and nieces. Moreover, heritage speakers applied the diminutive morpheme -ito/a to retrieve childhood experiences through the use of the diminutive form chiquito/a . These findings support Jurafsky's (1996) claim that morphological diminutives arise from the central sense “child,” which can in turn trigger pragmatic values such as “affection” and “sympathy.” In other words, the present analysis suggests that the concept “child” motivates the everyday use of the diminutive morpheme -ito/a in the Spanish-discourse of heritage speakers as a marker of speech by, about, to, or with some relation to children.

  In terms of speakers' sex (gender), there is no statistical significance between male and female speakers, suggesting that both groups exhibited similar distributions of the diminutive morpheme -ito/a across the objective-subjective continuum in Table 1 . A second multinomial regression further showed that Spanish proficiency did not modulate heritage speakers' degree of subjectivity applied in using the diminutive morpheme -ito/a in their everyday speech.

  The third RQ further explored the role of the diminutive morpheme -ito/a in promoting cultural meaning related to the heritage experience in the Spanish-discourse of heritage speakers from Southern Arizona. In Reynoso's (2001 , 2005) framework, sociocultural norms can exert the degree of subjectivity that speakers employ through the use of the diminutive. Reynoso further suggested that the relational function, which involves the maximum degree of subjectivity, is the pragmatic function that best captures how speakers manifest sociocultural norms unique to a speech community. In fact, the relational function occurred at a 21.28% (792/3,271) rate in Reynoso's corpus of Mexican Spanish, and the use of the diminutive manifested sociocultural norms linked to speakers' Mexican identity and culture. However, the reader may recall that the relational function is relatively infrequent in both the heritage (4.33%) and the monolingual (7.30%) corpora analyzed here. Instead, heritage speakers invoked a maximum degree of subjectivity to convey affection toward their family members and to retrieve childhood memories through the use of the diminutive morpheme -ito/a , two crucial factors in heritage language learning ( Carreira and Kagan, 2011 ; Leeman, 2015 ; Xiao-Desai, 2019 ; Dubinina, 2021 ). Although more research is needed in terms of the linguistic forms that encode cultural meaning in heritage languages (see Park, 2008 for heritage Korean in the U.S.), the present analysis suggests that the diminutive morpheme -ito/a can be a promoter of cultural meaning in the heritage community studied here. The fact that the morpheme -ito/a is the only diminutive suffix observed in this speech community supports this suggestion.

  While we do not have data from the kind of input that the heritage population studied here received during child language learning, child studies indicate that the diminutive morpheme -ito/a is the most productive form used by parents and their children in child-directed speech ( Melzi and King, 2003 ; Marrero et al., 2007 ). Since most of the heritage speakers in the present study experienced a period of Spanish monolingual learning in the first years of life (see Table 2 ), it is likely that they were primarily exposed to the diminutive morpheme -ito/a during childhood. If so, sociocultural meaning linked to the heritage experience (i.e., how to interact with their Spanish-speaking grandparents and other relatives) was further instilled during the process of being socialized in the heritage language, and continued to expand in a bilingual context. It followed that the diminutive morpheme -ito/a eventually became the community norm in this speech community to the point that these language users did not adopt other diminutive suffixes to express diminutive meaning in their heritage language, even when they are exposed to other diminutive suffixes through interactions with monolingual speakers from Mexico because of the constant flow of people between Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora. In this sense, the diminutive morpheme - ito/a maintains its core semantic sense “child,” but its everyday use (or its pragmatic dimensions) has been conventionalized in this speech community to convey primarily speakers' subjective perceptions about their heritage language experience, which includes their Mexican heritage and growing up bilingual ( Leeman, 2015 ).

  In this study, heritage speakers from Southern Arizona employed the diminutive morpheme -ito/a in their Spanish-discourse to convey affection toward their family members. However, it should be noted that Aaron (2015) showed that Spanish–English bilinguals from New Mexico were more likely to use English-origin kinship terms such as grandma and daddy in their Spanish-discourse instead of the Spanish equivalents of these kinship terms (i.e., abuelito/a ). 9 Aaron further suggested that English-origin kinship terms “serve specific, locally determined discourse functions that have been conventionalized within this community” (p. 476). Aaron's study and the present study suggest that bilingual communities in the U.S. may employ different linguistic strategies to manifest community norms linked to the heritage (bilingual) experience. Moreover, Vanhaverbeke and Enghels' (2021) analysis of the Bangor Miami Corpus showed that Spanish–English bilinguals from Miami produced other diminutive suffixes in addition to the diminutive morpheme -ito/a , which is the only form observed in the heritage corpus in the present study. Finally, Kpogo et al. (2023) experimental study indicated that Twi heritage speakers in the U.S. exhibited different morphosyntactic strategies to express diminutive meaning compared to first generation Twi speakers.

  These studies highlight the importance of studying diminutive formation and the semantic/pragmatic dimensions of the diminutive in heritage bilingualism as well as how heritage speakers encode and generate sociocultural meaning in their heritage languages. Future studies can adopt a similar framework to the one developed here to explore whether the concept “child” is the core sense of the diminutive in other heritage communities and the pragmatic (or illocutionary) force that these communities assign to the diminutive morpheme in their everyday speech. This line of research could shed new light on the diversity of pragmatic norms in heritage bilingualism, including speech acts ( Pinto and Raschio, 2007 ; Elias, 2015 ; Bar On and Meir, 2022 ; Avramenko and Meir, 2023 ) and discourse/pragmatic markers ( Park, 2008 ; Kern, 2014 , 2017 ).

  7 Conclusion

  The present study examined the morphosyntactic strategies that Spanish heritage speakers from Southern Arizona employ to express diminutive meaning in their heritage language as well as the pragmatic force that these language users convey through the use of the diminutive morpheme - ito/a in their everyday speech. Heritage speakers overwhelmingly preferred the morphological strategy (i.e., the morpheme -ito/a ) over its analytic counterpart, and the sense “child” motivated the morphological diminutive in their Spanish-discourse. This particular finding supports Jurafsky's (1996) claim that morphological diminutives arise from the sense “child.” In addition to its prototypical meaning (i.e., the notion of “smallness”), the diminutive morpheme -ito/a conveyed an array of pragmatic values in the everyday speech of Spanish heritage speakers and their monolingual counterparts from the same dialectal region, but the statistical analysis revealed that heritage speakers are significantly more likely to apply the diminutive morpheme -ito/a to convey positive attitudes toward their family members and to talk about their childhood experiences/memories. This particular finding was interpreted to indicate that the diminutive morpheme -ito/a is a promoter of cultural meaning in the Spanish-discourse of heritage speakers from Southern Arizona, U.S. Nevertheless, I should also highlight the fact that the diminutive morpheme -ito/a has been used to mark social marginality in some high schools across California where the diminutive form “oaxaquita” conveys a derogatory connotation when referring to people from the Mexican state of Oaxaca ( Esquivel, 2012 ). This again stresses the nuances of the diminutive morpheme -ito/a and the need to study its pragmatic dimensions across bilingual communities in the U.S.

  Data availability statement

  The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/ Supplementary material , further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author. The data files and the scripts used for these analyses are available at Open Science Framework (OSF: https://osf.io/m5gu8/ ).

  Author contributions

  AC: Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing.

  The author(s) declare that financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This research project was partially funded by a Dean's Grant awarded to the author by the College of Arts and Sciences at Santa Clara University.

  Acknowledgments

  The author would like to thank Maya Díaz, Francisca Gelman and Kaitlyn Robles for their help with this research project. I also thank the editor and reviewers for their insightful feedback and patience.

  Conflict of interest

  The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

  Publisher's note

  All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

  Supplementary material

  The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2024.1377977/full#supplementary-material

  Table 1. Diminutives CESA corpus.

  Table 2. Diminutives Mexicali corpus.

  1. ^ Dressler and Merlini Barbaresi (1994) proposed that the core meaning of the diminutive is the semantic sense “small,” whereas the (non-serious) feature is the driving pragmatic force of the diminutive. Based on cross-linguistic evidence, however, Jurafsky (1996) raised some concerns for Dressler and Merlini Barbaresi's proposal of the (non-serious) feature as the pragmatic source of the diminutive, and instead proposed that the sense “child” is the semantic and pragmatic source of the diminutive. In this paper, I adopt Jurafsky's (1996) proposal because it provides a compelling approach to the study of diminutives in heritage bilingualism. In the next section, I explain how it does so.

  2. ^ The examples in (1) were extracted from the Corpus del Español en el Sur the Arizona (The CESA Corpus, Carvalho, 2012 ), the Spanish–English bilingual corpus that I analyze in this paper.

  3. ^ I acknowledge current efforts to eschew from the monolingual comparative normativity prevalent in heritage bilingualism ( Rothman et al., 2023 ). The monolingual sample in the present study serves as a comparison group to explore the pragmatic dimensions of language use in a bilingual community rather than prescriptive norms in heritage bilingualism.

  4. ^ Although I use the -ito/a form in this paper for sake of clarity, it should be noted that the final -o/-a vowel contrast is not part of the diminutive morpheme in most cases because it predicts the wrong derivation of words like mapa > * mapito , which should be mapita “map-DIM” ( Colina, 2003 ).

  5. ^ Analytic diminutives in Spanish-discourse in fact included poco and chin both meaning “little” and chico and pequeño both meaning “small.”

  6. ^ It should be noted that Vanhaverbeke and Enghels (2021) adopted a different framework than the one adopted here to examine the pragmatic force of diminutives in Spanish–English bilingualism. Moreover, and given Miami's unique Spanish-speaking context, bilinguals from Miami may not fit the working definition of “heritage speakers.”

  7. ^ Table 1 presents the pragmatic functions proposed in Reynoso's (2001 , 2005) framework, which was written in Spanish. The “labels” of the pragmatic values in Table 1 are not the direct translations from Reynoso's terms, but they aim to capture the general conceptualization proposed in Reynoso's original work.

  8. ^ As a reminder, the examples used throughout this paper are examples from the heritage population that concern us here, unless otherwise indicated.

  9. ^ I thank Annie Beatty-Martínez for pointing this out to me.

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  Keywords: diminutives, pragmatics, sociolinguistic data, heritage bilingualism, Spanish

  Citation: Cruz A (2024) Expressing diminutive meaning in heritage Spanish: linking the heritage experience to diminutive use in everyday speech. Front. Lang. Sci. 3:1377977. doi: 10.3389/flang.2024.1377977

  Received: 28 January 2024; Accepted: 18 June 2024; Published: 08 July 2024.

  Reviewed by:

  Copyright © 2024 Cruz. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

  *Correspondence: Abel Cruz, acruzflores@scu.edu

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