Discontinuous reduplication: a typological sketch

Abstract The paper investigates discontinuous reduplication (DR), a pattern where reduplicant and base are separated by other material, by annotating a 214-example dataset collected from a 99-language sample. Several items turned out to serve as interposing elements, although their nature does not seem to correlate with function, unlike the category of the base. DR’s functions are a subset of those associated with reduplication cross-linguistically. All languages displaying DR also present contiguous reduplication, suggesting a contiguous reduplication > discontinuous reduplication hierarchy. Finally, a corpus-based analysis of Italian (lacking DR according to grammars) unveiled a wealth of DR patterns, suggesting that corpora are essential for the typological enterprise.