Turning Back to Again Using Parallel Texts : Structuring the Semantic Domain of Repetition and Restitution (original) (raw)
Related papers
Repetition avoidance in human language
2007
Repetition is avoided in countless human languages and at a variety of grammatical levels. In this dissertation I ask what it is that makes repetition so bad. I propose that at least three distinct biases against repetition exist. First, repetition of articulatory gestures is relatively difficult. This difficulty results in phonetic variation that may lead to categorical phonological avoidance. I call this set of claims the Biomechanical Repetition Avoidance Hypothesis (BRAH), and support it with evidence from cross-linguistic patterns in repetition avoidance phenomena, articulatory data from music performance, and a series of phonetic experiments that document the proposed types of phonetic variation. Based on these data, I give an evolutionary account for antigemination in particular. The second anti-repetition bias is a perceptual deficit causing speakers not to perceive one of a sequence of repeated items, of any conceptual category. This bias is already welldocumented, as are the grammatical effects (primarily haplology). I provide here the evidence of gradient variation in production bridging the two, from avoidance of homophone sequences in English corpora. The third factor is a principle disallowing the repetition of syntactic features in certain configurations within a phase domain. I document categorical effects of it in Semitic syntax of possession and relativization. These elicit repair strategies superficially similar to those of phonology (specifically, deletion and epenthesis/insertion). Repetition effects, then, are traceable to a variety of independent, functional biases. This argues against a unitary, innate constraint against repetition. Rather, multiple anti-repetition biases result in particular avoidance patterns, with their intersection producing additional asymmetries. Possible categorical repairs are further constrained by the nature of the formal grammatical system.
Aspects Of Repetition in Discourse
It is often claimed that language is a system for communicating information. In fact, language has a multiplicity of functions, but when it comes to information, that which is to be given significance is always framed by the known, hence repeated, elements. The organization of language is largely a matter of what is repeated, when, where, why, by whom, how and how often. For the purposes of this analysis, I will take a much broader view of repetition than is normally found in linguistics, considering a cline from local (often idiosyncratic) repeating clauses or phrases to stable units such as lexical items which have become formal, generalized tokens in the language. This is not a paper which proposes a neat solution to some small puzzle in a linguistic model. Rather, it outlines for further study some properties of a very general phenomenon.
The Concept of Semantic Phase and the Different Readings of again
2009
The paper offers a new kind of approach to the semantic contrast between repetitive and restitutive again. The heart of the theory is the new concept of Semantic Phase. It parallels the syntactic concept and is motivated as an instance of the Principle of Hierarchical Abstraction. The concept refers to a switch from imperfective to perfective view of a situation at the level of vP. Applying the modifier before or after phase transition derives the two readings without stipulation of lexical ambiguity. The framework used is Finite-state Temporal Semantics of Fernando. The syntactic background is an Orphan analysis of right-peripheral adverbials. Syntactic underspecification is resolved by the use of pragmatic information reflected locally by the prosody of the utterance.
Corpus-based approaches and discourse analysis in relation to reduplication and repetition
Reduplication is important in language studies. Its linguistic form at the lexical level has long been explored in terms of various formalist theories. However, the linguistic function at other levels such as the discourse layer tends to be ignored. A reduplication corpus (ongoing compilation; 1687 items in total thus far) has been constructed as the baseline for an integrated approach to the interplay of various kinds of repetition in the use of language. The frequency of each token was calculated based on its occurrence in the British National Corpus (BNC). Then a wordlist with the top 102 items was proposed for related research topics such as frequency, percentage coverage, concordance, and collocation in terms of McCarthy's framework (1990 and later) using MonoConc Pro, WordSmith 4.0 and the SARA 3.2 software. The probability of collocation was calculated in terms of mutual information (MI). The higher the MI score, the more genuine the association between two items (Church and Hanks, 1990). A powerful search engine, Google, was further employed to locate relevant texts on websites for the analysis of reduplication from lexical to discourse levels. Both reduplication and repetition do play a significant role and exhibit extensively a certain language musicality in our everyday life.
Exact repetition or total reduplication? Exploring their boundaries in discourse and grammar
Freywald, Ulrike & Rita Finkbeiner. 2018. Exact repetition or total reduplication? In: Rita Finkbeiner & Ulrike Freywald (eds.), Exact Repetition in Grammar and Discourse. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. 3-28, 2018
In this chapter, we review central criteria that are commonly used to differentiate between '(total) reduplication', understood as a grammatical operation that applies within word boundaries, and '(exact) repetition', which is a pragmatic or discourse-related process that takes place above the word level. The main focus of this article is on the grey area where the two domains meet or even overlap. In anticipation of the remainder of the book we discuss examples from a variety of languages which challenge a neat division into word-bound reduplication on the one hand and discourse-bound repetition on the other. This survey of potentially problematic cases leads to the conclusion that the demarcation line between reduplication and repetition is rather blurred: Neither is reduplication confined to the domain of the word nor is repetition completely excluded from it. Reduplication also occurs at the discourse level, conveying discourse-grammatical information such as topic marking. Conversely, purely pragmatically motivated processes of repetition can also be found within words, for example with derivational affixes and in ideophones. This introductory chapter is concluded by an overview of the articles assembled in this book.
English Literature and Linguistics, 2000
The aim of this paper is to introduce a working model of phrasal repetition and to identify different varieties or forms of phrasal repetition. In stating this aim, I have already introduced two basic assumptions that may need attention. First, I have stated, as given, that there is some need or rationale for such a model. Second, I have introduced a term that has the appearance of a technical term (phrasal repetition) but which has no preceding discussion in the literature of linguistic or stylistic study. By introducing such a term I am necessarily pre-forming the expectations of the descriptive model. To justify this seeming circularity, I will endeavour to place the development of the model within existing discussions of language repetition, and to show the steps which have led to the model described below. The paper therefore, will start with a general discussion of repetition, it will continue with an overview of existing discussion, it will develop from that discussion a descriptive model designed to cover what is not covered in existing models, and finally it will make a brief adventure into the uses of the model for textual analysis or stylistics.