Segmental and prosodic features in Lama Reduplication processes

Abstract

Lama Reduplication presents segmental and prosodic feature variations such vowel reduction, stranded syllable deletion, CV template insertion, nasality feature insertion and tone reversal, among other processes. In paper, I present first the duplication typology involving frozen reduplication, simple total reduplication, complex total reduplication and triplication. I then discuss some linguistic functions of duplication such as phonosemantic function, syntactic function, and pragmatic function. Within the theoretical framework of non linear morphophonology, I posit principles and steps for the analysis of Lama Reduplication. The implementation of my analytical framework shows that the order of duplication is governed by the morphological nature of the copied material (suffix and infix mainly) and the general principles and conventions of Multilinear phonology.

Keywords: Reduplication, frozen reduplication, triplication, phonosemantic function, syntactic function, pragmatic function, mirror-image tone.