Solving the Puzzle of Mandarin Verb versus Adjective Reduplication

Reduplication commonly seen in the literature creates new words by affixing to all or part of the base word. In most cases, it is prefixation or suffixation. Mandarin Chinese presents a rare case of reduplication that does not fit into this category. For an adjective base like /gaoxing / (“happy”), the reduplicated form is [gaogaoxingxing] in which [gaogao] and [xingxing] are not independent morphemes. It is difficult to identify which part of the word is the base or the reduplicant due to the discontinuity of the morphemes. The “circumfixing ” nature of this AABB pattern looks more intriguing when the reduplication of verb is considered. The reduplicated form of a verb base like /dasao/(“tidy up”) is [dasaodasao] which is structured like the standard full reduplication. This paper gives a unified account of the two patterns in the framework of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky, 1993), claiming both patterns are phonologically possible and the rare case of circumfixing reduplication is driven by the high prioritization of LINEARITY in the morphology of adjective. It has been observed that Chinese has a disyllabification requirement on lexical words (Zhou, 1964; Chen 2000) and a minimal word effect. (Lu, 1963 and Yip, 1991)