Re: OT: Reduplication enquiry

Pavel Iosad wrote:
>
> I'm in the process of choosing what to do as my year paper, and a nice
> topic has cropped up, offered by my tutor with whom I did the Tundra
> Nenets fieldwork. He suggests I treat on formal (phonological,
> morphological rather than semantic) aspects of reduplication in any
> language (in an Optimality Theory or similar framework), so I need a
> relatively well-described language with some nice reduplicaions (not of
> the Indonesian type, I mean, rather of the Latin, but hopefully more
> complex). Does anyone know what languages have nice, devilishly complex
> :-) reduplications, and preferably have them nicely described? Also
> remember I'm in Russia, so if a book is newer than 1996 or thereabouts,
> it's in all probability not in our libraries... :-(
>
David Peterson mentioned the Oceanic languages; Tagalog and Bisayan both
have lots of reduplication (of the CV- type) +/- vowel lengthening and
changes in morphological/semantic category.  Hypothetical ex:
base kámit ['ka:mit] , redup.1(short V) kakámit vs. redup.2(long V) ka:kámit
with slightly different meaning or function.  You would need a good
ref.grammar that indicates vowel-length (Schachter & Otanes, or Bloomfield's
work from the early 20th C-- maybe interesting to recast his structuralist
approach in OT). Aklanon (another Bisayan language) has some interesting
processes IIRC, which include metathesis in certain cases.

Gothic had redupl. in the preterit, but it's very similar to that of the
Latin perfect; Greek and Sanskrit too.

René Kager's _Optimality Theory_ (Cambridge 1999) seems to have about 10
pages on the subject.  If necessary I could copy those and send them to you.

You might find something too in the Rutgers Optimality website
http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/roa.html