Types of reduplication: A case study of Bikol by Veronika Mattes (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Types of reduplication: A case study of Bikol by Veronika Mattes Carl Rubino Types of reduplication: A case study of Bikol. By Veronika Mattes. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2014. Pp. 222. ISBN 9783110362978. $168 (Hb). Veronika Mattes’s volume is a revised and expanded version of her dissertation submitted to the University of Graz in 2007. It is a culmination of an extensive literature review of multiple Philippine languages and two fieldwork trips to the Bikol Peninsula, supported by two reduplication projects at the University of Graz and the University of Bremen. The Bikol Peninsula of Southeastern Luzon Island, Philippines, is home to a variety of Austronesian dialects collectively referred to as ‘Bikol(ano)’. All dialects of this language, as well as sister Philippine languages, are particularly rich in both inflectional and derivational reduplication. The analysis in this book mostly stems from the Legazpi dialect in which recordings of spontaneous speech and elicitation sessions were collected. In addition to the corpus M generated, she extracted all reduplicated forms attested in Mintz and Del Rosário Britanico’s (1985) dictionary and verified every entry with at least two speakers. The book is divided into six chapters and an appendix. Ch. 1 sets the stage for M’s interest in the topic and outlines the format of the book. Ch. 2 provides a grammar sketch of the Bikol language aimed at helping the reader maneuver through the copious examples throughout the book. In Ch. 3, M discusses reduplication in general, defining the topic with respect to the scope of her analysis. In Chs. 4 and 5, M presents the results of her study, productive reduplication in Ch. 4 and lexicalized reduplication in Ch. 5. In Ch. 6, she provides a synopsis of the major issues, then details the corpora and fieldwork annotations in the appendix. Of particular value to this volume is her excellent treatment of Bikol phonology and morphosyntax. This includes an introduction to the Bikol phoneme inventory and morphophonemic processes the readers must understand to navigate the examples. These include nasal assimilation, stress, h-epenthesis, and the status of the phonemes /r/ and /l/. Her examples are written in a current orthography that has not been universally standardized. In her treatment of the Bikol lexicon, M introduces the concept of an open class of categorically indistinct content words, mostly disyllabic in nature, from which both nouns and verbs can be derived via morphological processes, and a closed class of function words. Following Naylor (2006) and Himmelmann (2007), M justifies considering bare roots in Bikol to be ontological nominals that must derive verbal meanings by affixation of tense/aspect/modality (TAM) markers or voice morphology. Her analysis of Bikol grammatical relations is largely adopted from Himmelmann 1987, where the syntactically privileged argument with respect to the predicate is called the ‘predicate base’, referred to by various terms by other linguists, including subject/nominative argument, pivot, absolutive argument, focus, and trigger. The term ‘predicate base’ has not stuck for Philippine languages. Even Himmelmann (2007) has reverted to using the term ‘subject’, although other terms may more adequately cover this concept without discourse or syntactic implications, for example, Lehmann’s (1984:355) Ausrichtungsmarkieurung ‘orientation/alignment marking’ and Rubino’s (2006) ‘orientation’. Bikol is categorized as an agglutinating language with some inflectional features like syncretism and fusion. It is a predicate-initial language with no copula, no agreement marking, and no grammatical gender. M succinctly and accurately summarizes Bikol syntax as having an ‘alternating sequence of content and function words. Each argument is preceded by a phrase marker and each marker is connected with its head by a linker’ (17–18). Inflectional reduplication is immediately apparent in the paradigms M illustrates in her discussion of voice and TAM morphology. An interesting part of her study for Philippine specialists concerns the omission of TAM and voice morphology ‘when the speaker and addressee share enough background knowledge’ (22–23). This insight offers a refreshing perspective rarely seen from grammarians and typologists who do not feed their analyses from spontaneous spoken discourse data. The grammatical analysis closes with a word on derivational affixes and a section on nonobligatory number marking. M discusses three...