Reduplication

Abstract Reduplication has long been a topic of intense interest for morphological and phonological theory alike. From the morphological perspective, reduplication poses a challenge for item based theories of morphology because of its process like phonological character (see e.g. Anderson 1992:59). From the phonological perspective, reduplication, along with other prosodic morphology like truncation and infixation, has trained a bright light on phonological representations, providing evidence outside phonology proper for constituents like the mora, syllable and foot (see e.g. McCarthy & Prince 1986, 1996). More recently, reduplication has been plumbed as a source of evidence for syntagmatic correspondence relationships among segments (e.g. McCarthy & Prince 1995, 1999; Zuraw 2002). This chapter surveys major reduplicative phenomena from a cross-linguistic perspective, as well as the dominant theoretical approaches, pointing out challenges for existing theories.