„Je to tvoj priateľ alebo PRIATEĽ-priateľ?“
“Is he your friend or FRIEND-friend?”:

The Phonological Properties of Contrastive Reduplication (CR) in English

Summary/Abstract: Contrastive reduplication (CR) (e.g., milk-milk or soy milk) has emerged as a notable linguistic phenomenon in both spoken and written English, drawing attention across various linguistic dimensions, including morphology, semantics, and pragmatics. However, the phonology and prosody aspects of CR remain relatively unexplored. This paper represents a summary of an MA thesis (Petrechová, 2022) addressing this gap by conducting a comprehensive analysis of approximately 200 spoken excerpts of CR. The CR corpus encompasses diverse sources such as literature, radio, movies, and TV series, with manually curated spoken examples. The analysis investigates the overall intonation patterns of CR constructions, with special attention given to acoustic properties, including contrastive features in terms of intonation, overall duration of elements, and measurements such as F1 and F2 of stressed vowels. The investigation aims to shed light on the nuanced interplay of prosody and phonology in expressing contrast within CR constructions. The study also analyses the interconnection of acoustic and prosodic features of CR and other observed variables, such as the speaker’s gender, CR pragmatic functions, and the position of CR in a sentence. The study provides evidence that the first element of CR tends to be more prominent and stressed, and that the intonation pattern of CR depends on the overall intonation pattern of the whole clause in which CR occurs.

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