Re: THEORY: Reduplication

At 1:48 AM -0500 05/22/02, Thomas R. Wier wrote:
>  > In a message dated 05/20/2002 05.51.08 PM, Jeffrey@HENNING.COM writes:
>>
>>  >I've been wondering what I should do with reduplication.  I've been afraid
>>  >that it sounds to speakers of Western European languages rather childish
>>  >and pidgin-like.
>
>Missed the original post to this, but if you're looking for a good
>but very theory-bound way to introduce yourself to reduplication,
>you could try Rene Kager's _Optimality Theory_ which has a chapter
>on it, although you might be forced to read all the previous
>chapters to understand it if you don't know much about the OT
>framework.  John McCarthy and Alan Prince have a now classic OT paper
>called "Faithfulness and Reduplicative Identity" which can be
>accessed here in .PDF format:
>
><http://home.uchicago.edu/~goh/coursefiles/phon2_02.html>
Perhaps a better introduction to reduplication for CONLANGers is
Edith Moravcsik's paper "Reduplicative Constructions"; it isn't
nearly as theory-bound as the OT stuff and includes comments on the
lexical semantics of reduplication as well. It's in volume three of
the four volume _Universals of Human Language_ edited by Joseph
Greenberg et. al.

But I don't think that Jeffrey was concerned too much with the
mechanics of reduplication, but rather with its aesthetics.

Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga                  Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

Man deth swa he byth thonne he mot swa he wile.
'A man does as he is when he can do what he wants.'

- Old English Proverb

Reply