Syntactic discontinuous reduplication with antonymic pairs: a case study from Italian

Abstract

This article aims at giving a comprehensive account of a so far undescribed reduplicative pattern in Italian named syntactic discontinuous reduplication with antonymic pairs (SDRA). This pattern, characterized by the non-contiguous repetition of the same element within a larger fixed configuration defined by two spatial antonyms, can be schematized as <Xi Adv1 Xi Adv2>, where Adv1 and Adv2 are antonyms (e.g., di qua ‘here’ ∼ di là ‘there’). After describing its formal and functional properties, based on naturally occurring data extracted from the Italian Web 2016 corpus, the SDRA is analyzed as an independent ‘construction’ in the Construction Grammar sense. This construction is claimed to convey a general value of ‘plurality’ and to have developed a polysemy network of daughter constructions expressing more specific functions such as ‘distributivity,’ ‘related variety,’ and ‘dispersion.’ In addition, we propose considering the SDRA a ‘multiple source construction,’ originating from the blending of two independent constructions: syntactic reduplication and irreversible binomials with antonymic adverbs. Finally, we discuss SDRA-like patterns in other typologically different languages (Russian, Modern Hebrew, Mandarin Chinese, German), pointing out similarities and differences, and paving the way to a more systematic study of discontinuous reduplication in a crosslinguistic perspective.