Iconic features in nominal reduplication

Abstract Reduplicative morphology is intuitively well-suited for iconic meanings like plurality, but often also expresses seemingly counter-iconic meanings like diminution. At present, there is no satisfactory explanation of this apparent contradiction: under the recently popular view that both plurality and diminution make meaning more complex and are iconic because reduplicative forms are complex as well, reduplication is no different from other affixal strategies – an undesirable conclusion for various reasons. The contribution of this article is twofold. First, it provides a set of atomic semantic features for the semantic field covered by nominal reduplication, thus identifying the core semantic notions involved cross-linguistically. Second, it proposes various precise iconicities that link specific formal characteristics of reduplicative patterns to these features. These iconicities lead to predictions concerning preferences of semantic features for certain formal types (full, partial, or echo reduplication), which are tested against 134 reduplicative patterns from 118 languages. Confirmed iconicities are Distortion , linking echo reduplication to a meaning of similarity (‘something like X’), and Completeness , linking full reduplication to universal quantification. Effects are weaker for partial reduplication; iconicities linking this type to e.g. diminutive function will have to be tested on a larger data set.