Catherine gave a talk at the 32nd North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics (NACCL-32) about her findings on verbal reduplication in Mandarin Chinese!
Arnett, C. & Wittenberg, E. (2020). Conceptual effects of verbal reduplication in Mandarin Chinese.
Abstract. Full or partial reduplication of words has long been known to induce non-truth-conditional effects on how people conceptualize a referent (e.g., Ghomeshi et al., 2004; Inkelas and Zoll, 2005), but the conditions and mechanisms of this effect are in some cases not very well understood. In this paper, we explore how verbal reduplication affects the way Mandarin speakers conceptualize events. Reduplication is frequent in Chinese, and has traditionally been analyzed as inducing a diminishing, ‘fast’ meaning: According to Melloni and Basciano (2018) and Arcodia et al. (2015), walk-walk around the pond would denote a faster and shorter event than walk around the pond. However, the meaning of reduplication may also vary across Chinese dialects (Fu and Hu, 2012; Arcodia et al., 2014), and potentially, interpretation is influenced by the emotive content of the verb (Arcodia et al., 2015). This last factor is connected to semantic specificity – frequent, basic-level words may pattern differently from expressions denoting a more complex semantic content (Rice and Bode, 1993). This work investigates the empirical validity of these claims, and proposes tentative routes towards explanations of the data pattern: 1) Dialectal differences, 2) emotive content of the events themselves, and 3) semantic specificity.