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A syntactic derivation of the reduplication patterns and their interpretation in Mandarin

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Abstract

This paper aims to propose a syntactic approach to derive the three reduplication patterns for disyllabic words in Mandarin: the ABAB verbs, the AABB verbs, and the AABB adjectives. Based on Borer’s exo-skeletal model, I argue that there is no direct connection between the category and the form. The morphemes to be reduplicated enter syntax as roots which are unvalued both in categorial property and semantic content. The syntactic context determines both their category and the domain within which they must match with a reasonable content. I propose that there are three types of reduplication morpheme respectively involved in the derivations: Re ASP , Re DER , Re DEG , and the relative order between reduplication and categorisation is the key factor affecting the availability of event structures and non-compositional interpretations. The study shows that some problems which are traditionally discussed in the morphological or semantic domain are in fact syntactic in nature.

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Notes

  1. Reduplication is also found with nouns formed with two elements and the pattern is invariably AABB, e.g., huā-cǎo (‘flower-grass’) → huā-huā-cǎo-cǎo (‘flower-flower-grass-grass’). But I will not discuss this phenomenon in this paper. See Deng (2013) and Zhang (2015) for discussions.

  2. A few informants show partial acceptance of interpreting the AB base in the non-compositional reading of the AABB form, e.g. zhı̌diǎn as ‘gossip’ or tūntǔ as ‘mutter.’ But they all justify their judgement with the point that the AABB forms have such a reading (so AB must also have it). It seems that some kind of back-formation is in effect here. I thus mark it as dialectal variation.

  3. But note that both c-functors and s-functors are categorising morphemes. There are morphemes which do not categorise roots in this system, such as bi- in bicycle and re- in replay. The words bicycle and replay do not have a fixed category. In this sense, bi- and re- are not categorial functors.

  4. See Deng (2013) for a different account of this phenomenon, which is based on the notion of pluractionality and the semantic analysis of Rothstein (2004).

  5. I leave aside the question whether the categorised root really moves to Asp for reduplication, or just a position between Asp and FV at which it reduplicates itself via Agree with Asp. Whether \(\sqrt{}\)AB can further branch into \(\sqrt{}\)A+\(\sqrt{}\)B does not particularly affect this process, but only decides if we get compositional content (with A+B) at C=V level.

  6. A reviewer points out that if this analysis holds, the so-called continuous words (liánmiáncí; ) in Mandarin should not have AABB correspondents either, but this is not true, as in yóuyù–yóuyóuyùyù ‘to hesitate.’ But as the reviewer points out, a Chinese character is unclear in its morphological status (it may be used to record both a morpheme and a syllable), so it is disputable whether a continuous word is monomorphemic or not. Depending on the morphological structure, such examples CAN be a challenge to the proposal in this section. See Qiu (2013).

  7. I assume sometimes en-search does not literally fail in the sense that it fails to locate a content unit in encyclopaedia tagged morphemically with the root, as in the case of vi- in vision. But some content just has no sensical interpretation under certain categorial labels, and that means the en-search fails in practice.

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Acknowledgements

I present this paper as a tribute to Hagit Borer’s 70th birthday and her 10th work anniversary in Queen Mary University of London.

Funding

This study is funded by Jiangsu Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Science (Grant Agreement No. 20YYC014)

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  1. School of Foreign Studies, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, 200 Xiaolingwei Street, Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, 210094, China

    Chen Wang

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Wang, C. A syntactic derivation of the reduplication patterns and their interpretation in Mandarin. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 41, 847–877 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-022-09549-y

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