Contrastive focus reduplication, also called contrastive reduplication, identical constituent compounding, lexical cloning,Horn, L. (1993). Economy and redundancy in a dualistic model of natural language. SKY: The Linguistic Association of Finland. or the double construction, is a type of

syntactic In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituency), ...

reduplication In linguistics, reduplication is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word (or part of it) or even the whole word is repeated exactly or with a slight change. The classic observation on the semantics of reduplication is Edwa ...

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.

"As a rough approximation, we can say that the reduplicated modifier singles out a member or subset of the extension of the noun that represents a true, real, default, or prototype instance."

In English, the first part of the reduplicant bears contrastive intonational

stress Stress may refer to: Science and medicine * Stress (biology), an organism's response to a stressor such as an environmental condition * Stress (linguistics), relative emphasis or prominence given to a syllable in a word, or to a word in a phrase ...

. Contrastive focus reduplication in English can apply not only to words but also to multi-word

phrase In syntax and grammar, a phrase is a group of words or singular word acting as a grammatical unit. For instance, the English expression "the very happy squirrel" is a noun phrase which contains the adjective phrase "very happy". Phrases can consi ...

s such as

idiom An idiom is a phrase or expression that typically presents a figurative, non-literal meaning attached to the phrase; but some phrases become figurative idioms while retaining the literal meaning of the phrase. Categorized as formulaic language, ...

s, or to

word stem In linguistics, a word stem is a part of a word responsible for its lexical meaning. The term is used with slightly different meanings depending on the morphology of the language in question. In Athabaskan linguistics, for example, a verb stem is ...

s without their

inflectional morpheme In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and defin ...

s. * 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.

Terminology

Contrastive focus reduplication has been called by various names in English. Early work on the construction referred to it as ''double'' or ''lexical cloning'' due to its superficial characteristics. Theoretical differences in the approach to the construction result in different nomenclatures, as there are theoretical assumptions which underlie any expression. For example, ''reduplication'' is often thought of as a morphophonological process, whereas ''compounding'' is often regarded as a morphosyntactic process. American writer Paul Dickson coined the term ''word word'' in 1982 to describe this phenomenon.

Structure

Contrastive focus reduplication features two identical – or near-identical – constituents; these constituents can be words, idioms, or phrases. In English, the left constituent bears

contrastive stress In linguistics, and particularly phonology, stress or accent is the relative emphasis or prominence given to a certain syllable in a word or to a certain word in a phrase or Sentence (linguistics), sentence. That emphasis is typically caused ...

, and the right-constituent bears the weight of inflectional morphology.

In English

Contrastive focus reduplication is a form of ''motivated redundancy''. It is primarily employed as a form of repair in order to reinforce a speaker's true intended meaning.

In other languages

This construction has been identified in German, though research suggests that the meaning of the construction is not readily understood by all speakers. A typical phrase in Germany is "Er ist mein Freund, aber nicht mein Freund Freund". This is translated to "He's my friend, but not my friend friend oyfriend. It's used to disambiguate because there is no word specifically meaning 'boyfriend'. This linguistic phenomenon is present in

Assyrian Neo-Aramaic Suret ( syr, ܣܘܪܝܬ) ( �su:rɪtʰor �su:rɪθ, also known as Assyrian or Chaldean, refers to the varieties of Northeastern Neo-Aramaic (NENA) spoken by ethnic Assyrians, including those identifying as religious groups rather than eth ...

, particularly among speakers raised among English-speakers. A phrasal example in the language will be; "qartela, ina lela ''qarta''-qarta" (which translates to, "it's cold, but it's not ''cold''-cold").

Examples

The authors of the article that defined contrastive focus reduplication collected a

corpus Corpus is Latin for "body". It may refer to: Linguistics * Text corpus, in linguistics, a large and structured set of texts * Speech corpus, in linguistics, a large set of speech audio files * Corpus linguistics, a branch of linguistics Music * ...

of examples in English. These include: * "I'll make the tuna salad and you make the ''salad'' salad." * "How do they know it's turkey bacon and not ''bacon'' bacon?" * "I'm up, I'm just not ''up'' up." This example from Ghomeshi et al. was used by the comic strip '' Zits''. *"Is that carrot cheesecake or carrot ''cake''-cake?" In

Canadian English Canadian English (CanE, CE, en-CA) encompasses the varieties of English native to Canada. According to the 2016 census, English was the first language of 19.4 million Canadians or 58.1% of the total population; the remainder spoke French ( ...

, ''French French'' means French as spoken in

France France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of Overseas France, overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic, Pacific Ocean, Pac ...

, as opposed to

Canadian French Canadian French (french: français canadien) is the French language as it is spoken in Canada. It includes Varieties of French#Canada, multiple varieties, the most prominent of which is Quebec French, Québécois (Quebec French). Formerly ''Can ...

. This can be analyzed either as contrastive focus reduplication, or simply as the noun ''French'' (the French language) preceded by the adjective ''French'' (from France).

Notes

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References

* Bross, Fabian & Fraser, Katherine (2020)
Contrastive focus reduplication and the modification puzzle
''Glossa. A Journal of General Linguistics'', 5(1), 47. * Dray, Nancy. (1987). Doubles and modifiers in English. (Unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Chicago). * Ghomeshi, Jila, Ray Jackendoff, Nicole Rosen & Kevin Russell (2004). Contrastive focus reduplication in English (the salad-salad paper). ''Natural Language & Linguistic Theory'', 22. 307–357. * Wierzbicka, Anna. (1991). ''Cross-cultural pragmatics: The semantics of human interaction''. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Reduplication Sociolinguistics