Doubling as a Sign of Morphology

This paper argues for a strong distinction between morphological and syntactic processes, as the manifestation of two separate yet interacting components. A particular instance of compounding (the doubling of a morphological category) is taken into account and is distinguished from syntactic copying according to a series of criteria, including the effect of the derivations and the size of the units involved. The generalization is that morphological reduplication only affects strictly grammatical features and can be distinguished by other kinds of reduplicating phenomena on this basis: reduplication, a morphological process, operates before the lexical item is sent to the interfaces, while repetition, a syntactic operation, has merely semantic effects. Data from a typologically varied set of natural languages, such as Indo-European Languages, Japanese, some Sign Languages, support this theoretical analysis of the organization of language architecture.   &nbsp