Twice as Meaningful: Reduplication in Pidgins, Creoles and Other Contact Languages (review)

This eighth anthology in the estimable ‘Westminster creolistics series’ contains articles exploring reduplication in most of the major creoles and various pidgins of the world. The editor has supplemented papers delivered at a conference on the subject with solicited pieces from specialists on many other pidgins and creoles, resulting in what will stand for a long time to come as a definitive compendium on a subject long overdue for examination. The volume is especially vital given the traditionally rather perfunctory attention to morphology in much creolistic literature, particularly since reduplication often carries a significant functional load in the morphology of creoles.

Given the volume’s thirty-four papers, space does not allow summarizing each or even most of them. However, there are several useful generalities to be drawn from the body of them. Reduplication in creoles tends strongly to be total rather than partial; partial reduplication tends to be either a recent internal development (as in Surinam creoles) or an epiphenomenon of postlexical phonological processes (as in Berbice Dutch Creole). Quirkier phonological patterns tend to be inheritances from the substrate (Korlai Creole Portuguese kume bime ‘eat and so forth’ modeled on a pattern common in languages of India). Creoles also tend to render substrate reduplication patterns in less complex form: for example, Surinam creoles eschew the alterations of phonology, tone, and categorial marking required in the Gbe models of their verbal reduplication.

Creole reduplication is often recruited for derivational purposes (Jamaican laaf ‘laugh’, laafi-laafi ‘liking to laugh’), although not in obligatorily grammaticalized fashion. Other functions of reduplication in creoles tend to be iconic, encoding varieties of repetition (iterativity, distributivity) or approximation (Jamaican redi-redi ‘reddish’). Within this, however, many creoles link reduplication to tone or stress to yield finer semantic distinctions, such as Guyanese’s use of tone: rónrón ‘to run continuously’ vs. rônrón ‘to run in fits and starts’. Reduplication expresses simple plurality in relatively few creoles, mostly ones with Austronesian substrates that use reduplication in this function. In other creoles, pluralizing reduplication is a rather marginal strategy used optionally, usually for emphatic narrative effect.

Less iconic uses of reduplication tend to be substrate inheritances rather than internal developments, such as Salamanca’s resultatives (dí nákináki wómi ‘the beaten man’). This includes semantically noncompositional uses. Slight departures from semantic predictability are common internal developments (Jamaican bon ‘burn’, bon-bon ‘burnt crust’). But what seem to be opaque lexicalizations from a synchronic perspective tend to trace back to the reduplicated form’s being a substrate borrowing (Cape Verdean futi ‘get broken’ vs. futifuti ‘to get agitated’, the latter modeled on a Mandinka item).

Taken together, the articles suggest a reduplication life-cycle in the path from pidgin to creole to decreolization. Pidgins, perhaps counterintuitively, tend to have little reduplication (as opposed to repetitions); only in creoles does it become a central and frequent feature. However, if a creole moves towards a super-strate language over time, reduplication tends to erode. For example, it is most common in basilectal Cape Verdean, and verbal reduplication plays a relatively minor functional role in French Caribbean creoles, which have developed in ongoing contact with French. Mikael Parkvall’s cross-creole survey of reduplication patterns and Peter Bakker’s summary of reduplication in pidgins are especially useful overviews of this and other larger currents implied by the body of the papers.