Reduplication and repetition from a constructionist perspective

In the typological literature, a distinction is often drawn between reduplication (as a morphological process) and repetition (as a syntactic process) (Gil 2005Gil, David. 2005. “From Repetition to Reduplication in Riau Indonesian.” In Studies on Reduplication, ed. by Bernhard Hurch, 31–64. Berlin: De Gruyter. ). This squib reconsiders this distinction from the perspective of Construction Morphology (Booij 2010Booij, Geert. 2010. Construction Morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press., 2018Booij, Geert (ed). 2018. The Construction of Words: Advances in Construction Morphology. Cham: Springer. ; Masini and Audring 2019Masini, Francesca, and Jenny Audring. 2019. “Construction Morphology.” In The Oxford Handbook of Morphological Theory, ed. by Jenny Audring, and Francesca Masini, 365–389. Oxford: Oxford University Press.). Drawing upon previously understudied phenomena in Tagalog, an Austronesian language of the Philippines, this paper demonstrates that the Construction Morphology approach provides a suitable framework for analyzing reduplication and repetition. It makes it possible to account for both similarities and differences between reduplication and repetition: both processes create a lexical unit with an iterative form and a conventionalized meaning, although they differ in the size and complexity of the lexical unit they create. Furthermore, this paper makes a strong case for the basic tenets of constructionist approaches, including a hierarchical lexicon and a lexicon-grammar continuum.