Kentner (2018) – Do not repeat: Repetition and reduplication in German revisited

Do not repeat: Repetition and reduplication in German revisited
Gerrit Kentner
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004371
December 2018
All languages need to counterbalance the necessary re-use of their elementary vocabulary of phonemes, morphemes, and words with the imperative to avoid redundancy. The (
hopefully representative and near-exhaustive) list of repetitive phenomena in German that is offered here suggests that German avoids redundancy in the lexicon by rather
strictly prohibiting exact adjacent repetition of phonological material. The only cases that may override this ban appear to be abbreviations (BBC, DDR), onomatopoeias
(Wauwau), and ideophones (ballaballa). In all other cases, the ban on exact adjacent repetition holds, and it does so across all levels of the phonological hierarchy (se
gment – syllable – foot – word).

Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/004371
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:
ke
ywords:
reduplication, repetition, german, morphology, phonology