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Article published In:
The Wealth and Breadth of Construction-Based Research
Edited by Timothy Colleman, Frank Brisard, Astrid De Wit, Renata Enghels, Nikos Koutsoukos, Tanja Mortelmans and María Sol Sansiñena
[Belgian Journal of Linguistics 34] 2020
► pp. 259–272

Reduplication and repetition from a constructionist perspective

| The University of Tokyo

In the typological literature, a distinction is often drawn between reduplication (as a morphological process) and repetition (as a syntactic process) (Gil 2005). This squib reconsiders this distinction from the perspective of Construction Morphology (Booij 2010, 2018; Masini and Audring 2019). Drawing upon previously understudied phenomena in Tagalog, an Austronesian language of the Philippines, this paper demonstrates that the Construction Morphology approach provides a suitable framework for analyzing reduplication and repetition. It makes it possible to account for both similarities and differences between reduplication and repetition: both processes create a lexical unit with an iterative form and a conventionalized meaning, although they differ in the size and complexity of the lexical unit they create. Furthermore, this paper makes a strong case for the basic tenets of constructionist approaches, including a hierarchical lexicon and a lexicon-grammar continuum.

Keywords: construction morphology, reduplication, repetition, Tagalog, Austronesian
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Reduplication and repetition in Tagalog
    • 2.1Reduplication in Tagalog
    • 2.2Repetition in Tagalog
  • 3.Construction morphology analysis of reduplication
    • 3.1Holistic approach and automatic reduplication
    • 3.2Hierarchical lexicon and subschemas
  • 4.Construction morphology analysis of repetition
  • 5.Reduplication and repetition from a constructionist perspective
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 28 May 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/bjl.00051.nag
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