TALK: Social Action and Prosody of Syntactic Reduplication in Estonian
Leelo Keevalik (Anthropology, UCLA)
Friday, May 9 / 1:30 PM
Phelps 2536
Syntactic reduplication is a grammatical pattern that has been shown to mean increased intensity, duration or emphasis. This study demonstrates that reduplication in Estonian is regularly used in responsive positions in action sequences, constituting specific social practices. Rather than expressing increase or emphasis, syntactic reduplication is a sedimented linguistic pattern grounded in the social actions it recurrently performs, such as confirming and encouraging. Different actions furthermore display contrasting prosodic contours. Grammar and prosody are combinatory means of achieving communicative actions in specific sequential positions in interaction. The reduplicative practice discussed involves an exact repetition of a word or a word combination within one coherent prosodic contour, forming a whole turn construction unit.
Sponsored by the IHC’s Language, Interaction, and Social Organization RFG, and the Departments of Education, Sociology and Linguistics.
