17.117, Review: Typology/Phonology/Morphology: Hurch (2005)

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Subject: 17.117, Review: Typology/Phonology/Morphology: Hurch (2005)

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1)
Date: 12-Jan-2006
From: Michael Maxwell < maxwell at umiacs.umd.edu >
Subject: Studies on Reduplication 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sat, 14 Jan 2006 17:30:16
From: Michael Maxwell < maxwell at umiacs.umd.edu >
Subject: Studies on Reduplication 
 

EDITOR: Hurch, Bernhard
TITLE: Studies on Reduplication 
SERIES: Empirical Approaches to Language Typology 28 
PUBLISHER: Mouton de Gruyter
YEAR: 2005 
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-867.html 

Mike Maxwell, Center for Advanced Study of Language, University of 
Maryland

The papers in this book were originally given at the Graz Conference 
on Reduplication in 2002.  It appears that the authors were given the 
opportunity to revise their papers after the conference.

The conference organizers requested that presenters ''strengthen 
their theoretical claims with broad substantive evidence'', and the 
papers by and large reflect this dual perspective of theory and data, 
although naturally the papers range from those making strongly 
theoretical points to those mostly concerned with data.

With twenty five papers in this volume, I will not attempt to analyze 
each one.  The editor does a good job of summarizing the papers in 
his introduction (and Carl Rubino gives an overview of reduplication 
processes around the world, setting the stage for the further 
discussion).  Rather, I will discuss the book and its papers by themes.  
(The table of contents is available at 
http://www.degruyter.com/rfiles/p/3110181193Contents.pdf.)

1.  Repetition vs. reduplication: Diachronically, one plausible path to 
reduplication starts from repetition.  If reduplication is grammaticalized 
repetition, then distinguishing the two requires some criteria.  David 
Gil proposes several such criteria, e.g. that reduplication is only word-
sized, never phrasal.  Gil's criteria give unclear results in some cases 
(as he recognizes).

Contrary to Gil, Sharon Inkelas, in discussing her construction-
based ''Morphological Doubling Theory'' (see below), explicitly argues 
that phrasal doubling can and should be treated as the same sort of 
operation as morphological reduplication.

Also disagreeing with Gil, Utz Maas looks at a number of reduplication 
and reduplication-like syntactic constructions in Arabic languages, and 
in particular on the use of the 'masdar', a form rather like a gerund in 
English.  The masdar is morphologically derived from a verb, and is 
often used together with an inflected form of the same verb to 
strengthen the meaning of the whole, rather like ''Hitting, he hit'' to 
mean ''He hit violently.'' (Readers of more literal translations of the 
Bible will be familiar with this construction from another Semitic 
language, Hebrew.) If this is reduplication, rather than a stylistic form 
of repetition, then the two parts of the reduplicant are inflected 
differently.

As these papers show, the distinction between repetition and 
reduplication looks more like a cline than a sharp division.  Some 
theories are able to handle such gradient distinctions, while others 
posit very different mechanisms for repetition and reduplication, so 
that a dividing line somewhere is necessary.  I anticipate further 
disagreement on this issue in the future.

If it is unclear in some cases whether the repetition of a phrase or 
differently inflected forms of a word constitutes reduplication, a lack of 
clarity is apparent at the opposite end of the continuum, too.  Dina El 
Zarka argues that consonantal gemination in Arabic should be treated 
as reduplication, on the grounds that it is at least partly morphological 
(not just prosodic) in nature.  While this seems reasonable, El Zarka 
further argues against the notion that gemination is an endpoint in 
Arab grammaticalization, because some varieties of modern Arabic 
utilize both gemination and full reduplication (in biconsonantal roots), 
and the geminated forms are demonstrably older.  The geminated 
forms therefore cannot, El Zarka claims, have arisen from reduplicated 
forms.  I found this less convincing; surely reduplication can arise 
more than once in a language.  (El Zarka does not claim that the 
forms with full reduplication arose from the geminated forms, only that 
the former are replacing the latter in some contexts.)

2.  Morphological vs. Phonological Reduplication: Sharon Inkelas 
argues for her ''Morphological Doubling Theory'', in which a 
reduplicative morpheme is treated not as an empty prosodic structure 
that gets filled by copying from an adjacent base, but rather as the 
actual (grammaticalized) repetition of a morphological constituent, with 
possible subsequent truncation.  But several of her pieces of evidence 
lend themselves to re-analysis in a phonologically-based theory.  For 
instance, in Mokilese, most verb stems form progressives through 
prefixing CVC reduplication.  Monosyllabic verb stems, however, use 
triplication.  Inkelas claims that a phonological theory would have to 
analyze the triplicated forms as being having two instances of a 'RED' 
morpheme, which should--but does not--imply a meaning difference.  
In contrast, her morphological construction-based theory simply 
requires the daughter to appear twice for monosyllabic verbs.  I am 
less than convinced by this argument; it seems that in either case, 
monosyllabic verbs are a special case, and it is not clear why the 
morphological theory fares any better than a phonological theory.  
Moreover, the phonological theory she uses here is really a straw 
man.  The right theory to compare, it seems to me, would be a 
phonologically-based theory using a prosodic template requiring a 
progressive form to contain at least three syllables (or perhaps two 
feet).  The triplication of monosyllabic stems is then explicable as 
being the only way to fill this template.

Inkelas also argues from 'synonym compounds' in Southeast Asian 
languages (Khmer and Vietnamese), in which the compound consists 
of two more or less synonymous words.  (In some cases the glosses of 
the two words are identical, while in others they are only similar--
e.g. 'old' and 'mature'.  But of course glosses can be misleading, and it 
seems likely that all the word pairs in this construction are not 
perfectly synonymous.) If these synonym compounds are 
reduplications, then it is clear that reduplication does not consist of 
phonological copying, since the words in question are phonologically 
quite different.  Inkelas also brings up an antonym compound 
construction in Acehnese (the compounds have glosses like 'old and 
young', 'day and night').  While these are interesting constructions, it 
is unclear to me that anything like this is attested in clear 
(morphological) cases of reduplication.  If these compounds are not 
reduplication, then they are actually counter-evidence to Inkelas' 
theory.  

Back-copying is the situation where both the base and the reduplicant 
undergo a phonological process, despite the fact that only the 
reduplicant is in the environment for the rule.  This has of course been 
cited as evidence for such non-derivational theories of phonology as 
Optimality Theory (OT).  Fiona McLaughlin gives an interesting 
example of this phenomenon, from the Atlantic language Seereer-
Siin.  The phonological process involves consonant mutation.  
McLaughlin argues that back-copying in this case is not actually 
phonological , but rather an instance of an affix consisting of a single 
feature which is associated to both the base and the reduplicant.  
McLaughlin then uses this analysis to argue for Inkelas' theory of 
reduplication.  While McLaughlin expresses her theory in terms of OT, 
it would be interesting to see if her re-analysis could be recast in a 
derivational theory of phonology.  

Finally, Rajendra Singh discusses another compound noun 
construction, this one in Hindi; the two nouns are constrained to be 
synonymous (or antonymous), but non-identical.  Elinor Keane 
discusses echo reduplication in several south Asian languages, 
including cases where the base may be smaller or larger than a word.

3.  The Emergence of The Unmarked ('TETU'): Since McCarthy and 
Prince (1994), the expectation among Optimality Theory (OT) 
practitioners is that where the base and the reduplicant differ, the 
reduplicant will be if anything less marked than the base.  Laura 
Downing discusses cases where the opposite is true--specifically, 
cases where the reduplicant, but not the base, has a marked tone.  
While her arguments seem sound, I was left wondering why 
markedness in reduplication is only attested with marked tone.  
Downing discusses this, suggesting that the autosegmental and 
prosodic nature of tone explain this asymmetry.  I am ready to believe 
that these properties of tone account for the facts, but that potentially 
removes the issue from the realm of theory.  Putting this differently, it 
seems to me that TETU can then be explained by the non-
autosegmental, non-prosodic nature of other features, leaving nothing 
to be explained by theories such as OT.  

4.  Complete vs. partial reduplication: Nicole Nelson looks at cases 
where a partial reduplicant surfaces on the ''wrong'' side of the base, 
i.e.  where a reduplicative suffix unexpectedly matches the first part of 
the base, or a reduplicative prefix unexpectedly matches the last part 
of the base.  Nelson concludes that all such cases can be explained 
away, for example by a phonological process which (in descriptive, not 
theoretical terms) operates after full reduplication to trim off a portion 
of the reduplicant.  

5.  Historical studies: Jason D.  Haugen tries to reconstruct 
reduplication in proto-Uto-Aztecan.  It has often been argued that the 
life cycle of reduplication begins with the repetition of complete words, 
with the scope of reduplication eroding over time to yield partial 
reduplication.  Since the time depth of Uto-Aztecan is fairly high, 
reconstructing reduplicative processes which are similar to the modern 
day reduplicative processes presupposes that reduplication 
morphemes in this family have not greatly changed during that time 
(although one or another process has been lost in most languages of 
the family).  That is, while the synchronic similarities are clear, the 
nature of the reconstructed processes in the proto-language might, it 
seems to me, have been quite different.  

Reijirou Shibasaki overviews the history of grammaticalization of 
verbal reduplicants in Japanese, insofar as this can be pieced 
together from extant corpora.  

Leonid Kulikov sketches the issues surrounding reduplication during 
the documented history of the Vedic language.  The quantity of data 
and analysis that has gone into this long extinct but well attested 
language is matched by the variety of reduplicative devices.  If all 
languages could be documented and described so extensively, one 
might worry less about language endangerment, at least from a 
theoretical standpoint!  I can only echo Kulikov's concluding remark 
that students of reduplication would do well to look closely at the 
evidence from Vedic.  

6.  Child language: It has been observed that reduplication often 
arises in creole languages, despite being virtually unattested in pidgin 
languages (see below).  One way reduplication might arise ex nihilo is 
child language, and several papers explore reduplication among first 
language learners.  Wofgang Dressler, Katarzyna Dziubalska-
Kolaczyk, Naalia Gagarina and Marianne Kilani-Schoch provide 
examples of children producing reduplicants in a variety of languages 
which (in their adult form) lack productive reduplication, perhaps as a 
simplification of adult polysyllabic words.  A theoretical account of this 
stage might resemble accounts of reduplication in which an empty 
syllable in a bisyllabic foot is filled by spreading of the melody from an 
adjacent syllable, although Dressler et al do not put it in those terms.  

Marie Leroy and Aliyah Morgenstern observed a child in the very early 
stages of acquisition of French.  They remark that this child seemed to 
be a slow language learner at that point, but that he displayed a great 
deal of reduplication.  It is not however clear to me that this 
reduplication has any bearing on the later use of reduplication in 
morphology, since it is not clear at this early stage of language 
learning that there is any morphology.  That is, the child may simply be 
repeating full ''words''.  

Finally, Hatice Sofu looks at the acquisition of a partial reduplicant 
affix in Turkish.  This reduplicant is unusual in several ways: it is 
virtually the only prefix in Turkish, and it includes a coda consonant 
which is not part of the base.  Which coda consonant is used in any 
particular word, however, is difficult to pin down.  Turkish grammars 
give a number of rules for determining the appropriate consonant.  
Sofu tested whether children had learned these rules by having them 
reduplicate nonce words, and the children are far from consistent.  But 
as it turns out, adults exhibit even more variation in this task than 
children do.  One obvious possibility is that the putative rules do not 
represent the adults' competence, and that the coda consonant has 
simply been lexicalized.  

7.  Teleology: Suzanne Urbanczyk argues that phonological rules 
sometimes function to render two otherwise identical processes of 
reduplication non-homophonous.  As she admits, the claim is difficult 
to argue (as functionalist claims often are); in part, the difficulty lies in 
establishing that something requires a functionalist explanation.  But 
there is also the question of what to ascribe the function or purpose 
to.  Does language change somehow have as its goal preventing 
homophony?  This seems unlikely; on the contrary, as has often been 
noted, language change seems blind to such goals.  

But if language change is blind to preventing homophony, in what 
sense can a process be said to fulfill a function?  At first glance, a 
Darwinian parallel seems plausible, but it is far from clear what is 
doing the selecting.  Languages do not have more or fewer 
descendents because they are more or less iconic or functional, nor is 
it at all clear that iconic constructions are preferentially maintained in 
daughter languages.  Indeed languages seem to be replete with 
unnecessary morphological baggage.  Declension and conjugation 
classes and grammatical gender have been retained through millennia 
of Indo-European languages, but are familiar impediments to 
generations of second language students of these same languages (a 
point made by Carstairs-McCarthy 1994).  In sum, if language change 
has any goal, it seems unlikely to be that of making languages more 
functional.  

A different issue of teleology is mentioned in passing in the article by 
Leroy and Morgenstern discussed above.  These authors observe 
that reduplication may serve to help in first language learning, by 
enabling the child to discover phonological regularities, and to 
temporarily avoid some of the complexities of polysyllabic words.  

8.  Iconicity: One might expect that reduplication would be iconic, i.e. 
that its meaning would tend to imply ''more of the same''.  For signed 
languages, the case for the iconicity of reduplication seems 
reasonably clear, as discussed by Ronnie B. Wilbur in her paper ''A 
reanalysis of reduplication in American Sign Language.'' 

But the iconic motivation for reduplication is not always so obvious.  
Silvia Kouwenberg and Darlene LaCharite address the fact that the 
semantics of reduplication is sometimes anti-iconic, giving meanings 
like ''reddish'' or ''biggish (but still growing)''.  They begin with the fact 
that for some predicates--this is most obvious with those implying 
continuous action or states--''more'' means ''customarily'', while for 
other predicates--punctual verbs, for instance--it takes on a 
discontinuous meaning, such as ''repeatedly''.  The distinction can 
carry over to predicates which may imply a state that is localized, 
e.g. 'yellow' can refer to something that is yellow spotted.  But 
something that is spotted with yellow is no longer yellow all over, and it 
is a slight extension from 'yellow spotted' to 'yellowish'.  Kouwenberg 
and LaCharite thus claim that ''seemingly opposite interpretations of 
reduplication both instantiate the iconic principle.'' 

Their story certainly seems plausible as an historical explanation, but 
it leaves open the question of what the putative iconic principle is.  Is it 
a deep fact about language, as instantiated in human minds?  Or is it 
simply a pragmatic fact that some sorts of attributes (color, for 
example) can be discontinuous, and therefore lend themselves 
pragmatically to a discontinuous meaning, while others (weight, say) 
are nearly always properties of continuous objects?  Or to put this 
differently, does the Iconic Principle have any use in first language 
acquisition?  

Werner Abraham tackles anti-iconicity from a more theoretic 
perspective, although it appears that he reconsidered this position 
before the paper was published.  He raises the amusing question of 
why reduplication is the only morphological process for which linguists 
have attempted to find an iconic explanation; why not infixing, or 
metathesis?  

9.  Creoles: Peter Bakker and Mikael Parkvall give an overview of 
reduplication in creoles (for a book length discussion, see 
Kouwenberg 2003, reviewed here (Linguist List 15.1689).  They focus 
on the fact that reduplication is virtually absent from pidgins, but 
common in creoles.  Under the assumption that creoles are 
descended from pidgins (and that those pidgins lacked reduplication 
in the same way that present-day pidgins do), the obvious question is 
where reduplication in creoles comes from.  One answer would be that 
it is something children do naturally, and that creoles 
are ''constructed'' by children (cf. the papers discussed above under 
'Child language').  But Bakker and Parkvall lean towards a different 
answer, namely that reduplication enters a creole through the 
influence of adstratal languages, that is, it is borrowed in from other 
languages spoken in the community while the creole is forming.  
However, creoles usually have complete reduplication, whereas 
reduplication in more ''mature'' languages (including presumably the 
adstratal languages) is often partial.  While Bakker and Parkvall note 
this fact, they do not draw the implication that it might weigh against 
the theory of adstratal borrowing.  Also, the function of reduplication in 
creoles is often--but not always--different from that of the presumed 
adstratal (substratal) languages.  In the end, of course, both 
explanations may be correct; some creoles may have borrowed 
reduplicative strategies (and meanings) from adstratal languages, 
while other creoles innovated them.  

Kouwenberg and LaCharite's paper (mentioned above) also concerns 
Creoles.  

10.  Sign languages: Linguists should be thankful that sign languages 
exist, because of the unique light they throw on human language.  
Two papers discuss reduplication in signed languages.  Roland Pfau 
and Markus Steinbach on German Sign Language (GSL), and Ronnie 
B. Wilbur on American Sign Language (ASL).  Wilbur's article was 
discussed above, under the topic of iconicity.  

GSL exhibits at least two reduplication morphemes, which Pfau and 
Steinbach dub 'backward' and 'sideward' reduplication.  In backward 
reduplication, the reduplicant sign is performed in the backwards 
direction from the base sign; in sideward reduplication, the 
reduplicants (of which there are two, i.e. this is a case of triplication) 
are signed in a location to the side of where the base was signed.  
(Both morphemes have ''phonologically'' conditioned allomorphs which 
do not involve backward or sideward production.) Neither kind of 
reduplication has been attested in spoken languages.  In the case of 
backward reduplication, this is presumably because spoken 
morphemes consist of a sequence of phonemes, and human 
languages do not, so far as we know, reverse such a sequence (nor 
do sign languages reverse a sequence of signs).  And for spoken 
morphemes consisting of a single phoneme, it is unclear what it would 
mean to reverse the direction of that phoneme.  In contrast, a sign--or 
a portion of a sign that involves movement in some direction--can be 
easily reversed.  As for sideward reduplication, it is not even clear 
what it would mean to produce a spoken phoneme to one side; 
perhaps the closest analogy would be to attach a different tone to the 
reduplicant (something which is indeed attested, as discussed in 
Downing's article).  

11.  Other issues: Francoise Rose investigates reduplication in 
Emerillon, a Tupi-Guarani language.  One of the issues, too often 
taken for granted, is how (or perhaps in some cases, whether) one 
can distinguish the reduplicant from the base.  

In an earlier review on Linguist List 
(http://linguistlist.org/issues/12/12-2062.html) I commented on a 
study of reduplication in which the corpus was not large enough -- 
it did not contain enough examples of reduplication--to answer 
some critical questions.  The issue surfaces in some of the studies 
here, too.  In particular, Keane comments that ''the sample size...is 
obviously too small to draw any hard and fast conclusions.'' 
Shibasaki makes a similar point: a particular pattern of reduplication 
is known from modern Japanese, but not attested in the corpus 
which he was working with.  This is a critical issue for field linguists.  
It is also critical to know whether any particular reduplicative 
construction is productive, something which is not always made clear 
in descriptions (or even in theoretical analyses).  

Finally, I will comment on the price.  At 128 euros, I suspect few 
linguists will be tempted to buy this book.  That is perhaps unfortunate 
for the authors, whose contributions will not receive as great 
dissemination as they otherwise would.  There are, of course, 
alternative ways to distribute conference papers.  The publisher's 
website does contain a list of authors, with their addresses.

REFERENCES 

Kouwenberg, Silvia (ed.).  2003.  Twice as Meaningful: Reduplication 
in Pidgins, Creoles and other Contact Languages.  Westminster 
Creolistics Series 8.  London: Battlebridge.  

Carstairs-McCarthy, Andrew.  1994.  ''Inflection Classes, Gender, and 
the Principle of Contrast.'' Language 70:737-788.  

McCarthy, John J., and Alan Prince.  1994.  ''The Emergence of the 
Unmarked: Optimality in Prosodic Morphology.'' Mercè Gonzàlez, ed., 
Proceedings of the North East Linguistics Society 24, GLSA, Amherst, 
MA.  Pp. 333-379.  Available from the Rutgers Optimality Archive at 
http://roa.rutgers.edu. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER 

Mike Maxwell works on computational morphology and low density 
languages for the Center for the Advanced Study of Language at the 
University of Maryland.  He has a Ph.D. in linguistics from the 
University of Washington.





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