CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION - Reduplication

4 Brief history of the research on reduplication
4.1 Typological approaches to reduplication
Brief history of the research on reduplication
The oldest compilation of data on reduplication in a typological perspective was the
noteworthy study by Pott (1862). The author provides a huge collection of data from many
various languages of different families, and he divides his book in two major parts: The
formal types of reduplication and the functional types ("Verschiedener intellectueller Werth
der Doppelung"). Pott's "Doppelung" refers equally to sentences, words, syllables, and
individual sounds, as well as to both grammatical and extragrammatical word formation. The
amount of examples from American, African and Asian languages is remarkable. Pott's
compilation can be considered the most important typological database on reduplication.
Nevertheless, it was largely ignored and is rarely cited in studies on reduplication. Some
greater attention was given to a much smaller, but comparable typological study on
reduplications by Brandstetter (1917). It is also divided into formal and functional parts. In
the period between Pott's (1862) and Brandstetter's (1917) cross-linguistic studies, numerous
articles on reduplication in Indo-European languages were published. The reduplicated
preterit received especially great attention (e.g. Grein 1862, Wood 1895, Bezzenberger 1908,
Brugmann 1912/13, Karstien 1921). In her dissertation Kocher (1921), inspired by Pott's and
Brandstetter's work, provides a remarkable collection of reduplicated lexemes in languages
and dialects of France and Italy.
The first study that goes into a detailed description in a non-European language family,
namely Indonesian, but also referring to other languages, is Gonda (1950). Like Pott and
Brandstetter, the author tries to set up a systematization of the most characteristic meanings of
reduplication, namely different variants of plural, intensive and diminution. Furthermore, all
the three works point out that reduplicative word structures are often used for names of
plants, animals, body parts etc. (cf. also 5.3, and Mattes and Vollmann 2006). Examples of
language specific typologies on reduplication include Hestermann (1915) on Serer Sine (srr),
Haeberlin (1918) on Salish dialects, Blake (1917) and Lopez (1950) on Tagalog, Haas (1942)
on Thai (tha), Anagbogu (1955) on Igbo (ibo), Ansre (1963) on Ewe (ewe), and many more.
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