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Contrastive focus reduplication and the modification puzzle

Paper · 2020 · Fabian Bross and Katherine Fraser

Summary

The squib examines contrastive focus reduplication (CR), where a content word is doubled and one copy is stressed, as in salad-salad or German Kaffee-Kaffee. Speakers use it to pick out a prototypical or "real" sense of the word, and sometimes to intensify or disambiguate. Using judgment data from English and German, the authors identify a constraint earlier work had missed: a CR construction cannot take a modifier, so nominal CR rejects adjectives (*black coffee-coffee).

Neither existing account predicts this. The head-movement analysis, which posits a dedicated CR phrase, cannot explain CR applying to multi-word strings. The compounding analysis common in German studies wrongly expects modification to be possible. The authors propose a Cartographic alternative in which phrasal material moves into the specifier of a focus phrase, either cyclically through the intervening functional specifiers or directly. Both copies are pronounced. Because the movement passes through or skips the positions where modifiers would sit, those positions are unavailable. The same analysis also accounts for the stress pattern, the missing linking elements, and the ban on reduplicating functional words.

Key points

  • The core data are from English and German. CR is also attested in Italian, Spanish, French, Persian (adjectives only), Russian, and Kinande (nouns only).
  • English can reduplicate a stem without its inflection (glove-gloves), but irregular forms block this (*goose-geese). German requires both copies to carry identical inflection (Männer-Männer, but *Männer-Mann in the CR sense).
  • English CR can include an unstressed object pronoun (like-him-like-him) but not a full DP (*like-Peter-like-Peter). Nominal CR with a post-nominal PP is also degraded (*?student-of-physics-…).
  • For the semantics, the authors follow Song & Lee (2011): contrastive focus exhaustively selects one denotation from a set of alternatives supplied by context. Depending on the situation, this can be a prototype, a subcategory, or the category itself (drink-drink, bat-bat).
  • Citing Horn (2018), they note that the prototype reading clusters with nouns and the intensifying reading with adjectives. They tentatively link this to cyclic movement for nouns versus direct movement for adjectives.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. An X-X sequence with stress on one copy is a construction of its own, not a compound or a disfluency; its job is to narrow the word to a "real" sense.
  • I2. Checking whether a modifier can attach is a cheap test for telling a real compound apart from a syntactic construction that only looks like one.
  • I3. The CR meaning depends on context: the doubled word excludes a contrasting alternative already named in the discourse, such as wine versus martini or a bat as an animal versus a bat for baseball.
  • I4. The function of CR appears to vary with part of speech: nouns tend toward the prototype reading, adjectives toward intensification.
  • I5. The argument rests on minimal pairs of acceptable and starred forms, such as modified versus unmodified CR and pronoun versus full DP inside CR.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (tokens): The tokenizer/tagger can flag hyphenated or adjacent identical content words as a CR marker carrying a prototype/intensifier feature, rather than splitting them as repetitions or lemmatizing them as a compound.
  • I2 (tree): When converting treebanks or resolving compound vs. other relations for identical-word pairs, a parser can treat "no adjective can intervene or attach" as evidence for a CR analysis, attaching the stressed copy to the head instead of building a compound chain.
  • I3 (world): To resolve drink-drink, the world model should look up the contrast set from the previous turn and pick the member that it rules out, giving an explainable choice of referent.
  • I4 (frames): Prag can map CR on nouns to a "prototypical instance" restriction on the role filler, and CR on adjectives to a degree boost on the property, choosing the rule by POS.
  • I5 (learn): These pairs can serve as negative controls in evaluation, checking that the parser and interpreter do not accept or assign a prototype reading to *black coffee-coffee-type inputs.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓University of StuttgartStuttgart · Germany75 works · 46,113 citations🎓University of the Basque CountryLeioa · Spain40 works · 16,234 citations

📚 Shelves 6The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 worksPsychology · 798 worksExperimental and Cognitive Psychology · 463 worksNeuroscience · 95 worksCognitive Neuroscience · 95 works

Cite

Cite as Fabian Bross and Katherine Fraser. 2020. Contrastive focus reduplication and the modification puzzle. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5334/gjgl.1075

@article{bross2020contrastive,
  title = {{Contrastive focus reduplication and the modification puzzle}},
  author = {Fabian Bross and Katherine Fraser},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2020},
  doi = {10.5334/gjgl.1075},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.1075}
}

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  54. How to cite this article: Bross, Fabian and Katherine Fraser. 2020. Contrastive focus reduplication and the modification puzzle. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 5(1): 47. 1–18. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.1075 ↗
  55. Submitted: 22 August 2019 find
  56. Copyright: © 2020 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by Ubiquity Press. OPEN ACCESS ↗

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