Eric Raimy (2000). The phonology and morphology of reduplication. (Studies in Generative Grammar 52.) Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Pp. viii+200.

Abstract

The theory of reduplication developed in this book distinguishes itself from most recent work in reduplication in important ways. First of all, it adopts the Distributed Morphology framework (Halle & Marantz 1993, 1994, Noyer 1997) and a derivational, rule-based approach to reduplication (and to phonology in general). It explicitly argues against parallel, surface-based models of prosodic morphology, like Optimality Theory (McCarthy & Prince 1993, Prince & Smolensky 1993, etc.). Further, the analyses proposed in the book reject the proposal, current since McCarthy & Prince (1986), that the shape of reduplicative morphemes (like other fixed-shape morphemes) is constrained to be (roughly) equivalent to a prosodic constituent, syllable or foot. The book is organised as follows. After a brief introduction in Chapter 1 outlining the goals of the book, Chapter 2 introduces enough of the theory to show how backcopying in reduplication, argued since Wilbur (1973) to be impossible to account for without reference to reduplicative surface-identity effects, can be handled in a derivational framework. Chapter 3, the longest chapter, discusses the technical details of the theory in more detail and goes on to show how the fixed shape and unmarked featural and prosodic structure typical of reduplicative morphemes can be accounted for without reference to either prosodic structure or general markedness. The fourth and final chapter discusses in more detail theoretical issues raised in earlier chapters, like how this approach defines markedness of reduplication patterns and avoids reduplication-specific mechanisms. The review discusses each of these points in turn.