Reduplication across Categories in Cantonese

Reduplication across Categories in Cantonese Charles Lam Linguistics Program, Purdue University Beering Hall, Room 1289 West Lafayette, IN 47907 charleslam@purdue.edu Abstract This paper investigates the formal seman- tics of reduplication in Cantonese, i.e. how the meaning of reduplicated forms are en- coded and computed with the given mean- ing from the base forms. In particular, this paper argues that reduplication denotes a summation function that adds up argu- ments (be they object-, event- or degree- arguments) and return a collection of the el- ements. The surface difference across cat- egories is accounted for in terms of cu- mulativity and quantization (Krifka, 1998; Krifka, 2001; Rothstein, 2004). The present approach makes use of scalar structure and summation as formal tools to model the cross-categorial behaviour of reduplication. It provides the advantage of a unified theory for lexical composition across categories nouns, verbs and adjectives. Keywords: reduplication, formal semantics, cumulativity, cross-categorial behaviour 1 Introduction Reduplication is found across syntactic categories noun, verb and adjective in Cantonese. They all share a similar surface order, but the interpreta- tion can be quite differently. Nominal reduplica- tion denotes an exhaustive list such as ‘everybody, every apple’. Verbal reduplication displays ei- ther durative or iterative reading, depending on the telicity of the verbal predicate. Adjectival redupli- cation shows a hedging and diminutive reading, as in ‘a little fat’ or ‘reddish’ The goal of this paper is to establish a unified account for the cross-categorial reduplication that can interpret the various meanings. We argue that the common thread behind these interpretations is summation. Building on the notions of cumulativ- ity and quantization, the interpretations of redupli- cation are predictable. In what follows, section 2 lists out the distri- bution and characteristics of reduplication in Can- tonese. Section 3 reviews previous studies and points out that they cannot account for the be- haviour of reduplication across categories. Sec- tion 4 discusses the formal property of cumula- tivity (Krifka, 1998; Rothstein, 2004), which pro- vides a basis to account for the surface differences across categories. To test the hypothesis, section 5 provides the details of the proposal and shows how various interpretations can be handled by the present cumulativity analysis. Section 6 discusses the advantage of this approach and also the theo- retical implications. 2 Data This section makes a few observations on redupli- cation in Cantonese. We will first focus on adjec- tives, then include nouns and verbs, which share a similar surface pattern. Consider the sentence (1), which provides a reduplicated adjectives denote a sense of hedging or diminution. (1) keoi5 3sg gou1 tall gou1 tall dei2 Prt ‘S/he is fairly tall.’ Uttering (1) means that the person is considered tall, but probably not the tallest person or not even ‘very tall’. This can be seen in (2), which is in- felicitous unless it is otherwise specified that all other members of the group are simply short. (2) keoi5 3sg gou1 tall gou1 tall dei2, Prt, so2ji5 therefore keoi5 3sg zeoi3 SUPERLATIVE gou1 tall ‘#S/he is fairly …

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