Contrastive Focus Reduplication
Contrastive Focus Reduplication
the crucial source, with discussion and many examples: Jila Ghomeshi, Ray Jackendoff, Nicole Rosen, & Kevin Russell, “Contrastive focus reduplication in English (the Salad-Salad paper)”, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 22(2), 2004 (paper here)
the main part of the Wikipedia article:
Contrastive focus reduplication, also called lexical cloning or the double construction, is a type of syntactic reduplication found in some languages. Doubling a word or phrase – such as do you LIKE-like him? – can indicate that the prototypical meaning of the repeated word or phrase is intended. U.S. writer Paul Dickson coined the term word word in 1982 to describe this phenomenon.
The first part of the reduplicant bears contrastive intonational stress.
Contrastive focus reduplication in English can apply not only to words but also to multi-word phrases such as idioms, or to word stems without their inflectional morphemes.
I talked to him that week, but I didn’t TALK-TO-HIM-talk-to-him.
In fact I barely talked to him. Not TALK-talked.
ML on LLog, 6/11/07: Contrastive focus reduplication in Zits:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004591.html
BZ on LLog, 6/11/07: Contrastive focus reduplication in the courtroom:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004594.html
ML on LLog, 7/20/11: Friendly friend friendly:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3286
ML on LLog, 7/28/11: From X-X to X-X-X:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3320
ML on LLog, 1/14/12: Ask Language Log: raped-raped-raped: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3701
7/5/12: That’s so gay:
https://arnoldzwicky.org/2012/07/05/thats-so-gay-2/
example: “This is so gay. I don’t mean in the way that anything uncool or unfair or boring is “gay” these days. I mean gay gay.”
Stan Carey’s Sentence First blog, 8/7/12: Contrastive focus reduplication: It’s reduplication, but it’s not *reduplication* reduplication:
https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2012/08/07/contrastive-reduplication-a-thing-or-a-thing-thing/
Since writing about reduplication (choo-choo, splish-splash, heebie-jeebies) for Macmillan Dictionary Blog, I’ve been meaning to elaborate on a particular form of it, known as contrastive focus reduplication or just contrastive reduplication (CR), also called lexical cloning, the double construction, and word word.
11/8/12: Repetitions:
https://arnoldzwicky.org/2012/11/08/repetitions/
morphological and syntactic constructions in which repetition is stipulated, including CFR
4/23/13: Reduplicative compounds:
https://arnoldzwicky.org/2013/04/23/reduplicative-compounds/
Mark Nichol wrote a compact Daily Writing Tips posting on reduplicative compounds, setting aside two special cases that have been studied: shm-reduplication in things like fancy-shmancy (indicating irony, derision, or skepticism), and contrastive focus reduplication, used to pick out the central or archetypical sense of some expression (e-book vs. book-book).
4/21/16: New snowclone days:
https://arnoldzwicky.org/2016/04/21/new-snowclone-days/
the There’s X And There’s X snowclone with CFR in it
7/31/18: BILLY COLLINS Billy Collins:
https://arnoldzwicky.org/2018/07/31/billy-collins-billy-collins/
Collins poem packed with CFR