The author defends the traditional classification of words such as domik, solnyshko, listvenka; belenkyi, tikhonechko as forms of subjective emotional evaluation arguing that in linguistics (and linguopoetics) the term "form" does not only correspond to the concept "grammatical form" of words (idioms, statements, language in general) that is to the content through which another content is perceived. Connotative semantics of subjective emotional evaluation is an internal form of diminutive units. The article proposes to consider the amount of subjective emotional evaluation forms of nouns as a field, its center including traditional diminutives and the periphery being metaphorical forms not derived from nouns. The author draws attention to the fact that the question of the status of the forms of subjective emotional evaluation is correlated with the scope of this phenomenon in the Russian language.
Diminutive nouns are viewed together with diminutive adjectives and adverbs (like belenkyi, tihonechko) as well as words with magnifying semantics (like tolstennyi, crocodiliche). It is due to the syncretism of categories of quality and quantity that words with that feature semantics are included into this area: quantitative feature of measure is manifested as an indication of the size (domik, domiche), and as an indication of the degree (holodina, legon`ko). The meaning of the subjective emotional evaluation is obligatory for this area (cf. golubenkyi and golubovatyi. The second word is beyond the forms of subjective evaluation).
The author believes that the often used now name of the described units "The words of subjective and emotional evaluation of the degree of quality" is very broad in relation to the traditional term "Forms of subjective emotional evaluation", because the concept of "degrees of quality" includes the concept of "degrees of comparison" and subjective emotional evaluation is evident not only in the content of diminutives and words with a magnifying semantics, but in the content of other expression.