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[marta-mb.livejournal.com]

Thanks everybody for your instructive comments in the discussion about diminutives! I was wondering if I could raise a question related to this matter again. In fact, I have to give a short account of diminutive suffixes in Indo-European languages in my thesis (and also present a report on this), and Modern Russian provides a lot of data.
Russian is quite unusual in its wide use of diminutive / hypocoristic forms. There are European languages that use or used diminutives intensively (e.g. Dutch and Frisian, also Gothic) but not to the same extent as Russian. Such wide use of some pattern of derivation may eventually be accompanied by some grammatical (not just lexical / derivational) phenomena. The original conjecture was that in some cases Russian diminutive / hypocoristic / endearment nouns seem to acquire some additional grammatical meaning besides the meaning of diminutive etc. I think that it may be some sort of specification, either the reference to the limited amount (compare Engl. some) or simply definiteness. At the moment we can't say that it's some grammatical category as it's too inconsistent but in the course of time it may possibly evolve in this direction.

Now a couple of authentic examples:
остановите на остановочке. A request: Make a stop at the specified stop, which is clear from the situation.
[остановите на остановке: non-diminutive, probably has a less specified meaning]
съешь яблочко. Eat the apple, i.e. this particular apple.
But: съешь яблоко means apple in general, any apple, non-specified.

Thanks in advance for your kind comments!