Reduplication

[Giorgio Francesco Arcodia -- ============================================================ Ljuba Veselinova, Associate Professor Dept of Linguistics, Stockholm University, S-10691 Stockholm, Sweden Phone: +46-8-16-2332 Fax: +46-8-15 5389 URL : http://www2.ling.su.se/staff/ljuba/ "We learn by going where we want to go." Julia Cameron ============================================================]

Dear Scott,

I have the impression that this is a fairly common pattern 
in Sinitic - I can think of Standard Mandarin examples 
like gou-gou (sorry, no tone markers) 'dog-dog = doggie'. 
Also, almost all kinship terms are reduplicated forms 
(ma-ma, ge-ge, mei-mei, etc.); I venture to guess that 
they started out as reduplicated diminutive forms (maybe 
from child language?). However, the dog-dog pattern 
exemplified above is not really productive (you can do 
that only with a very small set of nouns).

Best.

Giorgio F. Arcodia

-- 
Dr. Giorgio Francesco Arcodia
Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca
Dipartimento di Scienze Umane per la Formazione
Edificio U6 - stanza 4101
Piazza dell'Ateneo Nuovo, 1
20126 Milano

Tel.: (+39) 02 6448 4946
Fax: (+39) 02 6448 4863
E-mail: giorgio.arcodia at unimib.it


On Sat, 2 Mar 2013 23:32:29 -0500
 "Scott T. Shell" <ay2493 at WAYNE.EDU> wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I'm looking for languages that reduplicate base forms to 
>create diminutives.
> 
> An example from Bamyili Creole:
> 
> bragbrag	'froggy'          pəpəp  	'puppy'
> daŋgidaŋgi	'donkey'	  daldal	'dollie'
> 
> Can anyone else help add to this list? It is important 
>that the reduplication process carries no grammatical 
>information. Also, I must point out that I am not looking 
>for partial base reduplication. It must be the entire 
>base. 
> 
> Thanks,
> Scott T. Shell
> Graduate Student, Wayne State University