Reduplication in Abui: A case of pattern extension

Abstract

This paper studies the effect of ongoing contact on the Abui reduplication system. Abui, a Papuan indigenous minority language of eastern Indonesia, has been in contact with the regional lingua franca, Alor Malay (Austronesian), for around 50–60 years. Throughout this period, contact with Alor Malay has affected different age groups in different ways across various levels of grammar. Here we compare Abui reduplication across four age groups: (pre)adolescents, young adults, adults, and elders, and show how the function and distribution of reduplication in the Abui spoken by younger speakers is affected by a combination of morphological PAT borrowing and lexical borrowing from Alor Malay. The changing patterns are first applied to the domain in which the two languages overlap: existing Abui verb reduplications become more Alor Malay-like with respect to their function, form, and productivity. The borrowing of an additional function of reduplication is analyzed as a type of complexification in Abui, while at the same time, Abui reduplication itself is demonstrated to also show simplification in terms of form. We argue that this change is induced by decades of stable bilingualism, and is further enhanced by the fact that reduplication is a universal morphological operation and can emerge spontaneously in language contact situations. Thus, the emerging trends reported here are explained by both borrowing from Alor Malay as well as incomplete acquisition of Abui.

Reduplication in Banjarese

“…These are unclear word repetitions whose basic form is unknown, such as mondarmandir, komat-kamit, kura-kura, and rama-rama (pacing, muttering, turtles, butterflies) (Ramlan, 1983;Keraf, 1984). Rubino (2005), stated that there are full and partial reduplications, supporting Klamer & Saad (2020). This is in line with Inclass & Downing (2015), which stated that there are total and partial reduplications.…”

“…Reduplication is a word formation process where parts of a word are duplicated (Klamer & Saad, 2020). It is a morphological process in which all or part of the base is repeated (Lieber, 2009).…”

Lexical Borrowing in Austronesian and Papuan Languages: Concepts, Methodology and Findings

“…Although linguistic research on language change induced by contact between Austronesian and Papuan languages is increasing, the number of studies is still rather limited, and their scope varies. Most publications on lexical borrowing describe how a single language is influenced by a (regionally or nationally) dominant language-recent examples from the region include Saad, Klamer & Moro (2019); Klamer & Saad (2020). Studies incorporating a wider set of Austronesian and Papuan languages typically study the borrowing or 'diffusion' of grammatical features (Ross 1996;Dunn et al 2008;Foley 2010), sometimes in order to define so-called 'linguistic areas' (Klamer, Reesink & van Staden 2008;Ewing & Klamer 2010;Schapper 2015;Holton & Klamer 2017).…”

Reduplication in Newar Language: An Empirical Study

“…According to Mattiolaand Masini (2022), reduplication has been one of the linguistic phenomena for the last ten years and it has greatly attracted the attention of linguists. Klamer and Saad (2020) stated that reduplication occurs when a part of a whole word is doubled in the course of word formation. Likewise, Lǐ and Ponsford (2018) presented the situations where it is called reduplication, i.e.…”