Productive reduplication in a fundamentally monosyllabic language.
The question to be addressed in this paper is how a language which is fundamentally monosyllabic in structure can have about a dozen different reduplication types with at least eight different linguistic functions. The language under discussion, American Sign Language (ASL), is one representative of a class of languages that makes widespread use of reduplication for lexical and morphological purposes. The goal here is to present the set of phonological features that permit the productive construction of these forms and a first approximation to the feature geometry in which they participate. Reduplication forms are dependent on the event structure of the predicate and the associated aspectual modifications.
Wilbur
Ronnie B
RB
Linguistics Program, Purdue University, 500 Oval Drive, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA.