Abstract

AbstractThis article aims at giving a comprehensive account of a so far undescribed reduplicative pattern in Italian namedsyntactic discontinuous reduplication with antonymic pairs(SDRA). This pattern, characterized by the non-contiguous repetition of the same element within a larger fixed configuration defined by two spatial antonyms, can be schematized as <XiAdv1XiAdv2>, where Adv1and Adv2are antonyms (e.g.,di qua‘here’∼ di là‘there’). After describing its formal and functional properties, based on naturally occurring data extracted from theItalian Web 2016corpus, the SDRA is analyzed as an independent ‘construction’ in the Construction Grammar sense. This construction is claimed to convey a general value of ‘plurality’ and to have developed a polysemy network of daughter constructions expressing more specific functions such as ‘distributivity,’ ‘related variety,’ and ‘dispersion.’ In addition, we propose considering the SDRA a ‘multiple source construction,’ originating from the blending of two independent constructions: syntactic reduplication and irreversible binomials with antonymic adverbs. Finally, we discuss SDRA-like patterns in other typologically different languages (Russian, Modern Hebrew, Mandarin Chinese, German), pointing out similarities and differences, and paving the way to a more systematic study of discontinuous reduplication in a crosslinguistic perspective.

Highlights

  • Reduplication has been broadly investigated in both theoretical and typological studies

  • Testing is the common origin of these patterns as multiple source constructions, as we proposed for the Italian case in Section 6: our prediction would be that languages that display syntactic discontinuous reduplication with antonymic pairs (SDRA)-like structures display, as independent constructions, some reduplicative pattern and an antonymic adverbial pair pattern

  • We identified a – so far undescribed – pattern in Italian that qualifies as an instance of both syntactic reduplication and discontinuous reduplication

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Summary

Introduction

Reduplication has been broadly investigated in both theoretical and typological studies (cf., among many others, Hurch 2005; Inkelas and Zoll 2005; Kallergi 2015; Moravcsik 1978; Rubino 2013; Stolz et al 2011; Urdze 2018). The most widely known classification is probably the one distinguishing between partial and full reduplication, but we know of other special types such as echoreduplication or automatic reduplication (cf e.g., Inkelas 2014; Rubino 2005). This contribution focuses on one of these special types, namely discontinuous reduplication ( DR). DR is defined by Velupillai (2012: 101) as a kind of reduplication “where other morphological material may appear between the reduplicant and the base” (cf. Rubino 2005: 17). See for instance (1), where the two copies are connected via the linker -ng

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