Contrastive focus reduplication

This is a salad-salad, not a tuna salad.

Contrastive focus reduplication,[1] also called contrastive reduplication,[1] identical constituent compounding,[2][3] lexical cloning,[4][5] 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.[1]

"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."[5]

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.[1]
  1. ^ a b c d Ghomeshi, Jila; Jackendoff, Ray; Rosen, Nicole; Russell, Kevin (2004). "Contrastive focus reduplication in English (the salad-salad paper)" (PDF). Natural Language & Linguistic Theory. 22 (2): 307–357. doi:10.1023/B:NALA.0000015789.98638.f9. S2CID 170949456. Retrieved 17 January 2017.
  2. ^ Hohenhaus, Peter (2004). "Identical Constituent Compounding – a Corpus-based Study". Folia Linguistica. 38 (3–4). doi:10.1515/flin.2004.38.3-4.297. ISSN 0165-4004. S2CID 144442947.
  3. ^ Finkbeiner, Rita (October 2014). "Identical constituent compounds in German". Word Structure. 7 (2): 182–213. doi:10.3366/word.2014.0065. ISSN 1750-1245.
  4. ^ Huang, Yan (September 2015). "Lexical cloning in English: A neo-Gricean lexical pragmatic analysis". Journal of Pragmatics. 86: 80–85. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2015.06.005. ISSN 0378-2166.
  5. ^ a b Horn, L. (1993). Economy and redundancy in a dualistic model of natural language. SKY: The Linguistic Association of Finland.