Doubling as a Sign of Morphology: A Typological Perspective

Abstract

1 The main goal of the paper is showing that there are three different kinds of iterative phenomena in languages: phoneme reduplication, not analyzed here, reduplication, and repetition. The phenomena differ on the basis of the grammatical components involved and therefore have very different effects. My work argues that reduplication is first and fore-most a formal phenomenon. It can involve several kinds of meaning, some of which of very iconic origin, but all the meanings get encoded grammatically. Then, phrases can be iterated, as well, and they are candidates for repetition. I take repetition to have an exclusively iconic function, basically with a single meaning: emphasis. No formal aspects are involved here. I insert the preceding generalization in the wider framework of the Parallel Architecture (Jackendoff 1997, 2002).