The Employment of Reduplicative Expressions in American Presidential Debates

Reduplication is an extra-grammatical morphological process, and this study looks at how it is used in American election debates held in 2012, 2016, 2020, and 2024. Political discourse has attracted considerable attention from rhetorical and communicative perspectives, but reduplication within this particular register has received comparatively little. The study sets out to examine how reduplication works in political debates to convey contextual and evaluative meaning, with three specific aims: (1) to determine the frequency and structural distribution of reduplicative expressions in American Presidential Debates, (2) to identify the rhetorical functions these expressions perform, and (3) to assess what a combined qualitative and quantitative approach adds to this kind of analysis. Merlini Barbaresi's (2005) model is adopted as the analytical framework. The corpus comprises 1,457,701 words drawn from American presidential debate transcripts spanning 2012 to 2024, and the study is carried out using a mixed quantitative and qualitative methodology. Taken together, the results point to phonological form, semantic coding, pragmatic context, and discourse setting all working in tandem to constrain lexical choice in formal political discourse. The implications reach beyond reduplication itself, feeding into a broader understanding of how vocabulary operates in specialized, high-stakes communication.