Contrastive focus reduplication

This is a salad-salad, not a tuna salad.

Contrastive focus reduplication, also called lexical cloning or the double construction, is a type of syntactic reduplication found in some languages. Doubling a word or phrase – such as do you LIKE-like him? – can indicate that the prototypical meaning of the repeated word or phrase is intended.[1] U.S. writer Paul Dickson coined the term word word in 1982 to describe this phenomenon.[2]

The first part of the reduplicant bears contrastive intonational stress.

Contrastive focus reduplication in English can apply not only to words but also to multi-word phrases such as idioms, or to word stems without their inflectional morphemes.

  • I talked to him that week, but I didn’t TALK-TO-HIM-talk-to-him.
  • In fact I barely talked to him. Not TALK-talked.[1]

Examples

The authors of the article that defined contrastive focus reduplication collected a corpus of examples in English.[1][3] These include:

  • "I'll make the tuna salad and you make the SALAD-salad."
  • "and you think you know me? The ME-me?"
  • "I’m up, I’m just not UP–up."[4]

The poem "After the Funeral"[5] by Billy Collins contains many examples of contrastive focus reduplication.

See also

References

  1. 1 2 3 Ghomeshi, Jila; Jackendoff, Ray; Rosen, Nicole; Russell, Kevin (2004). "Contrastive focus reduplication in English (the salad-salad paper)" (PDF). Natural Language & Linguistic Theory. 22: 307–357. Retrieved 17 January 2017.
  2. McArthur, Tom (1992). The Oxford Companion to the English Language. Oxford University Press. p. 1127. ISBN 0-19-214183-X.
  3. "Corpus of English contrastive focus reduplications". 30 May 2014. Retrieved 17 January 2017.
  4. Liberman, Mark (June 11, 2007). "Contrastive focus reduplication in Zits". Language Log. This example from Ghomeshi et al. was used by the comic strip Zits.
  5. ""Elusive" and "After the Funeral" by Billy Collins" (PDF). Boulevard Magazine. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2015-01-16. Retrieved 2014-10-26.
  • Dray, Nancy. (1987). Doubles and modifiers in English. (Unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Chicago).
  • Horn, Laurence. (1993). Economy and redundancy in a dualistic model of natural language. In S. Shore & M. Vilkuna (Eds.), SKY 1993: Yearbook of the Linguistic Association of Finland (pp. 31–72).
  • Wierzbicka, Anna. (1991). Cross-cultural pragmatics: The semantics of human interaction. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
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