There are numerous spoken languages which make productive (or no longer productive) use of the process of reduplication. This process generally consists of repeating a word or syllable in such a way that a new single lexical item is formed, generally with a somewhat different meaning from the original word, and often with some morphophonemic processes occur ring internal to the new word. For example, the word beri-beri is derived from a Singhalese word, beri, meaning'weak'. In Japanese, kami means' god', while kamigami, which we note voices the k to g intervocalically, means' gods'. Reduplication is used in various spoken languages to express pluralization, iteration, intensification, and other modifications in meaning. The American Sign Language (henceforth Sign), that language used by the deaf in the United States, participates in the process of reduplication also. This is a language produced by the hands and body and perceived by the eye. Although this language exists within a community of English speakers, the grammar of the language is rather radically different from that of English. 1 Reduplication is only one of the many ways in which Sign differs from the spoken language of the community. While almost any part of speech in Sign can reduplicate, we shall concentrate here on verbs, because the process seems to be the most productive for verbs, and is also the most regular, in terms of correspondences between the reduplication and the meaning it adds. This paper is designed to show how this process works, and how reduplication interacts with certain suprasegmental features in Sign, and how it interacts with the semantic and syntactic features of the verbs on which it operates.

There is a remarkable difference between reduplication in Sign and reduplication in other languages. Instead of being repeated once, the sign (or part of the sign) is generally repeated at least twice (so that the sign occurs at least three times), with the number of repetitions greater than two