Experience the power of the bookbook™
« previous post | next post »
From Ikea and ad agency BBH:
And feel the force of Contrastive Focus Reduplication™.
I think it's time for a little research — and LLOG readers are exactly the right source of evidence.
The standard reference on this topic is Jila Ghomeshi, Ray Jackendoff, Nicole Rosen, and Kevin Russell, "Contrastive focus reduplication in English (the Salad-Salad paper) ", Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 22(2) 2004, and the defining examples from that paper are things like
I'll make the tuna salad, and you make the SALAD-salad.
I'm up, I'm just not UP-up.
Oh, we're not LIVING-TOGETHER-living-together.
The authors observe that Contrastive Focus Reduplication "targets nouns, verbs (and optionally pronominal material to their right), verb particles, proper names, prnouns, and lexicalized expressions", that the first copy is prosodically focused (or perhaps the whole thing is treated as a compound?), and that "the semantic effect of this construction is to focus the denotation of the reduplicated element on a more sharply delimited, more specialized, range. […] For a first approximation, we characterize this effect as denoting the prototypical instance of the reduplicated lexical expression."
The research question is this: What is the distribution of this pattern across languages?
Let's take the defining elements of the phenomenon to be (1) reduplication and (2) prototypical semantics. Other aspects may vary — for example, some language lack prosodic focus, and if such languages still sometimes exhibit CR, this might call into question the "contrastive focus" aspect of the name. Similarly, the details of which constructions allow CR are likely to interact with other aspects of a language's morphophonology and morphosyntax.
One quick check might be: Can the Ikea bookbook™ ad be felicitously translated into language X, using a reduplicated form of X's word for book? The fact that the online ad comes from BBH Singapore, and has Hanzi subtitles, suggests that a comparable phenomenon exists in Chinese, though I haven't checked how "bookbook" is rendered in the subtitles, or asked for judgments from someone entitled to have them in (various varieties of) Chinese.
Bob Ladd's comments on an earlier post suggest that Italian generally lacks this construction. What about French? Spanish? German? Swedish? Russian? Korean? Arabic? Hindi? Tamil? Indonesian? and so on…
And once the basic descriptive issues are sketched out, there are interesting typological questions — does presence or absence of this construction correlate with other prosodic, morphological, or syntactic properties? Is it generally inherited or borrowed or both? Can it easily be borrowed into a language that previously lacked it?
[h/t to Nancy Friedman & Bob Ladd ]
Update — We should also consider the possibility that this construction is related to English's affinity for using nearly-arbitrary phrases as modifiers.
Ben Zimmer said,
September 7, 2014 @ 8:31 am
Not just CFR but retronymic CFR. (Hmm, or is that futuristic retronymic CFR?)
GeorgeW said,
September 7, 2014 @ 8:56 am
I can't offhand think of any examples of CR in Arabic although word reduplication does exist. Example: simsim (sesame).
Michael said,
September 7, 2014 @ 9:07 am
I Samuell 1:24 is usually translated as "the child was still young". But the Hebrew original reads: וְהַנַּעַר נָֽעַר׃ i.e. "and the youth [was a] youth" — he wasn't just a youth, he was a youth-youth.
And then there is the current, often ironical "gever-gever", i.e not just a man, but a man's man.
bks said,
September 7, 2014 @ 9:26 am
There are four kinds of characters in soap opera: good-bad (seemingly good but with evil intentions) bad-good (outwardly bad, but with a heart of gold), good-good and bad-bad.
–bks
phspaelti said,
September 7, 2014 @ 9:29 am
I can't really be sure for standard German, but for Swiss German these kind of things do not sound felicitous.
Riikka said,
September 7, 2014 @ 9:51 am
I have experience the power of the BookBook since purchasing one from Twelve South a couple of years ago:
http://www.twelvesouth.com/product/bookbook-for-macbook-air-retina
I'll follow the case with interest to see which company wins the right to the word.
—
It's doubtful whether Finnish or Swedish have this construction. During my university years I used the equivalent for "home-home" when talking about my parents' home (and not about the little room I lived in during the semesters), but most of the people I mentioned it to gave me rather blank looks.
Riikka said,
September 7, 2014 @ 9:52 am
*I have experienced, of course.
ahkow said,
September 7, 2014 @ 10:36 am
I can't think of an equivalent to contrastive duplication in Chinese even though reduplication exists as a morphological process.
Note that the subtitles at 0:24 (when the guy says "it's a BOOK book") actually say "這是一本實在的書" (this COP one-CL actual MOD book), with "實在的書" shizai de shu (actual MOD book) as the translation of the NP "BOOK book". So it's a paraphrase.
At the end of the ad, when the same guy says "Experience the power of a BOOK book", the subtitles read "感受書本的……" (experience book MOD …), again, no contrastive duplication in the subtitles.
Mart said,
September 7, 2014 @ 12:05 pm
We don't reduplicate in Spanish, but we do in Basque: "azkar-azkar" to say very fast, garbi-garbi to say very clean. So the Ikea ad could possibly be directly translated to Basque along the lines of: Hau ez da e-liburua; hau liburu-liburua da.
Bruce Rusk said,
September 7, 2014 @ 12:23 pm
Perhaps the English kind of CR is dependent on two linguistic features:
– Apposition of nouns and other words without intervening particles or any inflection: "paper book," "travel book," "Shakespeare play," etc. This can be used to refine semantically by indicating one of several possible senses of an ambiguous word, as in "funny weird" vs "funny haha."
– Prosodic stress to emphasize a particular word in a sentence and disambiguate possible senses ("She would never buy a Mazda [but others would]" vs "She would never buy a Mazda [but she would steal one]" etc.)
Languages without these features might have to use different constructions to achieve the same end. For example, French syntax doesn't permit noun-noun apposition as in English; a preposition would typically have to connect the words. So the construction "livre livre" would not be felicitous. A sequence of two nouns would normally express not a qualification but a relationship, as in "relations Nord-Sud." One way of expressing "an X X" would be "un X, mais un vrai."
(However, in French, something or someone distinctly French can be called "franco-français," or mutatis mutandi québéco-québécois–a related form, perhaps?)
Akito said,
September 7, 2014 @ 12:58 pm
Reduplication is very common with some adverbs of manner, motion, and state in Japanese (with some euphonic changes):
hayabaya to (also sousou ni) "very (unexpectedly) quickly"
gayagaya to "so noisily"
tantan to "in a straightforward/unemotional manner"
shinshin to "very quietly"
harubaru (to) "all the way (from a place)"
naminami "(pouring liquid) over the brim"
dondon "further along"
sansan to "(of the sun) brightly"
There are just too many to enumerate. They all seem to intensify the meaning. Of interest is that most of them are not used other than in a reduplicated form. By extension, we sometimes say something like Kare wa kaisha de wa ibatte(i)ru kedo, ie de wa hontou ni otousan-otousan shite(i)ru. "He bosses around in the office, but at home really behaves like a father should," meaning he is soft on his children.
Ben Zimmer said,
September 7, 2014 @ 2:21 pm
I noted in a 2003 alt.usage.english thread that German Kaffee Kaffee and Italian caffè caffè are both used to mean "real coffee" (as opposed to ersatz coffee). Can't recall my source for that.
Michael Watts said,
September 7, 2014 @ 2:35 pm
I'm hazily aware of three different syntactic constructions in Chinese involving reduplication, but none behaves (in my foggy understanding) like CFR in English:
1. Verbs can be reduplicated in an ABAB manner, with the effect of softening or informalizing the sentence or of indicating that the duration of the verb should be short; 给我看看 [gei wo kankan; give me looklook], "let me have a quick look". Reduplicating one-syllable verbs is routine. I have been told that a reduplicated verb VV is precisely equivalent to the periphrastic V一下.
2. Adjectives can be reduplicated in an AABB manner, with the effect of intensifying the sense of the adjective. 匆忙 [congmang] "hurried, busy", 匆匆忙忙 [congcongmangmang] "hurried, busy – but even more". I'm not aware that it's possible to reduplicate one-syllable adjectives, and there are some for which the reduplication is obligatory.
3. Measure words can be reduplicated too. 一个 [yi ge] "one", 一个个 [yi ge ge] "every" or perhaps "lots".
But none of those strike me as analogous to the construction in english, where I would have said e.g. a "book-book" alternates with "a real book" or "I don't like-like him" alternates with "I don't really like him" (which judgment seems like another way of phrasing "prototypical semantics").
I'll close with the disclaimer that I virtually never produce reduplications in Chinese because I don't feel like I understand them well enough to use them safely.
david said,
September 7, 2014 @ 3:12 pm
In Chile, in the seventies, restaurants would distinguish café-café from café-nescafé. the later was instant coffee, served powdered in a silvery bowl accompanied by a pot of hot water.
Bob Ladd said,
September 7, 2014 @ 4:12 pm
The Basque construction mentioned by Mart above is like the Italian one I mentioned in my comment on the earlier post – it intensifies adjectives. Mart says maybe you could do it with 'book', but it doesn't seem quite the same, and certainly libro libro sounds pretty weird in Italian. However, Ben Zimmer is certainly right that you could use caffè caffè to mean 'real coffee' (as opposed to instant). Italian native speakers may want to correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure that (a) the main stress is on the second caffè, the opposite to the pattern with things like book-book in English, and (b) that the first caffè is the head of the construction and is modified by the second, like Italian noun phrase order generally.
Sid Smith said,
September 7, 2014 @ 5:03 pm
"rape-rape"
© Whoopi Goldberg
Chris Waigl said,
September 7, 2014 @ 6:17 pm
One thing that comes to mind in German is a kind of reduplication that doesn't create a compound noun, but a sentence where the two are connected by a copula. It's not about contrastive *focus* (book-book as opposed to e-book) but about contrast between [thing] and [non-thing]:
– Dienst ist Dienst und Schnaps ist Schnaps (duty [in the sense of being on duty] is duty and schnapps [in the sense of being off-duty] is schnapps).
– Krieg ist Krieg (para.: this is what war is like)
– Geschäft ist Geschäft (business…)
The "Kaffee-Kaffee" example would certainly be understood, but it's not common. To me it feels like an Anglicism.
In French, thinking of reduplication, there's a large number of informal nouns and adjectives made from one-syllable words or word clippings. They're all informal and belong to the register of intimate speech. They're not contrastive at all (chouchou (chou – cabbage, meaning someone's favourite), joujou (jouet – toy), loulou (louche – scary), bonbon, cul-cul (cul – arse, meaning stupid, obescene), dodo (dormir – sleep), doudoune (a comfort object/security blanket)). Lists are easy to find. Exists in German, too (Wehweh – a small painful injury). Maybe this blocks the contrastive focus use.
The franco-français etc. is less contrastive – I read it as a reinforcement. "Ceci est un problème britannique" = "This is a problem Britain faces". "Ceci est un probleme britanno-britannique" – "This is a problem intrinsic to Britain."
BasJ said,
September 7, 2014 @ 6:32 pm
@Riikka: Home for their student room and home-home for their parents' house is exactly what students say in the Netherlands (at least when I was at uni).
Another one I can think of in Dutch is meisje-meisje for a very girly girl (perhaps even a bit too girly, so I'm not sure this could be considered a prototypical instance).
D.O. said,
September 7, 2014 @ 11:53 pm
AFAIK, Russian does not have CR, but sometimes uses reduplication of adverbs and adjectives for higher degree of the same (that is as a substitute for очень-very).
Max said,
September 8, 2014 @ 2:46 am
The book book is an ad, and this is an ad for the book book, so it's an ad ad? Incidentally, it worked: after watching the video I fished the "book book" out of the recycle bin and gave it a look.
Benjamin S said,
September 8, 2014 @ 3:10 am
Answers to many of these questions can be found in the book "Total Reduplication: The Areal Linguistics of a Potential Universal" by Thomas Stolz (2011). As the title suggests, it concerns itself with all forms and functions total reduplication, but CFR is described and documented for many languages.
For example, the source for the Italian caffè caffè example is given as Medici (1959): "Il tipo caffè – caffè". Other examples in Medici's account are: donna donna (a real women), vita vita (a real life), romanzo romanzo ( a real novel).
An example for French is chien chien (a real dog) and perro perro (real dog) for Spanish (Bollée 1978, cited in Stolz).
flow said,
September 8, 2014 @ 4:32 am
i tried out 書書 in my mind, and 一本書書. the first can't work, the second feels awkward to wrong without being cute. the problem is that reduplication is, as has been noted above, already heavily used in Mandarin; with nouns, it often denotes 'every (instance of)'; cf. 人 'a person; man in general; …' vs 人人 'everyone'; 家 'house, home, household' 家家(戶戶) '(each and) every household'. however, this usage seems not possible for each and every [sic] noun in the language; try 字字 （each character) vs *字字典典 or *字典字典, 家家 'every household', 國國 'every country' vs. *國國家家 and so and it won't come out very well. instead, more analytic construction like 各個國家 are used.
that said, 我要喝一杯咖啡, 我要喝一杯咖啡咖啡 'i want to drink a cup of (real) coffee' does sound wrong but cute and readily understandable. it doesn't sound right with 書 for some reason. the closest thing to *書書 that i can readily think of is 真真實實的書, which does preserve the meaning and the reduplication, but lacks the luster of a a true Bookbook. i could imagine saying something like ?真真實實在在的書, using rerereduplication.
flow said,
September 8, 2014 @ 7:07 am
for what it's worth, when you have Google Translate help you: https://translate.google.de/#en/zh-TW/this%20is%20a%20bookbook
and then click on the speaker symbol, it almost comes out as 這是一個不可不可, which corroborates that 書書 is a no-no…
Josh said,
September 8, 2014 @ 8:44 am
In Chile, it seemed fairly common to differentiate "café café" from
instant coffee. I was told this was an influence from the Mapuche language (I don't have a better source than hearsay, though). I did once have a Mapuche woman ask me "pelo pelo?", meaning "is that your real hair?", so it seems from those two examples to have some similarity to the English construction.
Filippo said,
September 8, 2014 @ 8:57 am
As an Italian native speaker I must confirm Bob Ladd assertions that on constructions like caffè caffè the main accent is on the second element. I never heard, for example, the expression casa casa (home home) to refer to one parents' home but I think this kind of construction certainly exists as stated by Benjamin S. As concerns libro libro I think it sounds rather weird because it does not define more sharply the meaning of book in contrast with libro elettronico (e-book), which is seldom used. And it does not bring to mind the word e-book (used in Italian too) as the English book book does.
D.O. said,
September 8, 2014 @ 9:22 am
Addendum: Russian uses reduplication of nouns and verbs as well for emphasis, but not for contrast still.
Rodger C said,
September 8, 2014 @ 10:05 am
I've heard "café café" often from Spaniards, who are unlikely to be influenced by Mapuche (as opposed to Basque). But then, as Filippo points out, it seems to be a widespread Romance term for REAL coffee (as distinct from the American variety). And of course the second element is the stressed one, because it's the modifier, like the first element in English.
milt boyd said,
September 8, 2014 @ 10:22 am
I'm reminded of the time when electric guitars became popular, and people needed a term to distinguish the other, original, kind from them. For some, the phrase "guitar guitar" was used (though briefly), but it was replaced by "acoustic guitar". "book" (for some) covers a wide range of items, so how do you refer to the original or prototypical version, the real thing? It's a book book, of course.
Stephen Hart said,
September 8, 2014 @ 2:09 pm
How would Contrastive Focus Reduplication work in languages that duplicate words to make plurals (e.g. Bahasa Malaysia)?
SamC said,
September 8, 2014 @ 4:52 pm
My friend who served in the Peace Corps in Mali implied that this type of construction is pretty common with francophones there. It also reminds me of "wiki wiki" in Hawaiian for "fast."
"I… knew that in Hawaiian words were doubled for emphasis" – http://c2.com/doc/etymology.html
Purodha Blissenbach said,
September 9, 2014 @ 6:22 am
In Standard German, we usually would express the SALAD-salad or similar contructs – contrastive or not – with another type of qualifyer, such as the "standard / usual / normal / green" salad.
However, there has been a recent attempt to establish a "Film-Film" (movie-movie) both spoken and written in a TV-advertisment for an own program by a commercial TV station which they kept on-air but received quite some unfavourable comments about. Middle-aged people consider that predominantly nonsential. I do not really know about young people.
In colloquial Rhinelandic you cannot use requplication in this way, but you can have something similar by (a) using adjectives such as "male man" or "specifically male [man]" for the man-man and (b) using a set of extra-strong prosodic focus markers "while I make the tuna salad, you make the SALAD" which then is contrastive, (c) like in Standard German, you can use adjective qualifiers, and (d) you can use different words, often combined with prosodic focus, such as choosing "Weib" instead of "Frau" which inherently includes (some) stronger aspects of "female".
James Wimberley said,
September 9, 2014 @ 6:28 am
bks: And of course there are soap operas sponsored by supermarkets and insurance companies as well as those sponsored by the paradigmatic detergent companies, or soap-soap operas.
Purodha Blissenbach said,
September 9, 2014 @ 7:09 am
All varieties of German have reduplication for emphasis, increase or intensification in limited, often lexicalized, cases. Nouns are almost never reduplicated but some reduplicaed non-nouns can be used as nouns.
There is the alliteratively use "sehr, sehr" (very very), and of other adverbs like "hoch hoch oben" (high, high up). The original adverbial expression "weh, weh" (hurt, ouch) has turned via child language or motherese into the noun "Wehweh" (a (little) hurt) and even developed an at least as often used diminuitive "Wechwehchen" (an imaginated or really tiny hurt; something one should not complain about but does; a complaint or hurt seen as euphemistic). The french loan "bon" (good) regionally spun off the "Bonbon" (candy, sweet). None of those exhibit CF.
Filippo said,
September 9, 2014 @ 7:57 am
Well of course reduplication has been a well known strategy for pidgin languages. But here I think we are focusing on the N+N construction.
marie-lucie said,
September 9, 2014 @ 9:54 pm
Chris Waigl: In French, thinking of reduplication, there's a large number of informal nouns and adjectives made from one-syllable words or word clippings. They're all informal and belong to the register of intimate speech. They're not contrastive at all (chouchou (chou – cabbage, meaning someone's favourite), joujou (jouet – toy), loulou (louche – scary), bonbon, cul-cul (cul – arse, meaning stupid, obescene), dodo (dormir – sleep), doudoune (a comfort object/security blanket))
The majority of these words are from baby talk rather than just informal or intimate. Chou means not just 'cabbage' but a type of puff pastry, usually a cream puff, which is where the hypocorostic use of the word comes from, as in "mon petit chou", 'my little cream puff', something said to address a small child. Chou can also be an adjective meaning 'cute, cutesy', but un chouchou is not just anyone's favourite but specifically a 'teacher's pet' although the verb chouchouter 'to treat as one's chouchou' can be said of a wider variety of actors, such as grandparents doting on a grandchild. Joujou is the baby talk version of le jouet 'toy', dodo 'sleep, bed' is from 'faire dodo', the baby talk version of dormir 'to sleep'. Such words enter the speech of adults within the family, and when used outside of this context they are indeed informal but also ironical, as if the adults are pretending to be children. The phrase "métro-boulot-dodo" has been used for quite some years to describe the monotonous, spiritless life of Parisian workers caught in an endless cycle of 'subway-job-sleep', with 'dodo' ending the rhyming and rhythmic sequence of the three words (the middle one, le boulot is a slangy word for 'work, job').
Ben Hemmens said,
September 10, 2014 @ 2:12 pm
I've got a watch watch.
Mark Dowson said,
September 10, 2014 @ 5:14 pm
Slightly off-topic, but if you enjoyed the video in its own right, take a look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eIFoz-Tjf8 (thanks to Gary Milsark for pointing this one out)
Yuval said,
September 11, 2014 @ 1:10 pm
As mentioned above, Modern Hebrew indeed has some lexicalized expressions like gever-gever, a man's man. I guess someone can look at you bewildered and say "oh, you wanted a salat-saLAT" (modifiers come after heads, so that's where you'd focus) but it will sound somewhat Americanized. I don't think people in their 50s and above will ever use it.
If it's of interest, MH does have a charming (legitimate) use for reduplication: "X X" is the equivalent of English's "one X at a time". I read this blog post-post, meaning every single post, in sequence.
Purodha Blissenbach said,
September 13, 2014 @ 8:01 am
I agree with Chris Waigl that the Standard German "Kaffee-Kaffee" Example is uncommon and bodes foreign. While it may be regionally acceptable and unerstood, it would provoke big question-marked eyes when locals talk to one another in e.g. the Rhineland where "Bohnenkaffe" is the proper and sole contrast to "instant coffe" and other coffee surrogates.
Thanks to Yuval making me aware that we have another kind of reduplication in German and its varieties, also in Dutch, Luxemburgian, and Swiss German. It resembles the Modern Hebrew one sensewise but has a word in between like its English counterpart "one by one". In Dutch, you say e.g. "dropje voor dropje", in Colognian "Dröppsche för Dröppsche", in Standard German "Tröpchen für Tröpfchen", in Low German "Dröpke(n) för Dröpke(n)" all meaning "drop by drop", or "one drop at a time", or "each/every little drop".
Since both German and Hebrew have it, I am pretty confident without knowing that Jiddish has it, too – maybe with, may be without, or having an optional intervening "for".
Nathan Myers said,
September 19, 2014 @ 2:30 am
Contrast the Malay reduplication that serves to add vagueness: jalan, walking, jalan2, wandering. I seem to be reading here that this is a feature of Mandarin, as well.
In English, to get the "really" meaning it seems to need a heavy stress on the first of the pair. But it strikes me that what is really happening here is that the first is being forced into the role of an adjective. What if it starts out adjectival? "It was big, but was it -big- big?". Or maybe we need to quote the first: "but was it 'big' big?", the quote being implicitly attributed to a notional objective observer. Quote marks are rarely vocalized.