Social action of syntactic reduplication

Reduplication has been shown to carry the semantic meaning of increased intensity, duration or emphasis. This study demonstrates that syntactic reduplication in Estonian is regularly used in responsive positions in action sequences. Instances of syntactic reduplication constitute specific social pra...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of pragmatics Vol. 42; no. 3; pp. 800 - 824
Main Author Keevallik, Leelo
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Amsterdam Elsevier B.V 01.03.2010
Elsevier
Subjects
Action sequences
Descriptive studies and applied theories
Estniska språket
Estonian
Estonian language
Finno-Ugric languages
Finsk-ugriska språk
HUMANIORA och RELIGIONSVETENSKAP
HUMANITIES and RELIGION
Interactional linguistics
Language Patterns
Languages and linguistics
Linguistic subjects
Linguistics
Lingvistik
Lingvistikämnen
Prosody
Reduplication
Repetition
Semantics and pragmatics
Semantics Discourse Relationship
Sentence Structure
Språkvetenskap
Syntactic reduplication
Syntax Discourse Relationship
Action sequences
Syntactic reduplication
Prosody
Interactional linguistics
Repetition
Estonian
Action
Reduplication
Pragmatics
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Summary:Reduplication has been shown to carry the semantic meaning of increased intensity, duration or emphasis. This study demonstrates that syntactic reduplication in Estonian is regularly used in responsive positions in action sequences. Instances of syntactic reduplication constitute specific social practices such as affiliative and disaffiliative urging, challenging the prior speaker, reinforcing answers to yes/no questions, and providing a non-elicited confirmation. Syntactic reduplication is a sedimented linguistic pattern grounded in the social actions it recurrently performs. Different reduplicative actions furthermore display characteristic prosodic features, involving initial prominence in affiliative actions and delayed pitch peak in disaffiliative ones. Mock repeats and disconfirming answers are produced with double pitch peaks. Grammar and prosody are complementary means of achieving social action in particular positions in interactive sequences. The paper shows that sequential and social contingencies may be essential in understanding a grammatical pattern.
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ISSN:0378-2166
1879-1387
1879-1387
DOI:10.1016/j.pragma.2009.08.006