Contrastive focus reduplication

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 reduplication 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.

Contrastive focus reduplication in English can apply not only to words but also to multi-word phrases such as idioms, or to word stems without their inflectional morphemes.

* 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, 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.

Examples

The authors of the article that defined contrastive focus reduplication collected a corpus 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."
*"Is that carrot cheesecake or carrot ''cake''-cake?"

In Canadian English, ''French French'' means French as spoken in France, as opposed to Canadian French. 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).

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 is used to disambiguate because there is no word specifically meaning 'boyfriend'. In German, such forms are often treated as identical constituent compounds (ICCs), where ''Freund-Freund'' emphasizes a prototypical or "real" sense of the noun and can highlight a contrast with non-prototypical interpretations.

This linguistic phenomenon is also present in Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, 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").

In Croatian, a similar phenomenon is termed contrastive lexical repetition. Examples include ''beba beba'' ("baby baby", emphasizing an infant), ''kruh kruh'' ("bread bread", referring to a standard loaf), and ''meso meso'' ("meat meat", meaning pure meat rather than scraps). These constructions highlight a more prototypical sense of the word and may convey intensification. Compared to English, where Croatian allows modifiers (''daj joj sirovo MESO meso'', "give her raw MEAT meat") but disallows partial repetition (**''HIT hitovi'', "hit hits" is ungrammatical). It also uses fewer fixed-phrase reduplications (e.g. ''ići VAN van'', "go OUT out"). Though there is no direct evidence of its earliest use, English-language pop culture likely helped spread this construction among younger Croatian speakers.

In Spanish, nominal lexical reduplication (e.g., ''café café'', ''lana lana'') has been analyzed as a device that highlights the prototypical meaning of the word, situating it among intensifying appositive structures and examining its lexical-syntactic status.

In Russian, syntactic reduplication is widely employed in dialogic contexts, but real contrastive focus reduplication is rare. An example is ''zdes zdes'', "here here", in a dialogue asking whether Pushkin was killed at the very exact spot.

See also

* Retronym
* Compound (linguistics)
* Epizeuxis

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