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Reduplication

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Reduplication, in linguistics, is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word, or only part of it, is repeated.

Reduplication is used both in inflections to convey a grammatical function, such as plurality, intensification, etc., and in lexical derivation to create new words. It is often used when a speaker adopts a tone more "expressive" or figurative than ordinary speech and is also often, but not exclusively, iconic in meaning. Reduplication is found in a wide range of languages and language groups, though its level of linguistic productivity varies.

Contents

Typological description

Note: This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for a pronunciation key.

Form

Reduplication is often described phonologically in one of two different ways: either (1) as reduplicated segments (sequences of consonants/vowels) or (2) as reduplicated prosodic units (syllables or moras). In addition to phonological description, reduplication often needs to be described morphologically as a reduplication of linguistic constituents (i.e. words, stems, roots). As a result, reduplication is interesting theoretically as it involves the interface between phonology and morphology.

The base is the word (or part of the word) that is to be copied. The reduplicated element is called the reduplicant, often abbreviated as RED or sometimes just R.

In reduplication, the reduplicant is most often repeated only once. However, in some languages, reduplication can occur more than once, resulting in a tripled form, and not a duple as in most reduplication. Triplication is the term for this phenomenon of copying three times. Pingelapese has both reduplication and triplication.

Basic Verb Reduplication Triplication
(Rehg 1981)

Triplication occurs in other languages, e.g. Ewe, Shipibo, Twi, Mokilese, Min Nan.

Sometimes gemination (i.e. the doubling of consonants or vowels) is considered to be a form of reduplication. The term dupleme has been used (after morpheme) to refer to different types of reduplication that have the same meaning.

Full and partial reduplication

Full reduplication involves a reduplication of the entire word. For example, Kham derives reciprocal forms from reflexive forms by total reduplication:

    'ourselves' → 'we (to) each other'
    'themselves' → 'they (to) each other' (Watters 2002)

Another example is from Musqueam Halkomelem "dispositional" aspect formation:

    'to capsize' → 'likely to capsize'
    'to speak' → 'talkative' (Shaw 2004)

Partial reduplication involves a reduplication of only part of the word. For example, Marshallese forms words meaning 'to wear X' by reduplicating the last consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) sequence of a base, i.e. base+CVC:

    kagir 'belt' → kagirgir 'to wear a belt' (kagir-gir)
    takin 'sock' → takinkin 'to wear socks' (takin-kin) (Moravsik 1978)

Many languages often use both full and partial reduplication, as in the Motu example below:

Base Verb Full reduplication Partial reduplication
mahuta  'to sleep' mahutamahuta  'to sleep constantly' mamahuta  'to sleep (plural)'
  (mahuta-mahuta) (ma-mahuta)

Reduplicant position

Reduplication may be initial (i.e. prefixal), final (i.e. suffixal), or internal (i.e. infixal), e.g.

Initial reduplication in Agta (CV- prefix):
    'afternoon' → 'late afternoon'
    'a long time' → 'a long time (in years)' (ŋa-ŋaŋaj) (Healey 1960)

Final reduplication in Dakota (-CCV suffix):
    'tall (singular)' → 'tall (plural)' (hãska-ska)
    'good (singular)' → 'good (plural)' (Marantz 1982, Albright 2002)

Internal reduplication in Samoan (-CV- infix):
    savali 'they walk' → savavali 'he walks' (sa-va-vali)
    alofa 'they love' → alolofa 'he loves' (a-lo-lofa) (Moravcsik 1978, Broselow and McCarthy 1984)

Internal reduplication is much less common than the initial and final types.

Copying direction

A reduplicant can copy from either the left edge of a word (left-to-right copying) or from the right edge (right-to-left copying). There is a tendency for prefixing reduplicants to copy left-to-right and for suffixing reduplicants to copy right-to-left:

Initial L → R copying in Oykangand Kunjen (a Pama-Nyungan language of Australia):
    → 'rain' (ed-eder)
    → 'straight' (alg-algal)

Final R → L copying in Sirionó:
    achisia → achisiasia 'I cut' (achisia-sia)
    ñimbuchao → ñimbuchaochao 'to come apart' (ñimbuchao-chao) (McCarthy and Prince 1996)

Copying from the other direction is possible although less common:

Initial R → L copying in Tillamook:

Final L → R copying in Chukchi:

Internal reduplication can also involve copying the beginning or end of the base. In Quileute, the first consonant of the base is copied and inserted after the first vowel of the base.

Internal L → R copying in Quileute:

In Temiar, the last consonant of the root is copied and inserted before the medial consonant of the root.

Internal R → L copying in Temiar (an Austro-Asiatic language of Malaysia):

A rare type of reduplication is found in Semai (an Austro-Asiatic language of Malaysia). "Expressive minor reduplication" is formed with an initial reduplicant that copies the first and last segment of the base:

Reduplication and other processes

All of the examples above consist of only reduplication. However, reduplication often occurs with other phonological and morphological process, such as deletion, affixation of non-reduplicating material, etc.

For instance, in Tz'utujil a new '-ish' adjective form is derived from other words by suffixing the reduplicated first consonant of the base followed by the segment [oχ]. This can be written succinctly as -Coχ. Below are some examples:

* [kaq] 'red' → [kaqkoχ] 'reddish'  (kaq-k-oχ)
* [q’an] 'yellow' → [q’anq’oχ] 'yellowish'  (q’an-q’-oχ)
* [jaʔ] 'water' → [jaʔjoχ] 'watery'  (jaʔ-j-oχ)   (Dayley 1985)
Somali has a similar suffix that is used in forming the plural of some nouns: -aC (where C is the last consonant of the base):

* [tog] 'ditch' → [togag] 'ditches'  (tog-a-g)
* [ʕad] 'lump of meat' → [ʕadad] 'lumps of meat'  (ʕad-a-d)
* [wɪːl] 'boy' → [wɪːlal] 'boys'  (wɪːl-a-l)   (Abraham 1964)
(One linguist has used the word duplifix to refer to this combination of reduplication and affixation.)

In Tohono O'odham initial reduplication also involves gemination of the first consonant in the distributive plural and in repetitive verbs:

* [nowiu] 'ox' → [nonnowiu] 'ox (distributive)'  (no-n-nowiu)
* [hódai] 'rock' → [hohhodai] 'rock (distributive)'  (ho-h-hodai)
* [kow] 'dig out of ground (unitative)' → [kokkow] 'dig out of ground (repetitive)'  (ko-k-kow)
* [gɨw] 'hit (unitative)' → [gɨggɨw] 'hit (repetitive)'  (gɨ-g-gɨw)   (Haugen forthcoming)
Sometimes gemination can be analyzed as a type of reduplication.

Function and meaning

In the Malayo-Polynesian family, reduplication is used to form plurals (among many other functions):

*Malay rumah "house", rumah-rumah "houses".
*Hawaiian has the important example wiki-wiki.
In pre-1972 Indonesian and Malay orthography, 2 was shorthand for the reduplication that forms plurals: orang "person", orang-orang or orang2 "people"[The Malay Spelling Reform], Asmah Haji Omar, (Journal of the Simplified Spelling Society, 1989-2 pp.9-13 later designated J11).

The Nama language uses reduplication to increase the force of a verb: go, "look;", go-go "examine with attention".

Chinese also uses reduplication: 人 rén for "person", 人人 rénrén for "everybody". Japanese does it too: 時 toki "time", tokidoki 時々 "sometimes, from time to time". Both languages can use a special written iteration mark 々 to indicate reduplication, although in Chinese the iteration mark is no longer used in standard writing and is often found only in Calligraphy.

Indo-European languages formerly used reduplication to form a number of verb forms, especially in the preterite or perfect tenses. In the older Indo-European languages, many such verbs survive:

*spondeo, spopondi (Latin, "I vow, I vowed")
* λείπω, λέλοιπα (Greek, "I leave, I left")
* δέρκομαι, δέδορκα (Greek, "I see, I saw"; these Greek examples exhibit ablaut as well as reduplication)
*háitan, haíháit (Gothic, "to name, I named")
None of these sorts of forms survive in modern English, although they existed in its parent Germanic languages. A number of verbs in the Indo-European languages exhibit reduplication in the present stem rather than the perfect stem: Latin gigno, genui ("I beget, I begat") is a surviving example. Other Indo-European verbs used reduplication as a derivational process; compare Latin sto ("I stand") and sisto ("I remain"). All of these Indo-European inherited reduplicating forms are subject to reduction by other phonological laws.

Recent Finnish slang uses reduplicated nouns to indicate genuinity, completeness, originality and being uncomplicated as opposed to being fake, incomplete, complicated or fussy. It can be thought as compound word formation. E.g. Söin viisi jäätelöä, pullapitkon ja karkkia, sekä tietysti ruokaruokaa. "I ate five choc-ices, a long loaf of coffee bread and candy, and of course food-food". Here, the "food-food" is contrasted to the "junk-food" -- the principal role of food is nutrition, and "junkfood" isn't nutritious, so "food-food" is nutritious food, exclusively.

* ruoka "food", ruokaruoka "proper food", as opposed to snacks
* peli "game", pelipeli "complete game",as opposed to a mod
* puhelin "phone", puhelinpuhelin "phone for talking", as opposed to a pocket computer
* kauas "far away", kauaskauas "unquestionably far away"
These sorts of reduplicative forms, such as "food-food," are not merely literal translations of the Finnish but in fact have some frequency in contemporary English for emphasising, as in Finnish, a "authentic" form of a certain thing. "Food-food" is one of the most common, along with such a possibilities for "car-car" to describe a vehicle which is actually a car (small automobile) and not something else such as a truck, or "house-house," for a stand-alone house structure as opposed to an apartment, for instance.

In Swiss German, the verbs gah or goh "go", cho "come", la or lo "let" and aafa or aafo "begin" reduplicate when combined with other verbs.

Examples

Indo-European

English reduplication

English uses some kinds of reduplication, mostly for informal expressive vocabulary. There are three types:

In the ablaut reduplications, the first vowel is almost always a high vowel and the reduplicated ablaut variant of the vowel is a low vowel. There is also a tendency for the first vowel to be front and the second vowel to be back.

None of the above types are particularly productive, meaning that the sets are fairly fixed and new forms are not easily accepted, but there is another form of reduplication that is used as a deprecative called shm-reduplication that can be used with most any word; e.g. baby-shmaby or car-shmar. This process comes to American English from Yiddish.

More can be learned about English reduplication in Thun (1963), Cooper and Ross (1975), and Nevins and Vaux (2003).

Lingua Franca
Common in Lingua Franca, particularly but not exclusively for onomatopoeic action descriptions: "Spagnoli venir...boum boum...andar; Inglis venir...boum boum bezef...andar; Francés venir...tru tru tru...chapar." ("The Spaniards came, cannonaded, and left. The English came, cannonaded heavily, and left. The French came, trumpeted on bugles, and captured it.") [link]

French
A common use for reduplication in French is the creation of hypocoristics for names, thus Louise becomes Loulou, and Zinedine Zidane becomes Zizou.

Chinese

Adjective reduplication is common in Standard Mandarin, typically denoting emphasis, less acute degree of the quality described, or an attempt at more indirect speech: xiaoxiao de 小小的 (small), chouchou de 臭臭的 (smelly).

Noun reduplication is found in the southwestern dialect of Mandarin, which is nearly absent in standard Mandarin (Guoyu). For instance, in Sichuan, baobao 包包 (handbag) is used whereas Beijing and Guoyu use bao'r 包儿.

Reduplicated Babbling

During the period 25-50 weeks after birth, all infants go through a stage of reduplicated babbling, as they experiment with their vocal apparatus and home in on the sounds used in their native language. This is distinguished from earlier syllabic play, which has less of a structure.

See also

(For an example of a language with many types of reduplication see: St'at'imcets language#Reduplication.)

External links

Bibliography

 

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