Romanica Cracoviensia 15 (2015): 30–55 doi: 10.4467/20843917RC.15.003.4000 www.ejournals.eu/Romanica Cracoviensia
Iwona Piechnik Jagiellonian University in Krakow REDUPLICATIVE SYLLABLES IN ROMANCE LANGUAGES
ABSTRACT The article deals with the reduplications in Latin and in Romance languages. While in Latin there were only reduplications of monosyllables, Romance languages have a lot of polysyllabic (mostly disyllabic) reduplications. This development could arise due to a bigger expressivity of vulgar Latin mixed with vernacular languages and to their contacts with other languages: Germanic (mostly English and German), Celtic, Slavic, Turkic and Hungarian, in which the polysyllabic reduplication is the most common. KEY WORDS: reduplication, repetition, doubling, Latin, Romance languages, monosyllables, polysyllables, syllables.
With a special dedication to Mikołaj kollo
The repetition of sounds occurs in all languages of the world, doubling segments of audible material: natural sounds and animal cries, but also words and clauses. Of, course, some languages use it more intensively than the others, e.g. Afro Asiatic, Austronesian and Niger Congo languages have the highest frequency of reduplication (Štekauer et al. 2012: 323 and passim). At the onomatopoeic level, “it is interesting to note how often reduplication serves as a common denominator even in cases when languages disagree in the choice of phonemes” (Anderson 1998: 113). Thus reduplica tion is one of the most universal phenomena that we can see in everyday life, e.g. for learning words by children or expression of diminutive meanings. Also in many languages, “there are kin terms that are formed by a reduplicative CVCV, CVC or VCV pattern, such as mama , papa , ata and the like. It appears that this is most com mon for parental terms” (Dahl & Koptjevskaja Tamm 2001: 216). In this study, we would like to analyse the evolution of (semi )reduplicative or redundant polysyllabic words in Romance languages by comparison to Latin (classical and vulgar) and their neighbouring languages. Our aim is to look at a morphonological process in word