Reduplication

There are many “rules” in the English language that speakers don’t know they know. Reduplication is one such rule. For example, has anyone ever given you a definition for “tip-top” or “namby-pamby”? You’ve likely either heard or used these sayings—each of which is a different type of reduplication—at some point, but chances are you weren’t taught how to use them.

Definition of Reduplication in Linguistics

You might inherently understand this process of repeating words, but there are specific uses for reduplication in linguistics. Here’s a DEFINITION-defintion of the term reduplication.

Did you notice the repeated use of the word definition in the sentence above? That was an example of reduplication; the repetition of the word perhaps implied that the definition would be more official in some way.

Sometimes, reduplication repeats an entire word—like in the definition example—and other times, it only repeats part of the word. Whether it’s a whole word or a word piece (such as the first letter or some other sound), reduplication is a morphological process where the root or stem of a word is repeated.

The process of reduplication is largely not grammatically productive in English. In other words, English does not use the process of word repetition to create new forms of words. In fact, English is one of the few languages that don’t use reduplication as a means to grammatically alter or produce words.

For example, Malay uses reduplication to express plurality. The word house is rumah and the plural form (houses) is rumah-rumah.

Reduplication in English

Just because reduplication in English isn’t a feature of the official grammatical system doesn’t mean it isn’t used in everyday discourse. In fact, many of us heard variations of reduplication as early as our first few minutes on earth. Parents often reduplicate words to their children in their quest to introduce language. The bottle might be a “ba-ba” and dad is “da-da.” This version of reduplication is called baby talk.

Reduplication doesn’t stop willy-nilly (i.e., all at once) once when language is acquired, though, and you might use reduplication as a type of wordplay in discourse (as seen in the previous sentence). English speakers might use several types of reduplication, but perhaps the most common is contrastive focus reduplication. This is where a speaker emphatically contrasts a concept with a prototypical version of itself.

The point of reduplication here is to emphasize that there is a “real” or official version of these things (musical, house, and meal). Like all other types of reduplication in English, there are no strict grammatical rules to create this phenomenon, but there are parameters that most, if not all, English speakers know.

Fig. 1 - A "MUSICAL-musical" has a certain authenticity about it (as opposed to another type of musical).

Reduplication Rules

Although the rules of reduplication remain largely unspoken in English, in other languages, reduplication is linguistically productive and follows specific rules. For example, reduplication may have a grammatical or semantic function.

As previously mentioned, the purpose of reduplication in English is largely semantic. The Persian language, however, uses reduplication as a derivational (form-changing) means to change the base word into another grammatical category.

Fig. 2 - The official language of Iran, Persian, uses reduplication frequently.

Generally speaking, there are two types of reduplication: partial reduplication and total reduplication. Total reduplication is the complete replication of a word (i.e., tond-tond), while partial reduplication repeats only a part of the base word.

Types of Reduplication

The two major types of reduplication are partial and total, but there are several other subtypes of reduplication in English.

Contrastive Reduplication

As already mentioned in the Reduplication in English section, contrasting reduplication is arguably the most common form in English.

Copy Reduplication

This version of reduplication is simply the repetition of a word, usually seen in baby talk, to simplify language for emerging speakers.

Multiple Partial Reduplication

Multiple partial reduplication is the repetition of a single sound numerous times. You might see this type of reduplication in song or poem lyrics.

Deprecative Reduplication

This type of reduplication is when a speaker repeats a word but replaces the initial consonant with the “schm-” sound. You may have heard children use this phenomenon to mock one another.

This is one of the few types of reduplication that is productive in English, meaning that it’s “open” to use with essentially any word.

Rhyme Combination

English speakers use certain rhyme combinations, another type of informal reduplication, in specific circumstances. English speakers have been creating rhyming duplications for hundreds of years, and it is usually done for fun.

The typical format is to create a word that rhymes with the base word by altering the initial consonant.

Ablaut Reduplication

Ablaut reduplication is another informal wordplay where an internal vowel changes from the first word to the second, where the first vowel sound is typically higher than the vowel in the second word.

Most often, the vowel changes from the back of the mouth (as in /ɪ/ in the word ding) to more forward in the mouth (as in /ɑː/ dong) in ablaut reduplication.

Intensive Reduplication

This type of reduplication is yet another example of informal language taking advantage of reduplication.

Essentially, a single word is repeated three times for emphasis. The key to intensive reduplication is that the word is repeated three times, no more and no less.

Reduplication Examples

Here are a few more examples of reduplication from literature and pop culture.

Jo is using a rhyme combination form of reduplication. Alcott knew her audience would understand Jo’s meaning, even though they wouldn’t have learned this phrase in grammar school.

The next example comes from the movie Elf (2003):

This is a more modern example of rhyme combination reduplication, but the effect is still the same.