Reduplication and the structure of nouns in Xining Chinese

Abstract

In Xining Chinese, especially as used by older people, free nouns are always reduplicated, as a purely formal condition without any semantic effects. We argue that the reduplication takes place when an acategorial root is merged with a null nominal categorizer which copies the phonological matrix of the root, as an effect of a condition ruling out free monosyllabic nouns. When the condition is not independently satisfied, as in a compound or derived noun, reduplication is how the condition is met. Reduplication also occurs optionally in compounds or derived nouns. In conjunction with a minimalist theory of word formation, this will be shown to predict the distribution of reduplication in various contexts. For instance, the head of a compound can be reduplicated, but not the modifier, some affixes but not others permit reduplication of the base, non-compositional compounds do not allow reduplication, and so-called ‘bound roots’ (really, bound words) are not reduplicated. The phenomenon provides very strong evidence that simple content words are made up of an acategorial root and a categorizer which is often null, but can be overt in some languages, including Xining Chinese, where it is overt in nouns by virtue of reduplication.

A Descriptive and Experimental Investigation of Recursive Compounds in English: Their Semantic, Syntactic, and Phonological Characterization

“…2 Wang and Holmberg (2021) propose a minimalist theory of recursive compounds in Swedish. They argue that the case-marking or -linking element assigned to the complex modifier is the solution to the labeling problem (Chomsky 2013(Chomsky , 2015.…”

“…Thus, we can hypothesize that the semantic, syntactic, and phonological operations of recursive compounds are governed by similar rules that operate in two-member compounds. Although the topic of recursive compounding has been studied extensively (e.g., Mukai 2008;Giegerich 2009;Tokizaki 2010;Kösling 2012;Mukai 2018;Wang and Holmberg 2021;Mukai and Shimada 2021;Yonekura et al 2023), the experimental approach is still in its infancy. This study's aim is to present a comprehensive experimental study of all the properties of recursive compounds in English.…”