Multiple Reduplication: Typology and Theory

• Applicant: Dr. Eva Zimmermann
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2017 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 396719118

Reduplication is the repetition of sounds inside a word to express certain morpho-syntactic features. Theoretical accounts of reduplication disagree on whether this repitition results from doubling of morphemes or from copying of phonological structure. An empirical area inside reduplication that can shed interesting new light on this question is the rare phenomenon of multiple reduplication: Patterns where more than one reduplicative morpheme is present in a word. Morphological and phonological accounts make crucially different predictions about the possible multiple reduplication patterns in such recursive structures: An example is the question whether the embedded reduplicant is visible for further reduplication. This project will investigate the understudied phenomenon of multiple reduplication and the consequences its analysis has for our understanding of morpho-phonology. A representative database of attested multiple reduplication patterns in the languages of the world will be developed that will then be the base for testing the predictions of theoretical approaches to reduplication. The goal is to find new arguments for a purely phonological account of reduplication that is based on the affixation of empty prosodic nodes and against alternative analyses for reduplication that are based on morpheme-specific mechanisms. This project hence uses a typological study in an empirically understudied area to address general questions about the architecture of grammar, the boundary between phonology and morphonology, and of how much morpho-syntactic information is accessible in the phonology.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: Canada
• Host: Professor Dr. Douglas Pulleyblank