[…] some of the registral modifications found in simplified registers are not simplifying, clarifying, or upgrading, but simply seem to signal attitudes or affect appropriate to the communication situation. Thus, the proliferation of diminutive and hypocoristic formations in BT does not seem intended to make the language easier to process, but rather to express the speaker’s attitude to young children. The presence of such ‘expressive’ processes is doubtless a factor in the extension of registers to affectively comparable situations (e.g., BT to pets).
- Ferguson-DeBose (1977), a pag.106