The Category of Reduplication in Japanese and The Classification Problems

Abstract

Reduplication refers to the structures formed by repeating the word or at least one of the components that comprise the word, which are commonly used in languages to intensify the meaning or make plurality. This category, which exists in many languages, is broadly divided into two categories as total reduplication and partial reduplication. According to Rubino's (2005) research, which is in the database of WALS (The World Atlas of Language Structures), Japanese counts only among the languages with a category of total reduplication. The aim of this research is to figure out why there are inconsistencies between the mentioned database, which many academics use as a source, and the acceptance of reduplication type in Japanese by researchers as Kwon (2017), Sato (2013), Fujimura (2001), and Shibasaki (2005). Since the reduplication category is a large area, some limitations have been made, and accordingly, the reduplications formed with reflection words (mimetics) and the ones formed with close, synonyms and antonyms (dvandas) have been excluded from the scope of the study. In the analysis, the reduplication components and syntactic types, which are considered in the category of “total reduplication” and “partial reduplication” in Japanese both have been analysed by using bracketing methods. The results of the analysis are as follows: a)The occurrence of sequential voicing (rendaku) in the reduplication components leads to the disagreement among the researchers in determining the type of the reduplication. b) If there is sequential voicing in reduplication components and if the structure undergoes syntactic category shift, the new structure should be considered as the partial reduplication. c)If there is sequential voicing in reduplication components and, if it undergoes a semantic category change such as metaphoricalization, the new structure should be considered as partial reduplication.