‘There’s far too much arty-farty, namby-pamby, hoity-toity, wishy-washy, lardy-dardy, sun-dried tomato eating, decaffeinated fannying about!': Reduplicative compounds and other iterative sequences in English

Abstract

ABSTRACT The aim of the paper is to (re-)evaluate the treatment of reduplicative expressions as compound words in nearly all previous work on English. Examples of reduplicative expressions are listed, out of context, and they are labelled as compound words, without providing proper motivations as to why it makes sense to treat them as compounds, in the sense of lexical items that are formed of other lexical items. The paper provides plenty of examples of how the reduplicatives listed in previous work are actually used in present-day English and examines the functions and interpretations of such expressions. The paper shows that most reduplicative expressions are not compound words. Some of them are words in their own right that cannot be divided into meaningful constituents. Some may have a more compound-like reading, alongside a clearly non-compound-like reading; for most such items, the latter function and interpretation seem to be most common. A large majority of alleged reduplicative compounds display clear non-compound-like behaviour. It will be shown that these expressions are likely to be sequences of words that are created by the same (syntactic) process/es that iterate or stack ‘ordinary’ nouns, adjectives and verbs in English.