Contrastive focus reduplication

Contrastive focus reduplication (also lexical cloning, the double construction) is a little-studied type of syntactic reduplication found in some languages that indicates the prototypical meaning of the repeated word or phrase, a form of retronymy. The term word word was coined by U.S. writer Paul Dickson in 1982 to describe this.^[1]

The first part of the reduplicant bears contrastive intonational stress.

Examples

• cable television vs. television television.
• e-book vs. book book.
• Freelance work vs. work work.

References

1. ^ The Oxford Companion to the English Language. Oxford University Press. 1992. pp. p. 1127. ISBN 0-19-214183-X. 

• Dray, Nancy. (1987). Doubles and modifiers in English. (Unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Chicago).
• Ghomeshi, Jila; Jackendoff, Ray; Rosen, Nicole; & Russell, Kevin. (2004). Contrastive focus reduplication in English (the salad-salad paper). Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 22, 307–357. See also Corpus of English contrastive focus reduplications started from this article
• Horn, Laurence. (1993). Economy and redundancy in a dualistic model of natural language. In S. Shore & M. Vilkuna (Eds.), SKY 1993: Yearbook of the Linguistic Association of Finland (pp. 31–72).
• Wierzbicka, Anna. (1991). Cross-cultural pragmatics: The semantics of human interaction. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

External links

• Contrastive focus reduplication in Zits (Language Log)