Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jkksz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T08:54:42.213Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

7 - Repetition and reduplication in Italian

from Romance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 August 2023

By
Anna M. Thornton
Edited by
Jeffrey P. Williams
Jeffrey P. Williams
Affiliation:
Texas Tech University
Get access

Summary

The chapter surveys repetitions and reduplications in Italian, from the segmental to the discourse level. Italian has reduplicative structures in ideophones, onomatopoeic formations, child language, and baby talk; segment repetition is used as an expressive device in commercials and product names; reduplication is used as a lexeme formation device in Verb-Verb compounds such as fuggifuggi ‘stampede, lit. run away run away’, and as a means of intensification of adjectives and adverbs; some sequences of two nouns have lexicalized with adjectival or adverbial meaning; contrastive focus reduplication is also attested in Italian. Discourse markers are often reduplicated; several cases of repetition of imperatives in discourse have constructionalized, giving rise to converbs with concessive or hypothetical meanings or used as antecedents of consecutive clauses; noun reiteration in discourse can be used to indicate frequency of occurrence of entities and events. It is argued that no clear dividing line can be drawn between pragmatic or syntactic repetition and grammatical or morphological reduplication, since grammaticalization of discourse repetition in diachrony often occurs.

Keywords

RepetitionreduplicationItaliandiscourse-grammar continuumcontrastive focus reduplicationreduplicated imperatives“framing”reduplicationintensification
Type
Chapter
Information
Expressivity in European Languages , pp. 231 - 268
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Amenta, Luisa. (2010). La reduplicazione sintattica in siciliano. Bollettino – Centro di studi filologici e linguistici siciliani, 22, 345–58.Google Scholar
Andreoli, Raffaele. (1966). Vocabolario napoletano – italiano. Naples: Arturo Berisio Editore.Google Scholar
Aronoff, Mark. (1994). Morphology by Itself: Stems and inflectional classes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Bazzanella, Carla. (1995). I segnali discorsivi. In Renzi, Lorenzo, Salvi, Giampaolo, & Cardinaletti, Anna (eds.) Grande grammatica italiana di consultazione. III. Tipi di frasi, deissi, formazione delle parole. Bologna: il Mulino, 225–57.Google Scholar
Benigni, Valentina & Lo Baido, Maria Cristina. (2020). La reduplicazione nella codifica della maniera. Testi e linguaggi 14, 151–79.Google Scholar
Bernini, Giuliano. (2010). baby talk. In Simone, Raffele (ed.) Enciclopedia dell’italiano. Vol. I. Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 139–40. https://bit.ly/3n3dpLUGoogle Scholar
Bühler, Karl. (1982). Sprachtheorie. Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache. Stuttgart: Gustav Fischer Verlag.Google Scholar
Castellani Pollidori, Ornella. (2002). Per la storia del detto Le gambe fanno giacomo giacomo. In L’Accademia della Crusca per Giovanni Nencioni. Florence: Le Lettere, 333–56.Google Scholar
Colombo, Adriano. (2019). Superstizioni grammaticali. Italiano a Scuola, 1(1), 91–104. DOI: 10.6092/issn.2704-8128/9998Google Scholar
D’Achille, Paolo. (2005). Sintassi e fraseologia dell’italiano contemporaneo tra diacronia e diatopia. In Hölker, Klaus & Maaß, Christiane (eds.) Aspetti dell’italiano parlato. Münster: Lit, 235–49.Google Scholar
D’Ascoli, Francesco. (1993). Nuovo vocabolario dialettale napoletano. Naples: Adriano Gallina Editore.Google Scholar
De Santis, Cristiana. (2011). reduplicazione espressiva. In Simone, Raffele (ed.) Enciclopedia dell’italiano, Vol. II. Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1224–5. https://bit.ly/3ELIklNGoogle Scholar
De Santis, Cristiana. (2014). Cresci, cresci, cresci … La reduplicazione espressiva come strumento di espressione di relazioni transfrastiche. In De Santis, Cristiana, Ferrari, Angela, Frenguelli, Gianluca, Gatta, Francesca, Lala, Letizia, Mazzoleni, Marco, & Prandi, Michele (eds.) Le relazioni logico-sintattiche: teoria, sincronia, diacronia. Ariccia: Aracne, 191–219.Google Scholar
Di Giovannantonio, Sara. (2023). «La vuoi finì la vuoi?»: la ripetizione nella sintassi del romanesco pre-belliano. In Mastrantonio, Davide, Bianchi, Valentina, Marrucci, Marianna, Paris, Orlando, Abdelsayed, Ibraam, & Bellinzona, Martina (eds.) Repetita iuvant, perseverare diabolicum: un approccio multidisciplinare alla ripetizione. Siena: Università per Stranieri, 177–85.Google Scholar
Dingemanse, Mark. (2015). Ideophones and reduplication. Depiction, description, and the interpretation of repeated talk in discourse. Studies in Language, 39(4), 946–70. DOI: 10.1075/sl.39.4.05dinGoogle Scholar
Dixon, R. M. W. (2004). Adjective classes in typological perspective. In Dixon, R. M. W., & Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. (eds.) Adjective Classes: A cross-linguistic typology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1–49.Google Scholar
Evans, Nicholas. (2007). Insubordination and its uses. In Nikolaeva, Irina (ed.) Finiteness: Theoretical and empirical foundations. New York: Oxford University Press, 366–431.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fabi, Angelo. (1964). Ancora del tipo «caffè caffè». Lingua nostra 25(1), 18.Google Scholar
Finkbeiner, Rita. (2018). Bla(h), bla(h), bla(h): Usage and meaning of a repetitive all-rounder. In Urdze, Aina (ed.) Non-prototypical reduplication. Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 71–89. DOI: 10.1515/9783110599329-003CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fischer, Olga. (2011). Cognitive iconic grounding of reduplication in language. In Michelucci, Pascal, Fischer, Olga, & Ljungberg, Christina (eds.) Semblance and Signification. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 55–82. DOI: 10.1075/ill.10.04fisGoogle Scholar
Freywald, Ulrike. (2015). Total Reduplication as a productive process in German. Studies in Language 39(4), 905–45. DOI: 10.1075/sl.39.4.06freCrossRefGoogle Scholar
GDLI = Battaglia, Salvatore (ed.) (1961–2002) Grande Dizionario della Lingua Italiana, Turin: UTET.Google Scholar
Gil, David. (2005). From repetition to reduplication in Riau Indonesian. In Hurch, Bernard (ed.) Studies on Reduplication. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 31–64.Google Scholar
Ghomeshi, Jila, Jackendoff, Ray, Rosen, Nicole, & Russell, Kevin. (2004). Contrastive Focus Reduplication in English (The Salad-salad paper). Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 22: 307–57. DOI: 10.1023/B:NALA.0000015789.98638.f9CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gougenheim, Georges. (1935). La répétition distinctive. Le Français moderne 3(4), 345–6.Google Scholar
Grandi, Nicola. (2017). Intensification processes in Italian: A Survey. In Napoli, Maria & Ravetto, Miriam (eds.) Exploring Intensification: Synchronic, diachronic and cross-linguistic perspectives. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 55–77. DOI: 10.1075/slcs.189.04graCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grossmann, Maria & D’Achille, Paolo. (2016). Italian colour terms in the BLUE area: Synchrony and diachrony. In Silvestre, João Paulo, Cardeira, Esperança, & Villalva, Alina (eds.) Colour and Colour Naming: Crosslinguistic approaches. Lisbon: Centro de Linguística da Universidade de Lisboa/Universidade de Aveiro, 21–50.Google Scholar
Grossmann, Maria & D’Achille, Paolo. (2019). Compound color terms in Italian. In Raffaelli, Ida, Katunar, Daniela & Kerovec, Barbara (eds.) Lexicalization Patterns in Color Naming: A cross-linguistic perspective. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 61–79. DOI: 10.1075/sfsl.78.04groCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haspelmath, Martin. (1995). The converb as a cross-linguistically valid category. In Haspelmath, Martin & König, Ekkehard (eds.) Converbs in Cross-Linguistic Perspective. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1–55. DOI: 10.1515/9783110884463-003CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haspelmath, Martin. (2009). Terminology of case. In Malchukov, Andrej & Spencer, Andrew (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Case. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 505–17. DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199206476.013.0034Google Scholar
Hoffmann, Thomas & Trousdale, Graeme (eds.) (2013). The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195396683.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hopper, Paul. (1987). Emergent grammar. Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. 139–57. DOI: 10.3765/bls.v13i0.1834CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jaberg, Karl. (1947). Elation und Komparation. In Festschrift für Edouard Tièche zum 70. Geburtstage am 21 März 1947. Berne: H. Lang, 41–60.Google Scholar
Jakobson, Roman. (1960). Closing statement: Linguistics and poetics. In Sebeok, Thomas (ed.) Style in Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 350–77.Google Scholar
Kallergi, Haritini. (2015a). Reduplication at the word level: The Greek facts in typological perspective. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/9783110365597CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kallergi, Haritini. (2015b). Total Reduplication as a category of expressives.(Counter)evidence from Modern Greek. Studies in Language 39(4), 873–904. DOI: 10.1075/sl.39.4.04kalGoogle Scholar
Kallergi, Haritini & Konstantinidou, Magdalene. (2018). Reduplicative constructions involving distortion. In Urdze, Aina (ed.) Non-Prototypical Reduplication. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 91–150. DOI: 10.1515/9783110599329-004Google Scholar
Kaltenböck, Gunther, Heine, Bernd, & Kuteva, Tania. (2011). On thetical grammar. Studies in Language 35(4), 852–897. DOI: 10.1075/sl.35.4.03kalCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kim, Yuni. (2012). Review of Stolz et al. (2011). Studies in Language 36(2), 440–8. DOI: 10.1075/sl.36.2.08kimGoogle Scholar
Langacker, Ronald W. (2008). Cognitive Grammar: A basic introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lepschy, Giulio & Lepschy, Anna Laura. (1981). La lingua italiana: storia, varietà dell’uso, grammatica. Milan: Bompiani.Google Scholar
Loporcaro, Michele. (2017). Cacchio! Una nuova etimologia. In Gerstenberg, Annette, Kittler, Judith, Lorenzetti, Luca, & Schirru, Giancarlo (eds.) Romanice loqui. Festschrift für Gerald Bernhard zu seinem 60. Geburtstag. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 321–31.Google Scholar
Maiden, Martin & Robustelli, Cecilia. (2000). A Reference Grammar of Modern Italian. London: Arnold.Google Scholar
Mauri, Caterina & Masini, Francesca. (2022). Diversity, discourse, diachrony: A converging evidence methodology for grammar emergence. In Voghera, Miriam (ed.) From Speaking to Grammar. Berne: Peter Lang, 101–50.Google Scholar
Medici, Mario. (1959). Il tipo «caffè caffè». Lingua nostra, 20(3), 84.Google Scholar
Medici, Mario. (1961). Ancora di «caffè caffè». Lingua nostra, 22(1), 28.Google Scholar
Migliorini, Bruno. (1968). Il tipo sintattico «camminare riva riva». In Segre, Cesare (ed.) Linguistica e filologia. Omaggio a Benvenuto Terracini. Milan: Il Saggiatore di Alberto Mondadori Editore, 183–90.Google Scholar
Mioni, Alberto M. (1990). Fece splash e, glu glu, affondò. L’ideofono come parte del discorso. In Berretta, Monica, Molinelli, Piera, & Valentini, Ada (eds.) Parallela 4. Morfologia/Morphologie. Tübingen: Narr, 255–67.Google Scholar
Moravcsik, Edith A. (1978). Reduplicative constructions. In Greenberg, Joseph H. (ed.) Universals of Human Language. Vol. 3: Word structure. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 297–334.Google Scholar
Mortara Garavelli, Bice. (1994). Epanadiplosi. In Beccaria, Gian Luigi (ed.) Dizionario di linguistica e di filologia, metrica, retorica. Turin: Einaudi.Google Scholar
NDM = Il Nuovo De Mauro. https://dizionario.internazionale.itGoogle Scholar
Nobile, Luca & Lombardi Vallauri, Edoardo. (2016). Onomatopea e fonosimbolismo. Rome: Carocci.Google Scholar
Pisani, Vittore. (1933). Pāṇini, Māgha e l’imperativo descrittivo. Rendiconti della R. Accademia nazionale dei Lincei. Classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche, VI(9), 246–67.Google Scholar
Piunno, Valentina. (2016). Multiword modifiers in some Romance languages: Semantic formats and syntactic templates. Yearbook of Phraseology, 7, 3–34. DOI: 10.1515/phras-2016-0002Google Scholar
Poggi Salani, Teresa. (1971). Il tipo caffè caffè. Lingua nostra, 32(3), 67–74.Google Scholar
Potts, Christopher. (2007). The expressive dimension. Theoretical Linguistics, 33(2), 165–98. DOI 10.1515/TL.2007.011Google Scholar
Rainer, Franz. (1983). Intensivierung im Italienischen. Salzburg: Institut für Romanistik der Universität Salzburg.Google Scholar
Ramat, Paolo & Ricca, Davide. (1994). Prototypical adverbs: On the scalarity/radiality of the notion of ADVERB. Rivista di Linguistica, 6(2), 289–326.Google Scholar
Rubino, Carl. (2005). Reduplication: Form, function and distribution. In Hurch, Bernard (ed.) Studies on Reduplication. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 11–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rubino, Carl. (2013). Reduplication. In Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.) The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. https://wals.info/chapter/27Google Scholar
Sabatini, Francesco. (2011) [1985]. «I popolari discorsi svolti nella mia poesia». Sintassi del parlato nei Sonetti di Belli. In Sabatini, Francesco, L’italiano nel mondo moderno, Vol. I. Naples: Liguori, 123–48.Google Scholar
Serianni, Luca. (1988). Grammatica italiana. Italiano comune e lingua letteraria. Suoni forme costrutti. Turin: Utet.Google Scholar
Shintel, Hadas, Nusbaum, Howard C., & Okrent, Arika. (2006). Analog acoustic expression in speech communication. Journal of Memory and Language, 55(2), 167–77. DOI: 10.1016/j.jml.2006.03.002Google Scholar
Sornicola, Rosanna. (1981). Sul parlato. Bologna: il Mulino.Google Scholar
Sorrento, Luigi. (1951). Sintassi romanza. Ricerche e prospettive. II edizione. Varese and Milan: Istituto Editoriale Cisalpino.Google Scholar
Spitzer, Leo. (1918). Über den Imperativ im Romanischen. In Spitzer, Leo, Aufsätze zur romanischen Syntax und Stilistik. Halle: Niemeyer, 181–231.Google Scholar
Spitzer, Leo. (1951–52). Sur quelques emplois métaphoriques de l’impératif. Un chapitre de syntaxe comparative. Romania, 72, 433–78 and 73, 16–63.Google Scholar
Stolz, Thomas. (2018). (Non-)Canonical Reduplication. In Urdze, Aina (ed.) Non-Prototypical Reduplication. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 201–77. DOI: 10.1515/9783110599329-007Google Scholar
Stolz, Thomas & Levkovych, Nataliya. (2018). Function vs. form – On ways of telling repetition and reduplication apart. In Finkbeiner, Rita & Freywald, Ulrike (eds.) Exact Repetition in Grammar and Discourse. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 29–66. DOI: 10.1515/9783110592498-002Google Scholar
Stolz, Thomas, Stroh, Cornelia, & Urdze, Ania. (2011). Total Reduplication: The areal linguistics of a potential universal. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.Google Scholar
Stolz, Thomas, Urdze, Aina, Nintemann, Julia, & Tsareva, Marina. (2015). When some dots turn a different color … Thoughts on how (not) to determine whether or not reduplication is universal. Studies in Language, 39(4), 795–834. DOI: 10.1075/sl.39.4.07stoGoogle Scholar
Stump, Gregory T. (2008). Comparison. In Cruse, A. D., Hundsnurscher, F., Job, M., & Lutzeier, P. (eds.) Lexikologie: Ein internationales Handbuch zur Natur und Struktur von Wörtern und Wortschätzen, 2. Halbband. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 1655–7. DOI: 10.1515/9783110171471.2.36.1655Google Scholar
Tannen, Deborah. (1987). Repetition in conversation as spontaneous formulaicity. Text – Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse, 7(3), 215–43. DOI: 10.1515/text.1.1987.7.3.215Google Scholar
Thornton, Anna M. (1996). On some phenomena of prosodic morphology in Italian: accorciamenti, hypocoristics and prosodic delimitation. Probus 8(1), 81–112. DOI: 10.1515/prbs.1996.8.1.81CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thornton, Anna M. (2008). Italian Verb-Verb reduplicative Action Nouns. Lingue e linguaggio 7(2), 209–32. DOI: 10.1418/28096Google Scholar
Thornton, Anna M. (2009). Imperativi raddoppiati nell’italiano contemporaneo: un tipo di converbi. In Ferrari, Angela (ed.) Sintassi storica e sincronica dell’italiano. Subordinazione, coordinazione, giustapposizione, Vol. II. Florence: Cesati, 1189–206.Google Scholar
Thornton, Anna M. (2015). Paradigmatically determined allomorphy: The ‘participial stem’ from Latin to Italian. In Müller, Peter O., Ohnheiser, Ingeborg, Olsen, Susan, & Rainer, Franz (eds.) Word-Formation: An international handbook of the languages of Europe, Vol. 1. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 780–802.Google Scholar
Thornton, Anna M. (2019). Sulle forme in -errimo nell’italiano contemporaneo. Studi di grammatica italiana 38, 301–32.Google Scholar
Traugott, Elisabeth Closs. (2006). The semantic development of scalar focus modifiers. In van Kemenade, Ans & Los, Bettelou (eds.) The Handbook of the History of English. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 335–59. DOI: 10.1002/9780470757048.ch14Google Scholar
Ugolini, Francesco. (1983). Per la storia del dialetto di Roma nel Cinquecento. I Romani alla Minerva, un’improbabile ‘madonna Iacovella’ e un pronostico di un conclavista. Contributi di dialettologia umbra, 3(1), 3–99.Google Scholar
Villani, Paola. (1986). Note teoriche per lo studio dei fonosimboli. Linguaggi, 3 (1–2), 32–44.Google Scholar
Wierzbicka, Anna. (1986). Italian reduplication: Cross-cultural pragmatics and illocutionary semantics. Linguistics, 24(2), 287–315. DOI: 10.1515/ling.1986.24.2.287CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wierzbicka, Anna. (2003 [1991]). Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: The semantics of human interaction. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
la Repubblica 1985–2000 https://bit.ly/3JP1HNQGoogle Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×