Two is too much…in the phonology!

Abstract

Abstract A purely phonological account of reduplication based on the affixation of empty prosodic nodes predicts the attested typology of multiple reduplication. Languages that can combine more than one reduplication-triggering morpheme in a word differ in (1) whether all reduplicants surface faithfully, (2) whether they systematically avoid adjacent multiple reduplicants, or (3) whether one of the reduplicants is smaller than expected if another reduplicant is adjacent in multiple reduplication contexts. Morphological accounts of reduplication not only violate the modularity between phonology and morphology, they also fail to predict this attested typology.