Introduction
Someone idly thumbing through an English dictionary might observe two characteristics of repetition in words. First, segments can vary in the number of times they repeat. In no, Nancy, unintended, and untentional, /n/ occurs one, two, three, and four times respectively. In the minimal triplet odder, dodder, and doddered, /d/ occurs one, two, and three times.
A second characteristic is that words repeat rhythmically or irregularly:
Rhythmic repetition: All the segments of a word can be temporally sliced to form at least two identical subunits, with patterns like aa, abab, and ababab. Examples: tutu (abab), murmur (abcabc).
Irregular repetition: any other segment repetition, such as abba, aabb, abca, etc. Examples: tint (abca), murmuring (abcabcde).
If asked to comment on these two characteristics, a phonologist might shrug and quote from a phonology textbook:
[An] efficient system would stipulate a small number of basic atoms and some simple method for combining them to produce structured wholes. For example, two iterations of a concatenation operation on an inventory of 10 elements … will distinguish 103 items … As a first approximation, it can be said that every language organizes its lexicon in this basic fashion. A certain set of speech sounds is stipulated as raw material. Distinct lexical items are constructed by chaining these elements together like beads on a string.
(Kenstowicz 1994:13)Repetition, the phonologist might say, is the meaningless result of the fact that words have temporal sequences constructed from segments.