Contrastive focus reduplication


Contrastive focus reduplication, also called identical constituent compounding, 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.
"As a rough approximation, we can say that the reduplicated modifier singles out a member or subset of the extension of the noun that represents a true, real, default, or prototype instance."

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.
Contrastive focus reduplication has been called by various names in English. Early work on the construction referred to it as double or lexical cloning due to its superficial characteristics.
Theoretical differences in the approach to the construction result in different nomenclatures, as there are theoretical assumptions which underlie any expression. For example, reduplication is often thought of as a morphophonological process, whereas compounding is often regarded as a morphosyntactic process.
American writer Paul Dickson coined the term word word in 1982 to describe this phenomenon.

Structure

Contrastive focus reduplication features two identical – or near-identical – constituents; these constituents can be words, idioms, or phrases. The left constituent bears contrastive stress, and the right-constituent bears the weight of inflectional morphology.

In English

Contrastive focus reduplication is a form of motivated redundancy. It is primarily employed as a form of repair in order to reinforce a speaker's true intended meaning.

In other languages

This construction has been identified in German, though research suggests that the meaning of the construction is not readily understood by all speakers.
This linguistic phenomenon is present in Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, particularly among speakers raised in the anglophone. A phrasal example in the language will be; "qartela, ina lela qarta-qarta".

Examples

The authors of the article that defined contrastive focus reduplication collected a corpus of examples in English. These include:
The poem "After the Funeral" by Billy Collins contains many examples of contrastive focus reduplication.