The saccadic eye finds free space in the world's scriptura continua
All lovers of language should read the wonderful paper by Jila Ghomeshi, Ray Jackendoff, Nicole Rosen, and Kevin Russell, "Contrastive focus reduplication in English (the Salad-Salad paper)", Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 22(2) 2004. And I mean READ-read this delightful, though scholarly, semantic romp. Contrastive reduplication (CR, also known as contrastive focus reduplication, lexical cloning or the double construction) is a rather hoighty-toighty term for a form of expression so common in English that we rarely pause to consider its semantic significance. Reduplication is a semantic structure found in many languages. Here are a few examples:
Chinese uses reduplication: 人 rén for "person", 人人 rénrén for "everybody". Japanese does it too: 時 toki "time", tokidoki 時々 "sometimes, from time to time". See the Wikipedia article on reduplication for many more examples. An Italian lollipop is called leccalecca.
The abstract sums up what Ghomeshi et al. mean by CR:There are various types of duplication in English that are not contrastive:
Note: These duplications are are not to be confused with one-note or monotonic sentences, which are more of a parlour game than a natural evolution of linguistic expression. This is to digress, but I cannot refrain from providing these examples from my private collection:
Spanish:
¿Cómo como? ¿Cómo cómo como? Como como como.
“How do I eat? What do you mean, how do I eat? I eat how I eat.”
Yet another form of reduplication in many languages is doubling a word to form the plural. In the language of the Wiradjuri people of south eastern Australian, plurals are formed by doubling a word, hence wagga meaning crow becomes Wagga Wagga meaning 'place of many crows'. The Malay word buku, meaning 'book', when reduplicated as buku-buku (also written as buku²) means 'books'.
But let us return to our topic. Contrastive reduplication is divided by Ghomeshi et al. into these four areas of meaning:
These categories are somewhat porous. For example, sometimes a CR can pack within itself all four meanings at once: "We weren’t SLEEPING-TOGETHER-sleeping-together." But the following should give some indication of how CRs can be roughly categorized.
1. Prototypical Meaning
Prototypical meaning is nicely illustrated by the following example, from a novel written in English and translated into German, which lacks CR. In the German version the reduplicated sequence RICH–rich gets translated as richtig reich:
Here is the German translation of the last part of the sentence:
2. Literal Meaning
Similarly "dead-dead" means life-has-ended-dead, not undead or brain-dead, while "date-date" is often used to distinguish a real, romantic date from just a social meeting.
3. Intensified MeaningI'm nervous but not NERVOUS-nervous.
A: Did you check out the leak in the bathroom?
B: What leak?
A: You know: the LEAK-leak.
I had a real HEADACHE-headache today.
4. Value-Added Meaning
We're not LIVING-TOGETHER-living-together. We're just roommates.
How was the meeting? You know, the MEETING-meeting?
For more linguistic fun see:
Contrastive reduplication: Looking at some of the properties of contrastive reduplication as observed by Ghomeshi et al. (2004).CAS LX 500 Topics in Linguistics: Focus. 2009 Sep 15. Available from: ling.bu.edu/blogs/lx500f09/files/2009/09/lx500ff09-03a-salad.pdf
Photo credit: estherase, 11 Aug 2006,
I'm the Pharmacy and Pharmacology Librarian at the Neil John Maclean Health Sciences Library, University of Manitoba.
I write about health issues and other things that catch my inner eye. I try to avoid ideological truculence and plodding nugacity, not always succeeding.
I'm the Pharmacy and Pharmacology Librarian at the Neil John Maclean Health Sciences Library, University of Manitoba.
I write about health issues and other things that catch my inner eye. I try to avoid ideological truculence and plodding nugacity, not always succeeding.
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