A Focus Account for Contrastive Reduplication: Prototypicality and Contrastivity

This paper sets forth the phenomenon of Contrastive Reduplication (CR) in English relevant to the notion of contrastive focus (CF). CF differs from other reduplicative patterns in that rather than the general intensive function, denotation of a more prototypical and default meaning of a lexical item appears from the reduplicated form resulting as a semantic contrast with the meaning of the non-reduplicated word. Thus, CR is in concordance with CF under the concept of contrastivity. However, much of the previous works on CF associated contrastivity with a manufacture of a set of alternatives taking a semantic approach. We claim that a recent discourse-pragmatic account takes advantage of explaining the vague contrast in informativeness of CR. Zimmermann's (2006) Contrastive Focus Hypothesis characterizes contrastivity in the sense of speaker's assumptions about the hearer's expectation of the focused element. This approach makes possible adaptation to CR and recovers the possible subsets of meaning of a reduplicated form in a more refined way showing contrastivity in informativeness. Additionally, CR in other languages along with similar set-limiting phenomenon in various languages will be introduced in general.