Poetic contrastive focus reduplication
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From Nancy Friedman — Billy Collins, "After the Funeral", in Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems, 2013:
For those who can't access the Google Books version, the same poem can be found as the second item in this page at Boulevard magazine.
Previous LLOG discussion of the phenomenon:
"Contrastive focus reduplication in Zits", 6/11/2007
"Reduplication reduplication", 6/28/2007
pj said,
September 1, 2014 @ 6:56 am
Lovely play is made with of this kind of reduplication in an episode of the BBC radio comedy 'Cabin Pressure' – relevant section starts at 11.30 here (with bonus Russian subtitles as it's the only full audio I can find). As background for the uninitiated, they're a tiny charter plane company and they need to convince a drunk passenger that they're taking him to Timbuktu, although the airport there is closed due to civil war, so they've come up with a plan…
Transcript, from here:
The codename/reduplication set-up is revisited as the final punchline of the episode, too.
Adrian Morgan said,
September 1, 2014 @ 9:08 am
This is one of those times when I'm curious about what an embedded object looks like to someone else, because in my browser it is nothing particularly enlightening.
This is the relevant crop from the screenshot: https://outerhoard.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/llogshot.jpg
(FTR, I have read the poem via the Boulevard link.)
[(myl) To those in favored IPR regimes, it looks like this.]
MaryKaye said,
September 1, 2014 @ 9:18 am
I had always been puzzled by reduplicated scientific names for species, such as _Gorilla gorilla_, and was charmed to suddenly realize that they mean exactly what they'd mean in English. What kind of gorilla is it? A gorilla gorilla!
Would Latin naturally do that, or has it been imported from some other language?
Dan Lufkin said,
September 1, 2014 @ 10:03 am
Does this count?
John Finkbiner said,
September 1, 2014 @ 10:05 am
@MaryKaye:
Biological names like Gorilla gorilla are not really reduplicated. You can read about the naming system in wikipedia and references there cited, but the gist is that every species* has a two-part name. The first part is a slightly broader category called a genus and the second part is name of the species within that genus. Sometimes the names of genus and species are the same but that doesn't tell you anything special about that species.
In other words Gorilla beringei is not lesser or deviant form of gorilla, it's just a different species in the same genus as Gorilla gorilla.
*Species is a very slippery concept, especially for micro-organisms.
Bob Ladd said,
September 1, 2014 @ 10:32 am
Is there a connection between this and reduplication for intensification of gradable adjectives in Italian? This is a regular part of informal speech, perhaps especially common when talking to children but by no means exclusive to that register: you get things like grande grande 'very big', rosso rosso 'very red', caldo caldo 'very hot', etc. etc. It's fairly productive for high-frequency adjectives. To me it feels quite different from the English reduplication in drink-drink or up-up, but I can't really say what the difference in effect is. The most obvious difference is that the Italian reduplication only occurs with gradable adjectives.
Tim Morris said,
September 1, 2014 @ 10:56 am
Reduplication in Italian can also be a way of making nouns into adverbs. In Andrea Camilleri's novels, Salvo Montalbano habitually takes "una passiata molo molo," a walk along the breakwater. There the repetition of the noun is not an attributive modifying itself but a way of changing the noun's case to an ablative of manner or something like that.
Rodger C said,
September 1, 2014 @ 11:14 am
@MaryKaye: That's a genus and species name. Gorilla gorilla is the member of the gorilla genus that's, you know, a gorilla.
Then there's Mola mola, the sunfish, which a lot of people seem to treat as if they think it's a Polynesian name, rather than "Millstone millstone."
blahedo said,
September 1, 2014 @ 11:30 am
That does sounds semantically a little bit different: there the reduplication seems to move the scalar adjective further along the scale, whereas the English reduplication (of the variety in the poem) is used to evince a "more canonical" version of something, moving in towards the middle of the fuzzy set (so to speak) rather than further along a scale from a baseline. Put another way, you can't get more drink-y than a "drink-drink", but something that was "grande grande" could presumably have an even grande-er counterpart.
tpr said,
September 1, 2014 @ 11:42 am
@Bob Ladd
Those Italian examples seem a lot closer in effect to reduplication of intensifiers in English (e.g., "thank you very, very much", "a really, really old man", etc.).
Ralph Hickok said,
September 1, 2014 @ 12:43 pm
Why is it "reduplication"? Isn't that the equivalent of saying he will repeat it twice when he's actually going to say it once and repeat it once?
[(myl) Good question. For an answer, you'll have to re-animate the Latin rhetoricians and grammarians who coined reduplicatio as a calque of Greek ἀναδίπλωσις; or channel Aristotle and the others who used ἀναδίπλωσις in the first place. I'll look forward to hearing what you learn!]
MattF said,
September 1, 2014 @ 1:05 pm
My favorite reduplicative biological name is the amoeba, Chaos Chaos. Unfortunately, this charming nomenclature has fallen into disrepute:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_(genus)
Mr Fnortner said,
September 1, 2014 @ 1:39 pm
Pizza, pizza.
Hot, hot, hot.
Eric P Smith said,
September 1, 2014 @ 3:08 pm
Gorilla gorilla is a gorilla, but Puffinus puffinus is not a puffin, but a Manx Shearwater.
Bob Ladd said,
September 1, 2014 @ 3:56 pm
It also occurs to me that there are a couple of interesting prosodic facts about these. In the English ones, it's always the FIRST member of the reduplication that bears the main stress – this shows up clearly in the use of italics or boldface in the Collins poem and in the examples from Zits cited in MYL's earlier post. In the Italian reduplicated adjectives, the stress is on the second of the pair. Of course, that's just normal sentence stress in Italian, but the English pattern in these cases seems to be intended as "contrastive" somehow. This seems like a further indication that the English and Italian constructions are not the same thing. It's also consistent with tpr's suggestion that the Italian construction is pretty much like very very or really really in English.
A possibly unrelated prosodic fact is that the Italian ones work best with two-syllable adjectives like the ones I cited in my earlier comment. The longer the adjective, the less natural the reduplication sounds. (Or the shorter: blu blu 'very blue' sounds really weird.) This means that the reduplicated form typically has a /,da da 'da da/ shape, like many Italian 4-syllable words. Of course, this preference may be confounded with word frequency, as the shorter adjectives are more likely to be common.
Terry Hunt said,
September 1, 2014 @ 4:01 pm
Since we're looking at species names, I'll mention that one of my favourite examples is Motacilla alba, the White wagtail, and its principal or Nominate subspecies Motacilla alba alba, the European white wagtail. (The British subspecies is Motacilla alba yarrellii, the Pied wagtail, which has more black about it.)
A Nominate subspecies arises where what was originally thought to be one species, say Aaa bbb, is found to consist of 2 or more, in which case the subspecies originally described (i.e. that to which the species' holotype belongs) has its specific name reduplicated, as Aaa bbb bbb, and others become Aaa bbb xxx, Aaa bbb yyy, etc.
Thus the subspecies of the Western gorilla Gorilla gorilla that was first scientifically described (when it was thought to be the only Gorilla) is now known as the Western lowland gorilla, Gorilla gorilla gorilla.
Yet another John said,
September 1, 2014 @ 4:23 pm
Contrastive reduplication gives a whole new set of possibilities for parsing "Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo" sentences which I hadn't even considered….
Akrep said,
September 1, 2014 @ 6:32 pm
Would someone enlighten me about "reduplication", please? By the English language I have been taught since four decades, "to duplicate" means to copy, to make something double, to say something twice etc… Also, the suffix "re-" means something similar to duplication, almost (but not quite) like an abbreviated "repeat".
So, I appeal to native English speakers and teachers, please help me out of my confusion: either "reduplication" is a redundant term, a "reduplication" itself, by which the speaker/drafter means merely "duplication", or, perhaps it is the way it is supposed to be used. Which is it?
By the way, in Bahasa Malaysia (which actually means "Malaysian language") nouns are pluralized by repeating the singular word. I don't know for sure, but I suspect it is the same in Bahasa Indonesia, the Malaysian's practical twin. E.g. "tree" = "pokok"; "trees" = "pokok pokok" (sometimes used with a hyphen between the two)
marie-lucie said,
September 1, 2014 @ 8:32 pm
Akrep: reduplication
Reduplication is a technical term in linguistics, but to my knowledge duplication is not. The Latin prefix re- has two meanings: again, once more (used also in English), and with greater intensity than normal. As a linguistic term, reduplication refers to the morphological use of the repetition of a word or phrase in order to indicate a specific grammatical meaning, as in the Indonesian example above, where reduplicating a word indicates plurality. An example in English is to crisscross versus to cross, but this type of formation is exceptional in English, so reduplication is not usually considered among types of English word-formation.
In the poem, reduplicated formations such as DRINK-drink are indicative not of repetition but of semantic intensity, a prototypical meaning of the word being reduplicated. It is possible that such formations may become more widespread and even make it into English morphology if they become commonplace, but thus far they are not.
marie-lucie said,
September 1, 2014 @ 8:36 pm
p.s. Reduplication can apply to a shorter element than a full word, such as initial reduplication which refers to the repetition of the first consonant or syllable of a word, as for instance in some Latin and Greek verb forms.
chh said,
September 1, 2014 @ 10:56 pm
Akrep, is Malay your native language? There are all kinds of interesting reduplication patterns in Malay and its relatives. You could look at some of the word lists in here for examples. http://www.sil.org/system/files/reapdata/16/62/07/16620753740636758952656763391966131088/Malay_redup_BLS_1989_rev.pdf
I've wondered whether there was a term in Malay to refer to these kinds of patterns- if there is please say so!
Bloix said,
September 1, 2014 @ 10:59 pm
There was a fair amount of outrage five years ago when Whoopi Goldberg claimed that although Roman Polanski perhaps had done something wrong he hadn't committed "rape-rape."
Akrep said,
September 2, 2014 @ 1:23 am
@ marie-lucie: Thank you for detailed explanation. I appreciate it.
@ chh: No, I was exposed to Malay 26 years ago when I was living in Malaysia for a while. My native language is Turkish.
BobC said,
September 2, 2014 @ 7:12 am
I like this post, but I don't like like it.
Nimrod Shalem said,
September 2, 2014 @ 7:25 am
I find the use of "real" in this poem somewhat redundant…
(a real bar-bar,a real funeral-funeral, a real friend-friend)
unless it's a matter of a poetic technique which I don't get
Jerry Friedman said,
September 2, 2014 @ 8:34 am
Trivia: Scientific names with reduplication are called "tautonyms". Tautonymous binomials are allowed for animals but not for plants. One example is Bison bison, which some prefer to call the American Bison, since it's not a buffalo-buffalo.
Terry Hunt: Did you mean "subspecies" instead of species, that is, "A Nominate subspecies arises where what was originally thought to be one subspecies, say Aaa bbb, is found to consist of 2 or more…"?
Nimrod Shalem: In my opinion, a problem with the whole poem is that Collins tries too hard to show you what he's doing though it's clear after the first time, and "real" is part of that. I suppose he and his friends might really use "real" before these reduplications, though.
Since Baden-Baden has been mentioned, I'll mention the extremely silly equation of Lorentz-Lorenz, as my friends in college called it.
J. W. Brewer said,
September 2, 2014 @ 9:34 am
The ringer is "clink-clink," which doesn't fit the semantic-intensification pattern (and doesn't have the same stress pattern), but the poet is forthright enough to acknowledge that by doing the italicization differently.
J. W. Brewer said,
September 2, 2014 @ 9:44 am
The opening is also odd because at least in my version of AmEng the normal/unmarked semantics of the idiom "to need a drink" imply an alcoholic drink. If a drink of water or orange juice or whatever would suffice, you wouldn't say "I need a drink," you'd say "I'm thirsty" or "I need something to drink." So the intensification in *drink*-drink would presumptively mean a stronger rather than weaker alcoholic drink — e.g. bourbon on the rocks as contrasted to a draft beer or watered-down cocktail, not a generic alcoholic beverage as contrasted to a glass of water. But perhaps the semantics of "to need a drink" in the poet's idiolect are otherwise.
Brett said,
September 2, 2014 @ 10:06 am
@J. W. Brewer: In many situations, "I need a drink," does imply an alcoholic one. However, I think there are plenty of situations where it does not. (I have certainly used that exact sentence on different occasions to mean either water or liquor with little possibility for misunderstandin. I have also intentionally used it ambiguously as wordplay.) If I heard somebody say it after attending a close friend's funeral, I would assume the drink was supposed to be alcoholic, but the "drink-drink" emphasis would not suggest that it should be stronger than usual. I would merely take it as additional emphasis that it was going to contain alcohol, just as in the poem.
Bill W said,
September 2, 2014 @ 5:32 pm
Then there's la princesse de Salm-Salm, as I recently learned from another website.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salm-Salm
http://languagehat.com/latvian-as-code-and-oddly-named-parisians/#comments
Joseph Bottum said,
September 2, 2014 @ 6:38 pm
As I remember, one of the mystery novels by (the linguistically trained) David Carkeet turns on what a toddler, a young witness, means by "no no."
John said,
September 2, 2014 @ 7:48 pm
The routine which (as far as I know) made comedian Mickey Flanagan famous was all about the difference between going out, and going OUT-out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jP_brwVyvc
Terry Hunt said,
September 5, 2014 @ 12:36 pm
@ Jerry Friedman
"Terry Hunt: Did you mean "subspecies" instead of species, that is, "A Nominate subspecies arises where what was originally thought to be one subspecies, say Aaa bbb, is found to consist of 2 or more…"?
No:Aaa bbb is the species bbb belonging to the Genus Aaa. If we discover that its population actually contains 2 (or more) subspecies, they are both (all) subspecies, so that any individual of the species must be either Aaa bbb bbb or Aaa bbb xxx (or Aaa bbb yyy etc.)
Incidentally, the reason I am fond of the White wagtail Motacilla alba is not just because it's a charming little manoraptoran dinosaur (aka 'bird), but also because its name gave rise to a new Latin word. Linnaeus reportedly named it Motacilla (presumably from its extant common Romance name) intending the original meaning of "little mover". However, earlier writers had misconstrued the name to mean literally "wag tail", inadvertently coining the neologism cilla – "tail".
Knud Lambrecht said,
September 12, 2014 @ 10:47 am
I probably don't have anything smart to add to all the comments reproduced above. But I would like to say that I heard examples of the doubling phenomenon in question soon after I visited the United States for the first time (decades ago) and was delighted by it. It's semantics and pragmatics is so transparent that I didn't need any explanation from native speaker friends.
Here are some more comments:
ACCENTUATION: as someone remarked, it always seems to be the first member of the formation that receives the word accent. This, our phenomenon seems to have in common with most (but not all!) English compound nouns. (As a non-native speaker of English, I have always considered compound accentuation in (American) English one of the most infuriatingly difficult or complex phenomena. Why is the pattern found in "ARMchair" by far the most "regular" one–similar to the one in German, my native language–, but why do I then encounter things like "student UNION"!! For me, this is about the only completely mysterious feature of modern English, one that I have never gotten close to fully mastering.
Anyway, to return to the "cookbook", oops, I meant "bookbook", phenomenon (the "cookbook" was introduced by my computer!), the common accentuation pattern in "BOOKbook" is no doubt reinforced by information structure: in spontaneous conversation, this formation (we need a name for it!!) occurs only, I believe, in discourse contexts where the denotation of the second member of the complex nominal is discourse-active, i.e. has been just mentioned before or is easily inferable from the conversational context. While I know for a fact that speakers regularly say "student UNION", I cannot imagine someone saying "bookBOOK". In other words, the accentuation pattern is strongly iconic (the second member being "de-accented" pragmatically).
Finally, a inconclusive remark about the existence of the phenomenon in other languages. It definitely does not exist in French. As for German, it does not exist there either, but, unlike French, I could imagine it coming into existence under American (and British?) influence.
Gerard said,
September 16, 2014 @ 9:30 am
When teaching an undergraduate class on morphology in Trinity College Dublin when the topic of reduplication cropped up, I always brought my trusty Hiberno-English anecdote along "to be sure to be sure".
The Irish language is fond of reduplication as an intensifier, "ar bith" roughly translates as "at all", however the phrase "ar chor" is often added for emphasis, which also translates into English as "at all"
There was no cabbage left at all at all
Similar pattern for the construction "to be sure to be sure", which Wikipedia informs me is a translation of the Irish Gaelic phrase "ar eagla na heagla" lit "for fear of fear"
I took my best shoes and a second pair to be sure to be sure.