Of choo-choos, moo-moos and salad salads.
In which we finally get down to some serious (but not SERIOUS serious) linguistic business.
One thing about linguists, they have a name for everything. (Well they would, wouldn’t they?)
Case in point, “contrastive reduplication”.
This is not the same as your bog standard, garden variety reduplication, which you charmed your parents with as a child, you little scamp. Examples from those innocent days include choo-choo, yum-yum, and moo-moo. Note that the repeated word adds no new meaning; its purpose seems to be purely aesthetic.
Contrastive reduplication is the adult version of this game and, like most things adult, its purpose is more serious. It's when you’re inviting friends over for lunch and you say, “We'll make a tuna salad and you bring a salad salad.” Or when my compatriot David Farrier says of the Save Our Children movement that it hasn’t just gone mainstream, it’s gone mainstream mainstream.
Here, the repetition is used to clarify.
Or, in the words of a Boston University academic, contrastive reduplication points to “the prototypical thing, not one of the slightly non-prototypical things one might otherwise have called by this name.”
Other names for contrastive reduplication include contrastive focus reduplication, identical constituent compounding, double cloning, lexical cloning, the double construction, and – my favourite, coined by American writer Paul Dickson – word word.
If nothing else, this illustrates that linguists not only have a name for everything, but having created a name, they are then compelled to invent alternative names for the same thing just in case the first name turns out to be a dud, a lemon, a flop or a dog.
In 2004, a group of North American linguists with nothing better to do published a 52-page paper that distinguished contrastive reduplication from other varieties of reduplication including:
Baby talk (choo-choo, etc)
Multiple partial reduplications (hap-hap-happy – as in annoyingly cheerful song lyrics)
Deprecative reduplication (fancy-shmancy)
Rhyme combinations (super-duper, okey-dokey)
Ablaut combinations (zig-zag, riff-raff)
Intensive reduplication (You are sick sick sick!)
To that list they could also have added taxonomical reduplication, as in the biologist’s term for the North American bison: Bison bison (sometimes jauntily shortened to B. bison).
A solitary B. Bison reduplicatively grazes on the expansive North American prairie.
Notice anything different about Intensive Reduplication? Here it is: One repetition isn’t enough – it requires at least two. Telling someone “you are sick, sick” sounds weird. It’s got to be “you are SICK, sick, SICK”. Try it for yourself and see.
If you want to tell someone that they’re the sickest person that ever lived, you may continue the theme and say “you are SICK, sick, SICK, sick, SICK”. What you can’t say, though, is “you are SICK, sick, SICK, sick”.
Put simply, an odd number of “sick”s are required for things to feel right. You need to have one at the start and another at the end - with both emphasised.
For variety, you could say “you’re a SICK, sick, SICK, sick MAN”. Now you’ve got an even number of “sick”s but, with the addition of “man”, an odd number of items, which still allows you to stress the final one. This surely proves that we all have an ear for rhythm and metre, even if the vast majority of us oaf-oaf-oafish riff-raff never discover the joys of Byron and Wordsworth.
Not every language uses reduplication to identify the prototypical thing. In the German translation of Michael Cunningham’s 1998 novel The Hours, the phrase RICH-rich below is translated as richtig reich.
They are rich, of course; obscenely rich by the world’s standards; but not RICH-rich, not New York City rich.
However, most languages do use reduplication for some purpose or another. It’s found in Sumerian writing from 5000 years ago and, according to at least one scholar, even German speakers use it now and again. Many languages use it to create different verb tenses. For example, in Pingelapese, spoken in Micronesia, mejr means ‘to sleep’, mejmejr means ‘sleeping’ and mejmejmejr means ‘still sleeping’.
I don’t know about you, but on a Sunday morning after a rough Saturday night I think a fourth tense, mejmejmejrmejr, would be decidedly handy.
BITS AND SPECIOUS
If, after all my hard work, you’re still unclear what contrastive reduplication is, check out this two-minute clip of comedian Micky Flanagan. It’ll clear things up, I promise.
Micronesia occupies a mere 702 square kilometres of land, making it the 19th smallest country on earth. Yet it has the world’s 14th largest exclusive economic zone (2.6 million square kilometres), thanks to the fact that its 607 islands are spread across a vast area of the Pacific Ocean. Unsurprisingly, one of its main economic activities is fishing.
Bison are sometimes called buffalo, especially in North America. But they’re a distant relative. True buffalo, of which there are many species, are found in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia.
Did you notice the two semi-colons in the Michael Cunningham sentence quoted earlier? Great writers, among whom Cunningham must be counted, are not bound by small-minded conventions. If a sentence requires two semi-colons, then dammit, two semi-colons it gets.
According to the 1965 Roger Miller song, things you cannot do besides roller skate in a buffalo herd include take a shower in a parakeet cage, go swimming in a baseball pool, change film with a kid on your back, drive around with a tiger in your car, or go fishing in a watermelon patch. He clearly knew a thing or two, did Roger Miller.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
Oh, but they're weird and they're wonderful
Oh, Bennie, she’s really keen
She’s got electric boots, a mohair suit
You know I read it in a magazine, oh
B-B-B-Bennie and the JetsBernie Taupin and Elton John
ASK ME
Got a language-related question? A pet peeve? I’m all ears! Email me at ken.grace@departmentofwriting.co.nz or post a comment below.
Wow, I am a huge fan of your writing voice & am thrilled to have stumbled across another linguistics-related newsletter. You've found a new subscriber!
B. Bison is akin to Danusplexippus and Bombus. The three all manage to do what they do despite anatomy / frailty which should, physics being what physics is, make their successful journeying through life impossible.