and Andrew Ira Nevins Echo Reduplication : When Too - Local Movement Requires PF - Distinctness

This paper provides supporting evidence for a number of hypotheses made in recent models of derivational syntax. The phenomenon under study is shm-reduplication in English, a particular instance of the more general, cross-linguistic pattern of echo reduplication. It is argued that the two elements in a reduplicated structure form a chain of two left-peripheral positions that, due to a distinctness requirement within a Spell-Out unit for the Transfer to PF, cannot be mapped onto linear order. A number of seemingly unrelated facts are derived rather naturally: (i) English shmreduplication cannot appear in an argument position; (ii) the two copies involved in shmreduplication are strictly adjacent; (iii) the phonological phrasing of the two copies is not the intonation of a compound; (iv) the discourse context felicitating shm-reduplication is not out-ofthe-blue; (v) no echo reduplication process yields the reverse order (e.g., with the echo reduplicant preceding the base); and (vi) echo reduplication is never the exponent of a Caseor wh-feature. ‘We’d better get this business straight,’ said Edwin. ‘This business of honorifics. I’m Doctor Spindrift.’ ‘Doctor?’ Dr. Railton looked wary: delusions of grandeur setting in? ‘Yes. I was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by the University of Pasadena. For a thesis on the semantic implications of the consonant-group “shm” in colloquial American speech.’ (The Doctor Is Sick, Anthony Burgess, 1960, p.15) Introduction The goal of this paper is to offer an account for the syntactic mechanisms and operations involved in a specific type of reduplication in English, so-called shm-reduplication as represented in (1) below. Along the way, we will touch on the more general phenomenon of echo reduplication, exemplified by Hindi (2) and Kannada (3). We attempt to relate form and meaning in an indirect way: through syntax, rather than adopting an Iconicity Hypothesis (Regier 1998) that there is a direct correspondence and predictability of the form and the meaning of reduplication, as this does not clearly apply to English shmreduplication. (1) Money, shmoney, who needs it anyway? (2) mãi paan-vaan nahiin khaataa huuN I paan-ECHO NEG eat-IMPF AUX.1.PRES ‘I don’t eat paan or other such things.’ [Hindi] (3) ooda-giida beeDa run-ECHO PROHIB ‘Don’t run or do related activities!’ [Kannada (Lidz 2001)] ECHO REDUPLICATION 85 Anticipating the results of our discussion, the meaning of (more general) echo reduplication results from the interpretation of a syntactic relationship between two almost adjacent syntactic heads. The phonological reflex of the fact that they are almost adjacent is that they must be realized with distinct phonological matrices. That is to say, elements that are too close in the syntax require a distinct shape at the PF-interface level. On the other hand, the semantic requirement of the Topic-Comment form of shmreduplication is that the two constituents be as locally composable as possible. Thus, two independent and contradictory constraints conspire to yield the apparent form-meaning relation in shm-reduplication: the mapping-to-LF constraint that a directly compositional relationship must involve elements as local as possible, and the mapping-to-PF constraint that elements that are very local must be distinguishable in order to establish consistent linear order. On a somewhat larger scale, we provide further evidence for a number of assumptions made in recent syntactic theorizing, in particular syntactic effects displayed by command units, anti-locality conditions, and distinctness in mapping. The picture of syntactic computation that unfolds thus combines recent proposals advanced by Uriagereka (1999), Grohmann (2003), Chomsky (2000 et seq.), and Richards (2002), couched in more long-standing assumptions on the copy theory of movement and linearization deriving from the work of e.g. Kayne (1994), Chomsky (1995), and Nunes (2004), alongside more specific properties of reduplication phenomena (as recently reviewed in Travis 2001, for example). Reduplication structures can be observed in many languages for many reasons. Concentrating on so-called shm-reduplication in English, here we pave the way for our analysis that takes this particular instance of echo reduplication to be an expression of pejorative mood (extended in section 1). The “syntax of reduplication” has been studied with respect to its internal morphological structure quite a bit (Broselow 1982, Travis 2001, Ghomeshi et al. 2003). However, there has been little, if any, work on the distribution of echo reduplicants with sentential syntax, which is what we address here. Shm-reduplication simply cannot occur in an argument position (4) or even target a displaced argument (5): (4) *John is always thinking about money, shmoney. (5) *Money, shmoney is all that John thinks about. This is a syntactic generalization that must be captured. Since we are not adopting a constraint-based syntax, we cannot appeal to Optimality-Theoretic principles, such as *SHM-ARGUMENT. Moreover, an attempt to derive the ban on shm-reduplication in argument position from general syntactic principles, such as the ban on adjunction (selfor otherwise) to an argument position (e.g. Chomsky 1986), seems to be on the wrong track. As we will see, echo reduplication in Hindi can occur in argument position, and our proposal derives this difference from English due to interpretive properties localized 1 Our analysis will focus only on echo reduplication, since it has a very narrow usage compared to total and partial reduplication, which have no consistent meanings cross-linguistically. This is not to say that these phenomena do not merit a syntactic account — it is rather to say that we do not have one for them. KLEANTHES K. GROHMANN and ANDREW IRA NEVINS 86 to the clausal sequence. Hence, we must attempt to derive the restriction from the nature of the interpretative criterion of these expressions. Section 1 of this paper will discuss the topic-related nature of shm-reduplication. The second section will introduce the ban on too-local syntactic movement, and demonstrate how shm-reduplication can be understood as an operation resulting from this constraint. The third section demonstrates how this analysis derives a number of important characteristic properties of shm-reduplication. Section 4 develops the analysis further, examining Hindi echo reduplication and typological (non-)properties of echo reduplication. 1 Topicality in Shm-Reduplication Shm-reduplication is not a “word-internal” phenomenon, immune to syntactic concerns, because its intonational pattern exemplifies that of an XP, not an X. Let us go through the core properties of shm-reduplication (drawing from Nevins & Vaux 2003, who focus on a morpho-phonological description, and the literature cited; see also section 3 below) before we address more analytical issues. The structure of our fancy is shm-reduplication, as illustrated within some naturally occurring contexts in (6) and (7): (6) Why? Because we’d rather sleep than see the truth? We’d rather shut our eyes than ask questions? Because we’re tired? Tired, shmired, it’s due time we took the blinders off and demanded answers from these elected officials who WORK FOR US. They do our bidding ... not the other way around. We can’t afford to be tired. [“An American Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Ruminate This] (7) “Breakfast?! Breakfast shmreakfast, look at the score for God’s sake. It’s only the second period and I’m winning twelve to two. Breakfasts come and go, Rene, but Hartford, the Whale, they only beat Vancouver maybe once or twice in a lifetime.” [from the movie Mallrats, 1995] It is clear in both examples that what undergoes shm-reduplication is the “topic under discussion” (see e.g. Prince 1981, Reinhart 1982, Birner & Ward 1998), which we will henceforth refer to as the discourse topic. In (6), the topic of being tired (or politically apathetic) runs as a constant theme throughout the monologue. In (7), the topic of breakfast has been brought up, and is dismissed as much less important than a hockey game. In short, shm-reduplication is employed when there is a salient discourse topic, and the speaker wishes to reflect a dismissive attitude towards that topic; we will call this dismissive attitude pejorative. Notice next that a topicalized use of tired or breakfast could equally well occur in (6)-(7) without the shm-reduplicant, and it would simply lack a grammaticalized reflex of the pejorative attitude other than intonation, possibly. Take the “topicalizationalternatives” of the relevant parts in (8) and (9), where we indicate the intonation contour 2 This is an online quote, originally posted on August 9, 2002 and last verified by the authors on April 24, 2004 at http://www.ruminatethis.com/archives/000728.html. ECHO REDUPLICATION 87