Reduplication can express a multitude of semantic or grammatical changes within languages, and can occur in more than one form. Per language there are its own phonological and/or morphosyntactic...Show moreReduplication can express a multitude of semantic or grammatical changes within languages, and can occur in more than one form. Per language there are its own phonological and/or morphosyntactic rules reduplication has to abide by. This thesis is written based on data of the Papuan languages of Timor, Alor and Pantar, found in the collective sketch grammars edited by Antoinette Schapper (Ed.) Volume 1 (2014), Volume 2 (2017), and Volume 3 (2020), comparing the data on reduplication in those languages aiming to formulate typological similarities and differences.Show less
Iconicity in reduplication is often considered to be a relation between form and referent, but this idea is more often than not inappropriate or too complicated. A thorough discussion about the...Show moreIconicity in reduplication is often considered to be a relation between form and referent, but this idea is more often than not inappropriate or too complicated. A thorough discussion about the nature of the sign, reduplication and its iconic nature, followed by a case study of Samoan shows that the iconicity should be seen as a relation between form and content.Show less
The thesis concerns Serudung Murut, a language of the Southwest Sabah subgroup of the Austronesian language family. Outside of a wordlist in Lobel (2016), virtually no published material on...Show moreThe thesis concerns Serudung Murut, a language of the Southwest Sabah subgroup of the Austronesian language family. Outside of a wordlist in Lobel (2016), virtually no published material on Serudung Murut exists. Data for this thesis comes from three main sources: two corpuses of language material collected in the periods of 1988-1991 and 2013-2016 by SIL researcher Jack Rushing, and one corpus of language material collected by the author for the author's Fieldwork (Internship) module in the period of January 16 to February 17, 2017. The bulk of language material comes from the variety of Serudung Murut spoken in the village of Serudung Laut in the western-most corner of Tawau Division, Sabah, Malaysia. Serudung Murut displays full lexical reduplication (mugad "travel" > mugad-mugad "wander about"), full root reduplication (gadingan "elephant" > gading-gadingan "lots of elephants"), and partial reduplication (bariu "wind" > babariu "windy"). Reduplication may occur with a stem from any word class, and may either alter the word class or the semantics of the stem, or both. Sometimes, a word which displays reduplication is amorphous, as with certain animal names and body parts: kakapir "praying mantis", sisigon "stingless bee", susuap "kneecap", bibingo "ankle". The thesis frames an analysis of reduplication in Serudung Murut according to a recent model devised by Jackendoff & Audring (to appear), called Relational Morphology. Relational Morphology is an offshoot of the Parallel Architecture (Jackendoff, 2002), a linguistic model which proposes that Phonology, Semantics and Syntax are independent linguistic components and are active simultaneously in speech production and parsing. Relational Morphology generalizes patterns between words in a lexicon and represents them as schemas. Therefore, a description of Serudung Murut reduplication according to this framework must posit generalized schemas which capture not only the structural variation, between full and partial reduplication, but also the variation in semantic effects.Show less
In the present study I expand on existing studies on syllabic patterns in babbling in two ways. First, I present two large-scale studies of babbling patterns from, respectively, eight and nine...Show moreIn the present study I expand on existing studies on syllabic patterns in babbling in two ways. First, I present two large-scale studies of babbling patterns from, respectively, eight and nine different languages. Second, I analyse babbling patterns – the “phonetic syntax” of babbling (Lipkind et al., 2013) – beyond the terms ‘reduplicated’ and ‘variegated’; a sequence “babadi”, for example, could be an example of either reduplicated or variegated babbling, and possible subpatterns become even more complex when considering four-syllable utterances. The conclusion is that that full variegation is preferred over any other form of reduplication in 0-24-months-olds – XY, XYZ, and XYZW. When infants do reduplicate they prefer to do so at the end of the utterance. From a cross-linguistic point of view it can be concluded that Polish and Germanic speaking infants use variegated patterns more frequently than infants of other languages. As regards to reduplicated patterns, languages such as French, Portuguese and Romanian have the highest distribution of reduplication. With regard to development of distribution of the syllabic patterns within the first two years of life, variegated utterances are produced at the very beginning of babbling and the frequency in which they occur increases while the infants grow older.Show less
