Questions and answers

What is the purpose of reduplication?

What is the purpose of reduplication?

The classic observation on the semantics of reduplication is Edward Sapir’s: “generally employed, with self-evident symbolism, to indicate such concepts as distribution, plurality, repetition, customary activity, increase of size, added intensity, continuance.” Reduplication is used in inflections to convey a …

What is reduplication and examples?

Reduplication refers to words formed through repetition of sounds. Examples include okey-dokey, film-flam, and pitter-patter. Many are baby words: tum-tum, pee-pee, boo-boo. Some are recent slang terms: bling-bling, hip hop, cray-cray.

What is the meaning of reduplication?

Reduplication is a word-formation process in which meaning is expressed by repeating all or part of a word. As for form, the term “reduplicant” has been widely used to refer to the repeated portion of a word, while “base” is used to refer to the portion of the word that provides the source material for repetition.

How many types of reduplication are there?

Travis (2001) argued that there are three types of reduplication: phonological, syntactic, and what Ghomeshi, Jackendoff, Rosen and Russell (2004) call contrastive reduplication.

What full reduplication is?

Full reduplication is the repetition of an entire word, word stem (root with one or more affixes), or root.

Does English have reduplication?

Reduplication is a widespread linguistic process in which a part or an exact copy of a word is repeated, often for morphological or syntactic reasons (but not always). English has no productive reduplication, apparently.

Is there reduplication in English?

What is Ablaut reduplication?

Ablaut reduplication is the pattern by which vowels change in a repeated word to form a new word or phrase with a specific meaning, like wishy-washy or crisscross. Ablaut reduplication is much more common in English than in most other languages.

Does English have Infixes?

Infixes are relatively rare in English, but you can find them in the plural forms of some words. For example, cupful, spoonful, and passerby can be pluralized as cupsful, spoonsful, and passersby, using “s” as an infix.

Is Mama a reduplication?

A reduplicative is a word or lexeme (such as mama) that contains two identical or very similar parts. The morphological and phonological process of forming a compound word by repeating all or part of it is known as reduplication.

What is infix in English?

An infix is an affix inserted inside a word stem (an existing word or the core of a family of words). It contrasts with adfix, a rare term for an affix attached to the outside of a stem such as a prefix or suffix.

Does English have Circumfixes?

Circumfixes are far less common in English than in other languages, and so you are much more likely to see either suffixes or prefixes. In addition, they are not productive affixes. An affix is productive if new words are coined by using them.

What does reduplication mean in a Polynesian language?

Reduplication can convey a simple plural meaning, for instance wahine “woman”, waahine “women”, tangata “person”, taangata “people”. Biggs calls this “infixed reduplication”. It occurs in a small subset of “people” words in most Polynesian languages.

What is the abbreviation for reduplication in Japanese?

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 .

Where does reduplication occur in the Persian language?

Mainly due to the mixed nature of the Persian language, most of the reduplication comes in the form of a phrase consisting of a Persian word -va- ( Persian: وَ ‎ = and) and an Arabic word, like “Taghdir-Maghdir” ( تقدیرمقدیر ‎). Reduplication is particularly common in the city of Shiraz in southwestern Iran.

Which is the correct way to describe reduplication?

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).