A Simple Formalism for Capturing Reduplication in Finite-State Morphology

Abstract

This paper presents a simple formalism for capturing reduplication phenomena in the morphology and phonology of natural languages. After a brief survey of the facts common in reduplicative elements cross-linguistically, these facts are described in terms of finite-state systems. The principal idea is that an operator can be derived to ensure equivalence of finite discontinuous strings at some level of representation.