The Phonology and Morphology of Reduplication

Although reduplication plays a significant role in the derivational and inflectional morphology of many languages, its study in formal theories of linguistics before this book has largely been confined to the realm of footnotes and brief addenda. The most in-depth attention to reduplication appears in descriptions of individual languages, particularly from such families as Salish (Urbanczyk 1996) or Austronesian (Hayes and Abad 1989), where the phenomenon is especially prevalent. A fair number of unpublished manuscripts and dissertations have dealt formally with reduplication as a separate typological issue, notably Wilbur (1973), Cowper and Rice (1985), Kiparsky (1986), and Inkelas and Zoll (2000). Finally, several recent journal articles have approached reduplication from a general theoretical perspective—notably Kenstowicz and Banksira (1999) and Alderete et al. (1999)—though none has suggested a definitive cross-linguistic treatment. Nor has any previous study successfully explained the reasons why reduplication exists in the forms attested across languages.

One of the reasons reduplication has hitherto eluded a definitive overall account in formal studies of grammar is that past treatments have tended to focus either on phonology alone (Wilbur 1973; Kiparsky 1986) or primarily on morphology (Marantz 1982; Inkelas and Zoll 2000) without attempting a holistic account of this most phonology-dependent of all morphological processes. The present book is the first monograph-length publication to deal directly with reduplication not as an exceptional or marginal process, but rather as a regular morphophonological phenomenon explainable on the basis of the same derivational principles that operate elsewhere in language. The study's main ideas continue the research introduced in the author's unpublished dissertation (Raimy 1999). Working in the framework of Generative Grammar, Raimy accounts for the existence of reduplication both from a phonological and morphological perspective (hence the book's title), and his findings therefore have implications for both layers of language structure and for the interface between them. The author, in fact, succeeds in placing reduplication firmly within generative grammatical theory without recourse to any reduplication-specific rules, which lends support to his claim that reduplication is the proof of generative phonology rather than an exception to it (p. 3).

The book's central premise is that phonological representations contain explicit precedence information that assign such properties as suffixation, prefixation and infixation, as well as reduplication per se. The analysis is modular, dealing with reduplication as a morphophonological phenomenon, with some properties belonging to the phonological and others to the morphological component. Reduplication is simply a loop in the precedence chain, with reduplicative morphemes reduced to a purely phonological representation requiring no additional copying mechanism or correspondence functions (p. 15). This model contrasts starkly with claims made by McCarthy and Prince (1995) and Alderete et al. (1999), who utilize the notion of parallel computation to account for reduplicative effects. Instead of insisting on a unique violation of Markovian computational principles, Raimy instead demonstrates that precedence information, which is necessarily inherent to all affixes, naturally accommodates the looping and backcopying characteristics of reduplication. But the author goes too far by attempting to use the superiority of his analysis to dismiss Optimality Theory altogether. If reduplication is the proof of Generative Phonology, it is still not quite the refutation of Optimality Theory either. All of the various competing formal theories of grammar have something of their own to contribute to the understanding of human language, and none is wholly superior to the others at the present stage of their development. It is to Raimy's credit that his elegant generative account of reduplication further enhances one of these theories.

Particularly useful aspects of the book include the author's attention to many obscure or unpublished sources on the topic, as well as his careful analysis of the claims these analyses make in contrast to his own. Another welcome feature is the use of data from a wide variety of languages, from Indonesian and Malay to the far less well-known Nancowry, a Nicobarese language related to Cambodian. Most of the language data examined come from the works cited rather than the author's own fieldwork.

One potentially fruitful avenue for future researchwould be to examine an even broader genetic and geographic range of data to test and further elucidate the claims being made here. For example, Raimy claims that multiple, gratuitous repetitions of looped material are naturally constrained by economy conditions, with instances of double reduplication in Salish being attributed to the operation of two distinct reduplicative morphemes. It would be interesting to see if this observation is borne out cross-linguistically in all instances or whether exceptions exist that render it a universal tendency rather than a true universal of language.

This book should be read by linguists interested in formal representations of grammar as well as by those concerned with the detailed description of as many natural languages as possible without the luxury of explicit and rigorous formalism. Raimy is the first to demonstrate convincingly why reduplication should be expected to occur widely across languages, since it derives from general phonological and morphological principles. Rather than an idiosyncrasy, reduplication is, in fact, much more common than previously realized. This opens the door for an informed typological study of the phenomenon that could shed yet more light on what types of language structures especially favour the development and maintenance of reduplicative morphophonological processes.