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Ablaut reduplication in English: the criss-crossing of prosody and verbal art

Donka Minkova

English Language and Linguistics / Volume 6 / Issue 01 / May 2002, pp 133 - 169
DOI: 10.1017/S1360674302001077, Published online: 06 June 2002

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1360674302001077

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Donka Minkova (2002). Ablaut reduplication in English: the criss-crossing of prosody and verbal art. English Language and
Linguistics, 6, pp 133-169 doi:10.1017/S1360674302001077

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 English Language and Linguistics 6.1: 13369. # Cambridge University Press 2002
DOI: 10.1017/S1360674302001077 Printed in the United Kingdom

Ablaut reduplication in English: the criss-crossing of prosody

and verbal art1

DONKA MINKOVA
UCLA
(Received 1 October 2001; revised 16 November 2001)

The two properties that characterize Ablaut reduplication in English (chit-chat, dilly-
dally) are: (1) identical vowel quantity in the stressed syllabic peaks, (2) maximally
distinct vowel qualities in the two halves, with [I] appearing most commonly to the left
and a low vowel to the right. In addition, Ablaut reduplicatives are described as having
a trochaic contour, yet there is a great deal of uncertainty regarding the stress on the
second part of the formation. Historically, Ablaut reduplication appeared long after
Copy reduplication (boo-boo, yo-yo) and ourished during the Renaissance; its produc-
tivity declined sharply in the twentieth century.
This article treats Ablaut reduplicatives as verbal art products, analogs of dipodic
poetic meter. The naturalness of the template ensues from the interaction of conicting
segmental and prosodic constraints on identity and markedness. An independently
established hierarchy blocks high back vowels from appearing in these forms. The
height difference is a response to the principle of Interest which favors maximum
perceptual differentiation between the stressed vowels. The linear ordering of the vowels
correlates with domain-nal lengthening. The ambiguity between compound stress and
level stress that these words exhibit is related tentatively to the existence of a separate
prosodic domain, a dipodic colon. The article provides Optimality-theoretic support for
the analytical relevance of gradient phonetic properties and the relevance of the colon
as a separate prosodic layer, and potentially enriches the taxonomy of metrical forms in
English.

1 Historical background and types of reduplication in English

In the lexicographical records of English, reduplication is a comparatively recent
pattern of word formation. Reduplicative words are very scarce in the surviving Old
English documents; among the earliest recorded forms are instances of wholesale
copying:
(1) ha-ha (OED c. 1000) galegale c. 1200 (O&N)
we(la we( (OED c. 1000) cuckoo, cuccu (MED c. 1300)
The number of reduplication types and tokens increased during the fourteenth
century, and by the end of the fteenth century the three types productive in later

1 This is a revised version of a paper presented at ICEHL 11 in Santiago de Compostela in September

2000. I am grateful to my audience there for helpful comments. I also want to register my special
indebtedness to the editors of English Language and Linguistics and three anonymous reviewers whose
reactions ranged from open hostility to wise warnings. Most of all, thanks to Ricardo Bermudez-Otero
whose insightful critiques red-agged more dangerous theoretical turns than I could avoid. All such
turns and other mistakes are mine alone.
134 DONKA MINKOVA

English were well attested. The nomenclature, following Jespersen (1942/1965: 174),
also Dienhart (1999), is as in (2):
(2) Type 1: Ablaut Reduplication (riff-raff )2
Type 2: Rhyme Reduplication (hocus-pocus)
Type 3: Copy Reduplication (boo-boo)

Estimates of the number of reduplicative words in Modern English range from a

very conservative 500 to a more inclusive 1,800 (Thun, 1963: ix); the latter number
excludes nursery talk and slang, tunes and refrains, interjections and exotic loan-
words. Semantically, these classes are united by the feature `expressivity', allowing
for the existence of some degree of phonaesthesia.3 Structurally, in studies of word
formation, Ablaut, Rhyme, and Copy reduplicative words are traditionally bundled
together for an obvious reason their elements are partial or full repetitions of each
other. The three types show differences too: historically, their productivity has been
uneven, and, most signicantly for this study, they have different phonological
properties, which underlie the taxonomy in (2).
The question of whether English reduplicative words are compounds or not has
received a great deal of attention. Jespersen (1942/1965: 17383) calls them
`reduplicative compounds'. Marchand (1969: 429) labels them `pseudo-compounds'.
Indeed, if stress pattern is one of the identifying features of compounds, then the
mixed prosodic signals these words send will be fully in line with Marchand's
designation. Hansen (1964: 301) points out that they are not real compounds, and
he nds the motivation based on pre-existing words insufcient to characterize
them. He emphasizes the `natural symbolic value' of these forms and classies them
between sound-imitative and onomatopoeic words on the one hand, and blends on
the other. In this article I will refer to these compositions as `reduplicative words', or
`reduplicatives' for short; the particular label is irrelevant as long as it identies them
as a distinct and coherent group in the language.4
Reduplicative words are independent vocabulary units, and the semantic and
morphological status of the components in them is subordinate to the overall

2 Using the philological term Ablaut does not mean that this type of reduplication is somehow modeled
on Indo-European ablaut. The patterns of Indo-European ablaut were no longer part of the productive
morphophonology of Early Modern English when the bulk of the ablaut reduplicative words were
formed. Also, the type of vowel alternations called `Ablaut' here are observed in non-Indo-European
languages. None of the claims about Ablaut word formation made here are therefore transferable to
Indo-European stem vowel gradation. For a full survey of previous attempts to relate the two
phenomena and a well argued rejection of those attempts see Thun (1963: 2715).
3 For recent discussions and further references to the voluminous literature on the soundmeaning
relationships in reduplicative words in terms of human creativity and iconicity see Coleman (1997),
Southern (2000).
4 Thun's (1963) designation, `Reduplication with Change of Stem Vowel', is misleading because it
suggests the presence of a `stem' in these words. Hansen opts for Ablautverdoppelungen (1964: 9). Koziol
(1972: 296301) classies these as Silbenverdoppelungen mit Ablaut under the more general rubric of
Umformungen. Reportedly (American Dialect Society discussion list, 24 March 1999), the linguist John
Ross used to call these pairs `Siamese twins'.
 ABLAUT REDUPLICATION IN ENGLISH 135

meaning of any lexical item that might participate in their formation.5 Therefore,
unlike Dienhart (1999), the latest contribution to the study of English reduplicatives,
my study excludes syntactic compounds in which one part clearly modies the other,
the bedspread, brain drain type. The rationale for that is that the syntactic head in
these cases is xed and does not reveal phonological regularities. Taking an example
from Rhyme reduplication, the ordering of the onset consonants in hocus-pocus is of
phonological interest, but the ordering of the consonants in real compounds such as
boy toy `a female' or toy boy or joy boy `a male', is not. A toy boy is a boy, but hurly-
burly is not a burly, six socks are socks, Lynn's lambs are lambs, but sing-song is not a
song. Super-duper is a case of reduplication, while pooper scooper is not. The line is
ne, though, and the phonological analysis of `syntactic' compounds with an
anchored head is a legitimate and interesting area of inquiry.
Before discussing further the phonetic and phonological properties of Ablaut
reduplication, we need to clarify some theoretical notions and assumptions that
underlie the proposed analysis. This is the task of the following section. Section 3
provides further background information on the history and the phonological
properties of Ablaut reduplicatives. Section 4 surveys earlier analyses and proposes
a treatment of the process analogous to the treatment of poetic meter. Section 5
isolates the constraints involved in Ablaut reduplication and ranks them. Section 6
suggests some phonetic and phonological factors that might be involved in the
optimization of the reduplicative template. The article ends with a discussion of
some outstanding problems and a brief summary of the results.

2 On the notions of base and reduplicant: correspondence

Reduplicative words have two parts: a base, and a full or partial copy of the base,
known as the reduplicant. In the usual cases, the base is a lexical stem, while the
reduplicant is an afx. In Optimality Theory (OT), both base and reduplicant are
strings of output segments; the relationship between base and reduplicant is a matter
of outputoutput matching.6 The base itself has an input representation, but the
reduplicative part of the word refers only to the output form of the base; see Kager
(1999: 202). In the technical language of OT, the (OO) matching of the input to the
output (IO) and that of the output base to the reduplicant (BR) is captured by the
notion of correspondence. A version of the correspondence schema in reduplication
is given in (3):

5 For a further discussion of this issue see Thun (1963: 1012) and the references there. Marchand (1969:
42939) is the clearest statement on the status of reduplicatives vis-a-vis canonical compounds.
6 An anonymous referee rightly worries about the exclusion of the input from the account. I assume that
the codication of the input form of the base, which I understand as an equivalent to the traditional
`underlying form', occurs when the phonetic effects of the OO correspondence result in a specic
constraint ranking. OO correspondence constraints thus in effect mirror input constraint rankings,
allowing fringes of variability; see Hayes (2000), Boersma & Hayes (2001), who also address the
learnability of gradient OO constraints and their interplay with the input.
136 DONKA MINKOVA

(3) Input: /base/

m IO Faithfulness
Output: red , base
BR Identity

Correspondence can be the relationship of any phonological entity: distinctive

feature, segment, mora, a structural part of a syllable or a whole syllable.
Correspondence is measured in terms of how faithfully the respective entities
reproduce each other's properties. Full IO and BR matching is rare; the BR relations
in Ablaut reduplication in English, the focus of this study, respect constraints
against segmental and moraic deletion and epenthesis, but do not require featural
identity of the corresponding elements. This means that the feature-faithfulness of
the reduplicant part is violable and low-ranked. As is typical in such situations, a
different set of constraints, markedness constraints, are involved in shaping the
reduplicant.7 The process raises interesting questions concerning the causes and
nature of the restricted range of segmental variation in the English reduplicative
material.
The representation in (3) differs somewhat from other OT representations of
reduplication, as in Sherrard (1997: 72), Kager (1999: 201). Standard OT studies of
afxal reduplication assume the change of stem to base from input to output, where
the input is composed of stem + red(uplicant), in either order. However, for English
the designation `stem' is inappropriate for either half of over 40 per cent of the
hocus-pocus words and similarly for a considerable number of the riff-raff words.
Even for words in which one or both parts are real stems, the tick-tack, chit-chat,
ip-ap, artsy-fartsy pattern, identifying one part of the word as the morphosyn-
tactic base `motivating' the content of the reduplication is moot. Marchand
recognizes the presence of contentful `signs' in some Ablaut and Rhyme words, but
he nevertheless states clearly that these words are motivated by form. He writes:
It cannot . . . be denied that the rhythmic doubling and the elements of ablaut and rime
do in fact constitute a motivation, and that these aesthetic elements determine the
character of the combinations based on them. . . . Even those combinations which are
composed of two independent words do not speak against this essential character of
twin words. (1969: 436).8
7 Markedness constraints are present, but not necessarily active or highly ranked, in the grammar of
every language. They evaluate segments and other structures either independently of context, or, they
can be context-sensitive. The ranking of markedness constraints producing the actual attested structure
is usually language-specic.
8 The same approach `sound patterns . . . more powerful than factors of meaning' is argued for by
Campbell & Anderson (1976: 77). Within OT, a very similar idea is formally developed by Yip on the
basis of reduplication in Chinese and a number of other languages. Yip argues that `the real core of
reduplication is an attempt to produce sequences that rhyme and alliterate, and that rather than
involving an abstract afx, reduplication is caused by Rhyme and Alliterate constraints . . .' (1999: 1,
2000: 7). The analysis proposed here is completely compatible with this position.
Yip's material makes the distinction between base and an afxed copy impossible. Instead, the nal
product is treated as the result of self-compounding which renders BR relations irrelevant, while Input
Output (IO) Faithfulness constraints relate each half of the word to the input. The term self-
compounding (McCarthy & Prince 1986; Yip, 2000) is convenient for the description of English
 ABLAUT REDUPLICATION IN ENGLISH 137

Put differently, the position taken here is that the central impulse for reduplication
in English is not morphological, but phonological and semantic-pragmatic. The
morphological relationship between the base and the reduplicant, if it exists at all, is
independent of the phonological requirements of the process. The phonological
forces which determine the left-to-right linear order of base and reduplicant operate
without regard for whether either half of the new word is already present in the
vocabulary. By implication, reduplication does not block potentially meaningful
lexical units from appearing to the left, to the right, in neither, or in both parts of the
word.9
In the analysis below, I will assume that the phonological shape of English
reduplicative words is not derived from a base string tied to a `live' morphological
input. Prosodic well-formedness is the main driving force in the left-to-right
arrangement of elements in reduplicative word formation. Such words are created as
a conscious replication of a set model; the occasional occurrence of a pre-existing
lexical stem will be separated from the phonetic and phonological motivation of the
ordering of base and reduplicant. Lexical stems, should they be involved in
reduplicative word formation, must be deployed in accord with the requirements of
a well-dened reduplicative template. The template requires that the phonological
base, here equaling the left part of the word, should have specic properties and that
self-compounding results in a construction which obeys a set of constraints. The
ostensible conict created by some words in which the second element appears to be
associated with a lexical base, e.g. kit-cat, dingle-dangle, is resolved if the surface
ordering of lexical items is epiphenomenal. Depending on their phonetic make-up,
real lexical stems can be positioned either in the phonological base/left slot, e.g.
didder-dodder, rickety-rackety, swing-swang, tick-tack, or in the phonological
reduplicant/right slot, e.g. kit-cat, mish-mash, thwick-thwack. In the large majority of
cases, however, there is no mismatch between a potential lexical stem and the

reduplication. Yip's approach and mine share the assumption that both parts of the reduplicative words
have equal morphological status. However, since my analysis is conducted entirely on the output level
where the two parts of reduplicative words stand in a well-dened linear phonological relationship to
each other, BR phonological relations will be central to understanding the nature of the process.
9 A recent study by Inkelas & Zoll (2000) treats reduplication as a case of morphological doubling, where
the primary relationship between the two parts of the word is that of morphosyntactic identity. The
English data support some of the main elements of the proposed Morphological Doubling Theory: base
and reduplicant are morphosyntactically identical, there is no phonologically underspecied morpheme
red, there is no asymmetry of base and reduplicant with respect to the input. The account here is
compatible with the idea of stem doubling where the two parts develop different cophonologies.
However, my focus is on the matching of phonological material to a template associated with
expressivity and playfulness and not on the generation of separate components in the input.
Separating the phonological target of the nal product of reduplication from any morphological
relations that may obtain within the word runs the risk of terminological confusion. Indeed, one might
be well advised to disassociate the `base' which participates in the STEM-BASE isomorphy of afxal
reduplication, from the (unorthodox) purely phonological notion of `base' used here. I keep the terms
`base' and `reduplicant' as synonyms for the `left' and the `right' half of the word because of the shared
principles with other types of reduplication, with the understanding that there is no hierarchy involved
in their relationship.
138 DONKA MINKOVA

phonological base. In addition to the tick-tack type, the latter is true of all words in
which both parts are real stems, as in sing-song, and of all words in which neither
part is an attested lexical item, as in riff-raff. I will assume therefore that the
appearance of recognizable lexical elements in either half of an Ablaut word does
not invalidate the point about the equal status of the two parts.
The fact that OO faithfulness constraints are known to be more restrictive,
limiting their effects to special environments, can be linked logically to the unique
word-formation properties and the expressive character of English reduplication.10
A simplied working version of the model in (3) is given in (4):
(4) Output: Base , Red
BR Identity

The BR identity relationship is morphologically bidirectional and nonhierarchical.

It should be noted that in the literature on English morphology the idea of the
equality of base and reduplicant has been present at least since Jespersen (1942/1965:
17383). He uses the label `kernel' for the rst half of what he calls `reduplicative
compounds', and talks about `kernel' and `repetition' linearly, from left-to-right, but
not in terms of any morphological or phonological hierarchy.11 Hansen (1964: 12,
212) also recognizes that an independent lexeme (Ausgangwort) can appear in
either half of the word. From that he concludes that the direction of reduplication in
English can vary according to the morphological status of one of the components.
Since the end products here are neither derivatives nor true compounds, ap-
proaching reduplication as a partial copying process that aims to t a template
without regard to stem availability obviates the need to build xed directionality
into the model. Retaining the designations `base' for the left parts of reduplicative
words and `reduplicant' for the right parts is only conventional; the two halves are
equally `primitive' partial copies of each other. Phonologically, however, anchoring
and directionality are essential in describing the process.

3 Ablaut reduplication: history and phonological properties

From now on the discussion of reduplication will focus exclusively on Ablaut words,
though it is hoped that some of the components of the proposed analysis will be
transferable to Rhyme and Copy reduplicatives.
10 See the section 6 on special/general relationships in Prince & Tesar (1999) where it is pointed out that
`when possible, the learner should account for . . . marked structures with OO-faith constraints,
effectively restricting them to specic morphological environments, rather than accounting for them
with ordinary faithfulness constraints, which would have the effect of permitting the relevant marked
structures independent of the morphological environment'. I take the `specic morphological environ-
ment' here to be provided by the partial repetition of a string to create a new morphosyntactic unit
with identiable semantic and pragmatic properties.
11 In Jespersen's account the `repetition' is dependent on the `kernel' only in the sense that the particular
sound sequence comes with a particular semantic association. Predictably, when describing the patterns
of full copying involving an additional syllabic extension (bumpety-bump, slip-slippering), Jespersen
addresses the phenomenon as an extension of one of the `kernels' (1942/1965: 174).
 ABLAUT REDUPLICATION IN ENGLISH 139

There are no recorded examples of Ablaut reduplication in English before the

fteenth century.12 Currently this type accounts for approximately 2030 per cent of
the entire reduplicative lexicon.13 About 65 per cent of all Ablaut words came into
the language during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In Dienhart's compar-
able counts (1999: 334), 73 per cent of the Ablaut formations have been in the
language for more than two centuries; apparently the productivity of this type of
word formation has been decreasing steadily since the beginning of the nineteenth
century. It is remarkable that only three twentieth-century formations ping-pong
(1900), ticky-tacky (1960), and hip-hop (1985)14 are listed in the 1996 Random
House compact unabridged dictionary (RHCUD); the pattern has come to a virtual
standstill.
Two observations regarding the salient phonological features of Ablaut words
are:
(a) the restrictions on the distribution of stressed vowel segments in the left and the
right half of the word, and
(b) the uctuation between compound stress (msh-mash), double stress (snp-snap), or
variable stress (tp-top, tp-top, or even tp-top).

Segmentally, the common denominator for Ablaut reduplication is the presence of

a high front vowel in the rst syllable peak, alternating with a maximally low vowel
in the second element: mish-mash, riff-raff, sing-song, zig-zag, but not *raff-riff,
*shally-shilly, *washy-wishy. According to the dictionary records, the most frequent
subgroup, [I-{], predates the next most frequent subgroup, [I-], by about a century.
Some early examples of these two most common patterns are given in (5):
(5) [I-{]: [I-]:
pitter-patter (1425) ip-op (1529)
mish-mash (1450),15 19th c. mish-mosh ding-dong (1560)
ribble-rabble (1460) criss-cross (1602)

12 Except for nter-fanter `the name of a herb', which the OED dates tentatively as 1400. Another
candidate is giuegoue (Ancrene Riwle) `gewgaw, bauble', which is sometimes etymologized as a
reduplicative formation from the verb give. This etymology is rejected by the OED.
13 In a database of 1800 items, such reduplication accounts for 490 items, or about 27 per cent, a
calculation based on the numbers in Thun (1963: 220). It excludes reduplicative phrases such as riff for
raff, tit for tat. Thun's data were collected from the OED, J. Wright's English dialect dictionary,
E. Partridge's Dictionary of slang and unconventional English, Berry and van den Bark's American
thesaurus of slang, Jespersen's Modern English grammar, and a number of additional dictionary sources
(1963: 2930). The counts bear no relation to token frequency and are therefore a very partial
representation of the proportion of reduplicative words in the overall vocabulary of English. Moreover,
estimates of the share of Ablaut words within the set of twin formations vary. Koziol (1972: 299) refers
to this type as `more frequent' than copy-reduplication. Dienhart (1999) reports that among the 220
reduplicative items listed in RHCUD 41, or 17 per cent, belong to this type. Hladky's (1998: 689)
type-frequencies are within the same range. Again, without the additional parameter of token
frequency, such gures should be treated with caution; see Cowie & Dalton-Puffer (2000).
14 These items are from Dienhart (1999: 34). Muller (1909: 99) lists hip-hop as attested in 1672.
15 The form appears side-by-side with dryff-draff, which is not separately listed in the OED. The full
citation is: `But, ser, I prey yow is questyon to claryfye: Dryff-draff, mysse-masche'. Mankind 49,
Macro Plays 3.
140 DONKA MINKOVA

riff-raff (1471) < OFr. rif et raf 16 sing-song (1609)

whim-wham (1490) chip-chop (1630)
tittle-tattle (1529) slip-slop (1675)
im-am (1538) bim-bom (1683)
tick-tack (1549) tip-top (1702)
Like all reduplicative words, Ablaut words differ from `ordinary' English poly-
syllabic lexemes in that they do not have an easily identiable canonical stress.
When pronounced in isolation, riff-raff words usually have main stress on the
leftmost syllable.17 Secondary stress on the second half of the word is ubiquitous:
png-pong, rff-raff, wshy-washy. Disyllabic and especially trisyllabic forms have two
main stresses: twnkum-twankum. Items occasionally listed as having a single stress,
e.g. tick-tock, zig-zag (Kingdon 1958: 187), never show reduction of the second
vowel, a clear indication that a degree of stress is present in the reduplicant. The
salience of the secondary stress on the second element could perhaps be tested in
structures where eurhythmy and phrase-nal position could contribute to realiza-
tions as in the second column of (6).18
(6) the silver crss-cross ? an absurd crss-cross
many doubtful zg-zags vs. ? a small zg-zag
As with other reduplicative types (and word formation in general), nouns dominate
the group, but there are also verbs and adjectives which are probably best treated as
either zero or afxed derivatives, e.g. wig-wag, v., wishy-washy adj. The syntactic role
of the unit may be a factor in stress placement: the RHCUD lists tip-top as initially
stressed when used as a noun, doubly stressed as an adverb, and variably stressed
when used as an adjective.19
The base attracts stress by the principle of stress assignment in English which
aligns a trochee with the left edge of stems. I am assuming, controversially, that
alignment and not weight is the governing principle of stress assignment for all
native noun stems in English. This does not preclude quantity-sensitivity as an
additional parameter involved in the phonology of reduplication. In OT, for better
or worse, the dichotomy between weight and alignment does not have to be absolute.
16 The earlier citation is from 1338: ei tok alle riffe & raf. R. BRUNNE Chron. (1810) 38.
17 This is in essence the nding in Dienhart (1999: 29). Dienhart ignores nonprimary stresses altogether,
does not address the question of stress-shifting in conversion or by the rhythm rule, and invites native
speakers to draw their own conclusions on much additional data not found in the source (RHCUD) for
his generalizations about the stress of these words (1999: 31). His decision to exclude secondary stresses
(1999: 14), but to include two `equal' stresses, is very problematic. In any prosodic theory these so
called `equal' stresses will be subject to beat addition through the compound rule or the End Rule
(Hayes, 1995). Thus, the `doubly stressed' hocus-pocus will always be realized with one of the parts
stronger than the other. Disconcertingly, Dienhart does not refer to the most complete earlier treatment
of stress placement in such words, Thun (1963: 2049). Thun's coverage is more cautious and realistic.
He does not attempt a generalization and allows for a great deal of variation relating to dialect,
function, and position in the sentence.
18 The intuitions on this stress shift vary. One native speaker of American English who read this paper
nds the shifting completely impossible, but Thun (1963: 2089) states it as a fact and refers to Daniel
Jones and Koziol as authorities on the matter.
19 This example is cited also in Dienhart (1999: 301).
 ABLAUT REDUPLICATION IN ENGLISH 141

Hammond, for example, concludes his extensive survey of the complex distribution
of stress in morphologically simple words in English with the proposal that
`sensitivity to quantity be described using a simple (syllabic) trochee and a
parametrized Weight-to-Stress principle' (1999: 282).20 In his account this means
that the unmarked syllable type is bimoraic. In my account the reference to weight
will be needed for the maintenance of the moraic identity of base and reduplicant.
In sum: with some trivial exceptions, the order of the vowel qualities in Ablaut
reduplicative words is rigid: a high front lax [I] has to ll the leftmost syllable peak.
In isolation, these words are left-prominent, but the right half of the structure
preserves a signicant degree of stress so that the stress differential between the two
parts of the word is never abrupt they are like acorn, costume, ssue or like the
prototypical blackbrd, skateboard compounds. Expanding on the preliminary
observations above, the four properties of Ablaut reduplicatives that characterize
their phonological shape are:
(a) Identical moraic content in the base and the reduplicant
(b) The rst syllable peak of the base is [I]
(c) The rst syllable peak of the reduplicant is [{]/[]
(d) The prosodic pattern of the stressed syllables is s! . . . s~

4 Rationalizing the shape of Ablaut reduplicatives

4.1 Earlier accounts

The xed segmentism of the syllable peaks in Ablaut words has elicited many
comments usually concerned with two issues: (a) the obligatory high vowel on the
left, and (b), the relative exibility of the right component.
In the rst full-length study of English reduplication, Muller (1909: 98) attributes
the order of the vowels to the assumption that a high vowel is best suited to attract the
attention of the listener.21 Subsequently, the most widespread idea in response to the
order of the vowels in Ablaut reduplicatives in English has been that of an inherent
phonaesthetic correlation between vowel height and semantic content. The notion
was developed in a series of studies by Jespersen, and adopted in Hansen (1964: 22),
Koziol (1972: 356), Pinker (1995: 1678), also cited in Dienhart (1999: 30).
Jespersen's often quoted position in this context is that `you begin with what is light
and indicates littleness and nearness and end with the opposite' (1942/1965: 176). This
20 The Trochee constraint in Hammond is dened simply as `The stress occurs on the left side of the foot'
(1999: 262), and it is this particular denition that I am using here. It should be noted that Hammond's
direction of stress assignment is from right-to-left, while I assume left-alignment as the default for the
reduplicative material.
An interesting parallel to the mixture of morphological and quantitative factors involved in
reduplication in English is the way in which quantity alone has been shown to provide an inadequate
basis for meter in English; see Hanson (2001). If reduplication is a `special' use of language, the
template, like metrical templates, can combine both size (number of moras) and prominence
parameters.
21 `Der hohe Vokal erschien als der geeignetste, die Aufmerksamkeit des Horers zu erregen.'
142 DONKA MINKOVA

is the famous observation that the word for here in many languages has a fronter and
higher vowel than the vowel in there, that this precedes that etc.22 The merits of this
particular associative claim will not be of interest here; it is sufcient to recognize that
some kind of expressive iconicity for the whole string can develop within the language.
This iconicity is instrumental in sustaining and recreating the original template.
However, we should still seek to explicate the phonetic and prosodic motivation
behind the original selection and ordering of the ingredients of Ablaut words.
Among the earlier scholars, Biese (1939) took a slightly different tack which has
since become part of the standard approach to English Ablaut reduplication. Biese
perceived the importance of the difference in the intrinsic duration of the short
vowels in the two halves of reduplicative words. Citing Jespersen, Biese (ibid: 189)
pointed out that the difference in duration between [I] and [{] (before /p, t, k/, 0.139
sec. and 0.224 sec. respectively), is greater than the difference between long [a:] and
[{]. His interpretation of the signicance of the different vowel duration is that it is
an additional factor enhancing the qualitative contrast between the vowels. Reading
Biese very generously, one might be tempted to infer that he was seeking to establish
a correlation between the phonetic properties of the vowels and the rhythmic
patterns that Ablaut words represent, but he did not pursue an account in that
direction. Although he mentioned briey the importance of `polarity' in producing
variation in the twin forms, he did not attempt to answer the ordering problem. He
related the linear order [I-{] to the intensity (Lautstarke) of [I], which is described as
`clearer and brighter' (1939: 190), taking the account back to the presumed iconicity
of the segment.
In trying to link the recognizably emotive nature of Ablaut reduplicatives to the
phonetic picture they present, Thun (1963: 23946) rejected the focus on the front
vowel in the previous studies. Instead, he hinted at the plausibility of the `polarity'
idea, isolating the presence of a maximum phonetic contrast between the two peak
vowels as the trigger of the special semantic effect (1963: 244). According to him, it
is the contrast that conveys the expressivity of these words. Again, it is not clear how
and why `polarity' and `expressivity' are related other than by at. Marchand (1969:
431, 4368), in his famously named chapter `Motivation by linguistic form: ablaut
and rime combinations', also recognized `opposition' and `distance' as central to the
description of these words. He elaborated by describing the reasons for the ordering
of the elements as both physiological and psychological. The physiological difference
of the vowels is described in terms of the distance between the tongue and the palate

22 Jespersen attributes the idea ultimately to J. van Ginneken (ibid.). It is of interest that the original
claim is not specic to English; Jespersen points out that the same correlation is observed in many
languages, including non-Indo-European languages. For German, the same claim is elaborated by
Bzdega (1965: 204), who combines the idea of vowel polarity and suprasegmental stylization with
loosely dened inherent expressivity, to account for the special linguistic form of the Ablaut words in
his corpus. The universality of the arrangement is called into question by the data in Marchand (1952).
The narrow aim of this study is to develop an account for English; it is possible that it can be extended
to other languages, though the applicability of the constraints used here will not be tested on non-
English data.
 ABLAUT REDUPLICATION IN ENGLISH 143

and it represents `a natural rise from the smaller to the bigger'. The psychological
value of the opposition, according to him, `is quite logically that between high and
low, with the rise preceding the fall'.
Most recently, in a widely read book, Pinker (1995) addresses the ordering puzzle
by adopting elements of Jespersen's broadly publicized position on `causation'.
After listing some familiar Ablaut words, Pinker writes:
the vowels for which the tongue is high and in the front always come before the vowels
for which the tongue is low and in the back. No one knows why they are aligned in this
order, but it seems to be a kind of syllogism from two other oddities. The rst is that
words that connote me-here-now tend to have higher and fronter vowels than verbs (sic)
that connote distance from `me': me versus you, here versus there, this versus that. The
second is that words that connote me-here-now tend to come before words that connote
literal or metaphorical distance from `me' . . . (1995: 167)

Pinker's syllogism has already made its way into the literature on reduplication in
English (Dienhart 1999: 30) as an explanation, yet it merely decomposes one
question into two further questions. General statements like that ignore diachronic
change: me and thee, we and ye have the same vowel. They also fail to address the
fact that it is specically the lax high front vowel that lls the leftmost syllable peak
of reduplicative words, i.e. why are *reef-raff or *reef-roof not the dominant pattern
if [i] is higher and fronter than [I]?
Both observations that Ablaut words are semantically marked, and that the
dissimilation between the vowels is part of the picture are valid aspects of the
description of Ablaut reduplication. However, neither the potential semantic
iconicity of short [I] nor peak contrast by itself can offer a satisfactory linguistic
solution to the specic linear ordering. In what follows I will attempt an account
which draws on some of the earlier insights while placing the explanation within a
more recent phonetic and phonological framework.

4.2 The metrical shape of reduplicatives: a different program

The multiple, but still identiable semantic and pragmatic associations of Ablaut
words suggest that their creation and replication may be analogous to the composi-
tion of a minimal verse-line where the constituents and constraints are denable on a
universal linguistic basis.23 As Hanson and Kiparsky (1996) (HK) write:
meter is linguistically grounded at two levels. First, language itself has a rich intrinsic
structure prior to any artistic form that may be imposed on it . . . it is prosodically
organized in ways that are immediately exploitable for esthetic ends . . . On another
level, literature stylizes the inherent prosodic organization of language with conven-
tional forms of versication which are themselves chosen from a limited set of formal
options provided by Universal Grammar. (HK: 288)

The possibility of analyzing reduplicative words as esthetic creations is attractive. If

23 This is one of the postulates of the linguistic study of verse: see e.g. Kiparsky (1973, 1977), Hanson
(2001: 467). The account here follows the parametric model of poetic meter proposed in HK.
144 DONKA MINKOVA

we take the BR unit as an analog to a verse line, we can address two questions: what
parameters best describe the reduplicative template in English and why should this
particular template be chosen over other options? It is hoped that addressing the
prosodic choices in the framework of universal considerations of well-formedness
can throw light on the shape of reduplicative words in English.
I propose to treat reduplicative words as coextensive with the metrical dipod. The
matrix involves also a recurrence of minimally two feet, one for the Base and one for
the Reduplicant.24 Each foot contains exactly two positions: a strong position to the
left and an optionally lled weak position to the right.
(7) Dipod (Colon) Reduplicative Word

Foot B(ase) R(eduplicant)

Position S (W) S (W)

As in verse feet, the recurrence of BR is subject to two further constraints, one

referring to the position size, and one to the prominence type used in the structure.
position size denes the maximum size of a position P in terms of universal prosodic
constituents: (mora) m, syllable (s), foot (f ), or phonological word (v) (HK: 289).25
The prominence type parameter `species the prosodic opposition with respect to
which prominence or unprominence is dened for the meter . . . syllable weight
(heavy vs. light), stress (stressed vs. unstressed), strength (strong vs. weak), or
pitch accent (accented vs. unaccented). Linguistically relevant combinations of
these prominence oppositions can dene prominence type as well' (HK: 291). The
parameters proposed for reduplicative words are given in (8):
(8) (a) position size
Each S position contains exactly one vocalic mora
(b) prominence type
Each S position contains exactly one stressed syllable26
24 The two-foot `minimally' is self-evident in Ablaut reduplication. The maximum number of feet seems
to be three, as in lin-lan-lone, tit-tat-toe. There are only a few such `triplicatives' cited in Thun (1963:
2212). Translated into the terminology of verse, wishy-washy is a dimeter and tit-tat-toe is a trimeter.
25 Notice the potential for terminological confusion here: in situations where each metrical position is
lled by a prosodic foot, e.g. a trochee as in Hanson (2001), each metrical foot F domain (here = the B
and R domains) will contain two prosodic feet (f ). This infelicitous overlap is recognized in HK (fn.7).
In reduplication the position size is best handled with reference to a single mora, and not to a whole
foot, so the reduplicative foot and the prosodic foot here are coextensive. HK do not discuss the
possibility of dening the position size by restricting the number of moras in the peak, but since both
peak and mora are independent linguistic categories, the option should be available in their theory.
26 A purely morphological principle of stress assignment is all that is needed historically for Old English.
The same principle continued to govern stress assignment in Middle English, though independently
motivated lengthening processes in the native vocabulary and `as is' learned borrowing from Romance
put a spoke in the wheel of left-alignment in Middle English, making moraic composition a runner-up:
see Minkova (1997). Present-day English combines stem-based stress with weight-sensitivity in
interesting ways. I submit that reduplication is one of those processes which takes its cues from the
prototypical left-headed prominence of stems while it respects the quantity restrictions on monosyllabic
stressed syllables in English.
 ABLAUT REDUPLICATION IN ENGLISH 145

In this template the composition of the W branch of the foot is variable. It may be
zero, which is the most frequent case, it may be lled by a single syllable, or, rarely,
by two syllables: riff-raff, wishy-washy, rickety-rackety. The prosodic representations
for the rst feet in these forms are respectively [(s-]S, [s-s]S, [s-s-<s>]S where
S = reduplicating foot and <s> stands for an extrametrical syllable. No more than
two syllables are allowed to ll the W position, blocking, e.g. *smilarly-samilarly.
The peak composition and the linear prominence relations of syllables are more
constrained than the overall syllable or mora count of the word.
The most controversial decision so far is that the prominence category selected for
the reduplicative template is stress and not weight. The structure of Ablaut words
could perhaps be represented as a sequence of two moraic trochees. I see no
compelling argument for preferring the moraic trochee as the relevant prominence
structure in S.27 Using the moraic trochee would be in line with a popular way of
accounting for stress assignment in nonreduplicative words in English. This is a
valid argument within the sociology of the eld. However, I have already indicated
some problems with the use of all-moraic footing in English. In fact, all accounts of
English stress have to recognize the effect of morphology; it is only the balance
between the two factors that is at issue. To the extent that moraicness is involved in
reduplication, it appears to be of no consequence whether the template refers to the
leftmost mora of the foot28 or the leftmost mora of the prominent syllable. The
focus on a left-aligned stressed syllable ts in with the intuitively powerful trochaic
nature of monomorphemic nouns in English, e.g. college, sister, summer, pattern.
This would also be true of the projection of the trochaic contour from the foot to the
BR dipod. Put naively, the intuition is that speakers know how to play with stressed
syllables, whereas it is debatable to what extent English speakers `know' about
moras.29
27 Pointing out the advantages of the moraic trochee for the analysis of the data, Ricardo Bermudez-
Otero suggests that it `would account for the rarity (non-existence?) of *clinkety-clankety, i.e.
[H]L<L>-[H]L<L>, which should be no rarer than hippety-hoppety under a syllabic trochee analysis'.
In fact, no difference in frequency correlating with the weight of the initial syllable can be claimed. The
numbers of forms for either type are comparable. Clinkety-clankety, kringlety-kranglety, twiddleum-
twaddleum, wibblety-wobblety are some of the recorded items within the minority group of trisyllabic
reduplicatives, where moraic footing is problematic unless (for the last two items) one assumes
syllabication with /L/ in the peak of the second syllable and an open initial syllable, no ambisyllabicity.
28 The `binarity' and the headedness of monosyllabic feet in this version could become transparent by
decomposing the bimoraic sequence into a strong and a weak mora, as in Kager (1999: 174).
29 In that vein, a nontrivial complaint against the moraic treatment of stress in native words would be
that it makes monosyllables, e.g. pit, identical in their prosodic representation with disyllables, e.g. pity,
pittance. This complicates the account of the fact that prosodic judgements, e.g. stress clash, rely on
syllables (or zero syllables; see Giegerich, 1985) and not on moras.
The parsing of the template does, of course, presuppose that the S (W) string as a whole should be
minimally bimoraic to exclude e.g. *[rI-r{]. In a trochaic foot the peak mora is always stronger than
the other mora in the syllable rhyme. I have already cited one position, Hammond's, which dispenses
with the need for a bimoraic foot for stress assignment in English. This position is compatible with the
view that quantity-sensitivity plays itself out in different ways, and that it is a cline with languages
allowing other factors to assume more importance at the expense of WSP, as argued in Kager (1999:
1745). Within English a non-OT statement would be that WSP is active on the basic lexical level,
146 DONKA MINKOVA

Given the left-prominent reduplicative template, the direction of the parsing of

the linguistic material is also assumed to be from left-to-right. This is another
controversial position which fortunately does not bear on the analysis. The relevance
of the right-to-left footing especially for polymorphemic Latinate words borrowed
after the end of the Middle English period is ignored in reduplication. Ablaut words,
though they do not appear in English until the latter part of Middle English, are
Germanic in nature. For them Weight-to-Stress Principle (WSP) is a low-ranking
constraint and they obey the vigorous requirements of Initial Prominence, preserv-
ing the historically strong left-to-right footing.30
The detailed foot structure for a disyllabic Ablaut reduplicative is shown below.
Sigma s stands for syllable, R stands for the syllable rhyme (including the peak and
the coda), and P stands for the syllable peak:
(9) Reduplicative Word

B(ase) R(eduplicant)

S (W) S (W)
| | | |
s (s) s (s)
| |
R R
| |
P P
| |
m m m m m m
t I p si t p si

The representation in (9) implies an additional layer of prominence relations on the

BR string as a whole. Although as an original creation the two parts obey the same
structural parameters, in terms of word formation, Ablaut reduplicatives resemble
compounds. This gives the rst syllable on the left a certain prominence advantage,
so on that level, B is stronger than R. On the other hand, the stressed syllable in the
right foot exhibits more exibility in the selection of segments that can be positioned
there.31 For the matching of linguistic material to reduplicative positions English
Ablaut reduplication thus requires a combination of syllabic and moraic references.
On the one hand, reduplication is the copying of a whole string, not just the syllable

whereas the stress system on the level of productive morphology is blind to WSP; see Hayes (1995: 32)
and references there.
30 These are the characteristics claimed for borrowed monomorphemic nouns and adjectives in Middle
English in Minkova (1997). The persistence of the Germanic left-strong syllabic footing in reduplicative
words is consistent with the spontaneous nature of their creation and the informality of the register to
which they belong.
31 The analog for the inequality of the two feet could be the observation (Kiparsky, 1977) that metrical
constraints are treated differently at the beginning and at the end of a line. The similarity ends here,
however. The metrical principle of closure imposes greater strictness at the right edge of the verse line,
while here it is the left foot that is more strict.
 ABLAUT REDUPLICATION IN ENGLISH 147

peak. On the other hand, the moraic composition of the peak is a factor which the
process respects.
The remaining part of this article will explore some arguments that might help us
dene the linguistic conditions for the shape of Ablaut reduplicatives in English. The
rst point to be addressed is the preservation of the moraic content of the base in the
reduplicant.

5 Constraining the shape of the reduplicative halves

5.1 Faithfulness constraints

By its very nature, Ablaut reduplication requires that the two halves of the
formation should be copies of each other. The parallel drawn between Ablaut words
and a dipodic verse line also implies the recurrence of identical structures. In OT,
this is handled by faithfulness constraints on the identity relations of the base and
the reduplicant, in our case the left and the right half of the word. Within the set of
faithfulness constraints relevant to Ablaut reduplication some constraints are
undominated, while others are violable and ranked low, allowing a well-dened
degree of divergence between the two parts of the construction. The description of
the English Ablaut words requires the interaction of faithfulness constraints from
three constraint groups within correspondence theory: Maximality, Dependence and
Identity.32 The specic constraints needed to evaluate Ablaut reduplicative words
are given in (10):
(10) Max-BR: Every element in the base has a correspondent in the reduplicant. This is
the `anti-deletion' constraint in reduplication.
Dep-BR: Every element in the reduplicant has a correspondent in the base. This is
the `anti-epenthesis' constraint.
Ident-BR (m): Correspondent segments have identical moraic content. This
constraint militates against moraic discrepancies in corresponding segments in the
base and the reduplicant.33

32 For a full description see McCarthy & Prince (1995) and Kager (1999: 20111). As stated in section 2,
in my production-based account both the markedness and the faithfulness constraints evaluate output
forms, which then, presumably, generate their underlying representations.
33 (C)VV(C) halves (see-saw, reel-rawl), though attested in the corpus, represent a minor pattern the
share of paired bimoraic peaks amounts to 5 per cent of Thun's 1963 Ablaut reduplicative data. The
tting of the bimoraic monosyllables to the template may be captured with an optional second mora
specied in the constraint, i.e., Ident-BR (m(m)). This is also possible within a theory which decomposes
a heavy syllable into two microbeats, two successive moras [mm]sS, of which the rst one is stronger
(Kager, 1999: 173). Neither analysis by itself explains why the identity of monomoraic peaks is
preferred to the identity of bimoraic peaks other than perhaps the cognitive simplicity of matching one
entity (m) vs. matching two entities (mm).
Disyllabic halves containing long vowels are either doublets for more canonical forms, or forms that
are `exceptional' in more than one way: equal-aqual, easy-osie, eetle-otle, eetie-otie, teeny-tiny, meepy-
moppy, teesty-tosty (also tisty-tosty), teeter-totter (also titter-totter). The numbers and the frequency of
these exceptional formations are insignicant.
148 DONKA MINKOVA

Ident-BR (High): Correspondent segments have identical values for the feature
[High]. This constraint militates against height discrepancies in corresponding
segments in the base and the reduplicant.34

Taking the simplest case, a reduplicative word formed by the concatenation of two
monosyllabic feet, we can see that the copying process respects the rst three
constraints, while Ident-BR (High) is violated. The segmental height identity of
base and reduplicant in the case of riff-raff formations is the only faithfulness
constraint which attested data violate regularly. Clearly, it is the lowest-ranked
constraint among all relevant faithfulness constraints. The interaction between the
correspondence constraints on Ablaut reduplication is shown in the tableau in (11).
(11) Base-Reduplicant Correspondence in riff-raff

/rIf-r{f/ Ident-BR Max-br Dep-BR Ident-BR

(m) (High)
+ rIf-r{f *
(?) rIf-r@f *
, rIf-rUf
rIf-brIf *!
rIf-royf *!
rIf-If *!
rIf-rif *!

The nger pointing to the right marks the correct output in a tableau. The sad face
, is used for the candidate which wins incorrectly according to the ranking in the
tableau. The symbol *! shows that the violation of the constraint is unacceptable.

Pursuing the idea of a parallel between poetic meter and reduplication, it is, I
believe, relevant to observe that in the historically earliest cases of reduplication in
English, the ha-ha type cited in (1), the two parts are full copies of each other. Such
reduplicatives incur no faithfulness violations. One line of speculation in the context
of this analogy would be that subsequent formations, both Ablaut and Rhyme
words, are more aggressively creative; like doggerel verse, boo-boo reduplication is
avoided for esthetic reasons. Variation is a great desideratum in verse. HK refer to
the enforcement of monotonous rhythm as `formally possible but functionally
pointless', and propose a principle they call Interest to cover the subtlety and
variety of the tting of linguistic to metrical forms.35 It is possible to imagine that a

34 This is a shortcut. The evaluation could start with a constraint blocking any featural discrepancies
between the corresponding segments, followed by a decomposition of that constraint into subcon-
straints. I have gone directly to the feature High because of its phonetic relevance for the Ablaut data;
see section 5.2 below.
35 `Interest: The parameters are set so as to maximize the esthetic interest of the verse' (HK: 295). This
parameter within the HK theory corresponds to the more familiar notion of tension, `the conict
created by interplay of the constituent elements of a work of art' (OED), though the specic
manifestations of tension described in the literature on English verse do not include xed qualitative
 ABLAUT REDUPLICATION IN ENGLISH 149

template which started out as a recurrence of completely identical structures was

changed in a particular way in response to the general principle of Interest,
changing either the vowel or the consonant in the iteration of the rst foot. Shall I
shall I is perfect reduplication, but shilly-shally is more esthetically gratifying.
Returning to the tableau in (11): other than restating the fact that identity is
violable only in the quality of the peak, the tableau highlights two problems. The
proliferation of riff-raff, chit-chat, criss-cross words in English cannot be modeled
simply with reference to faithfulness constraints. The factually correct form riff-raff
loses to unattested *riff-roof ([rIf-rUf ]). Another issue is that a simple featural
reference to the height of the vowel cannot distinguish the correct output from the
practically non-occurring pattern riff-ruff in the second row.36 The matter is more
complex. The shape of Ablaut words must be described with reference to both
identity constraints and constraints which select the segmental phonetic properties
of the nuclear vowels in a way which optimizes the prosodic shape of the nal
product.

5.2 Well-formedness constraints on Ablaut reduplicatives

The next step in the analysis is to consider the possibility that the selection of the
vowels in the two halves of the reduplicative words can be addressed in terms of
independently motivated well-formedness constraints. There are two main chal-
lenges that these forms present. First, Ablaut reduplicatives consistently pair a high
front vowel, usually [I], to a low vowel, [{] or []. Second, the linear ordering of the
two vowels is xed with the high vowel occurring in the base and the low vowel
occurring in the reduplicant. We could declare that the distribution of the vowels is
arbitrary, a genetic accident which created a matrix out of which the whole set
subsequently developed. Perhaps so. But for linguists it is worth exploring whether
the properties of the matrix are such that they would enhance the chances of its
survival and procreation. The biological metaphor refers to phonological marked-
ness constraints that are universally available but whose ranking is structure- or
language-specic. Just as some constraints are more prominent in the morpho-
phonology of one language, some constraints may be more important in the
`creative' realm to which Ablaut reduplicatives arguably belong.
Let us start with the selection of [I], [{], and [] in the two halves of the
reduplicative words. One possible approach to the question of why the invariable
vowel in the base is a high front vowel is suggested by crosslinguistic observations
on the `unmarkedness' of front vowels. In OT markedness is a contextually dened,
not an absolute notion. Within the context of reduplication, Alderete et al. (1999:

vowel differences. For an account of an `interesting' interplay between template violations and esthetic
effect in English verse see Hanson (2002).
36 There are only ve Ablaut words showing this alternation: clittery-cluttery, crinkle-crunkle, crish-crush,
jiggle-juggle, strim-strum (Muller, 1909: 96), but all of them except jiggle-juggle have variant forms with
[{] in the second stressed syllable.
150 DONKA MINKOVA

335) describe the [coronal] front vowels as positioned low on the place-markedness
hierarchy, crucially, below labials, as shown in (12):37
(12) *Pl/Lab >> *Pl/Cor >> *Pl/Phar

In its strongest form the hierarchy predicts that a labial vowel will be the least likely
choice for the default vowel in various linguistic structures. The prediction is borne
out by the reduplicative facts in English: no matter what other qualitative variations
appear in the corpus, a fully rounded [u] is practically unattested in English. The only
two exceptions in the nearly 490 Ablaut words in Thun (1963) are wooh-wah, an
isolated (1823, Suffolk) variant of wee-wow and wee-waw, and gooshtie-gosh, listed as
a `formation from a primary interjection of non-reduplicative type' (Thun, 1963: 167).
The full set of Ablaut reduplicative words in English does include six forms with
orthographic <u>, historical [U] in the left foot: crush-crash (1583, OED), um-am
(1546, OED), ush-ash (1583, OED), muxter-maxter (dial. for mixter-maxter,
mixty-maxty, mixy-maxy), shuck-shack (Dial. for shick-shack), trush-trash (1582,
OED a variant of trish-trash).38 These are the only formations that either predate
the lowering of [U] to []/[@] or accompany it. They are rare dialectal forms paralleled
by alternative canonical forms with [I] in the rst syllable. Historical lexicographical
records show that more than one-third of the total number of Ablaut reduplicative
words in the language were rst recorded before and during the sixteenth century. If
we add to this the words recorded before the middle of the seventeenth century, the
proportion of pre-1640 creations rises to 58.5 per cent.39 Thus, for a considerable
part of the period during which the process of Ablaut reduplication was most active
in English, [] was not a competitor in the `unmarked' set of vowels eligible for the
rst peak position on language-specic grounds.
Crosslinguistically, this leaves the front high vowel /i/ as the favored default vowel
in copying processes, along with /e/, /a/, and /@/.40 The choice of /@/ is limited by
another markedness consideration. Avoidance of stressed /@/ is a top-ranked
constraint in many reduplicative processes.41 Indeed, even when a stressed schwa-like
[] became available in the language, its share in the process was minimal. Calcula-
37 The original proposal to treat vowels as having the same place features as consonants, to which
Alderete et al. and Yip (2000) refer, is in Clements & Hume (1995). Yip (2000: 1516) uses this place-
markedness hierarchy to explain why [i] is chosen as the default replacement of all vocoids in Chaoyang
onomatopoeia.
38 The items cited here are found in the Ablaut word lists in Muller (1909: 918), and Thun (1963:
32347). I have not been able to nd the seventh item that Thun includes in his counts of this pattern
on p. 220.
39 The percentages are calculated from the lists in Muller (1909: 98100). For compatible statements on
the historical productivity of this type of word formation, see Biese (1939: 204) and Thun (1963: 257).
Although the lowering and centralization of the short peripheral back vowel [U] to []/[@] is usually
lumped together with other changes as an `Early Modern English' process, its precise dating is difcult.
The rst evidence for the change does not appear until the 1640s; see Lass (1999: 8991).
40 I am using the slashes to enclose types of vocoids, not phonemes. Square brackets refer to the particular
realization of these vowel types in English. No dialect of English has a functional distinction between
/a/ and /{/.
41 See Alderete et al. (1999: 340) and the references there.
 ABLAUT REDUPLICATION IN ENGLISH 151

tions based on Thun's (1963) data show only 2.3 per cent of [I]-[] words and only 1.6
per cent of []-[{] words. Some internal factors that may have inhibited further the
use of [] in English reduplication are the robustness of the rounded quality [U] in the
Northern dialects, the preservation of [U] after labials, and the persistent backness of
the sound in the standard language through the nineteenth century.42
The restrictions identied so far do not exclude the /e/ and /a/ vocalic types from
participating in reduplication alongside /i/. At this point, tentatively, I want to
suggest that the avoidance of /e/, realized as [E] or [ey], is a consequence of its
nonpolar position in the vowel system. Observations that distinct linguistic entities
tend to maintain maximal perceptual distance are frequent in the literature. Within
OT this intuition has been developed into a phonetically based Dispersion Theory
(Flemming, 1995); the undesirability of mid vowels from the point of view of the
place-markedness hierarchy in reduplication is pointed out in Alderete et al. (1999:
335). Note that this interpretation of the mid vowels makes it likely that the same
factor is also partially responsible for the extreme rarity of [] in reduplication.
The assumption that the base and the reduplicant will strive to be maximally
perceptually distant while maintaining structural identity takes us back to the
parallel between verse structure and English reduplication. Blind repetition of the
way in which linguistic material is matched to a template runs against the parameter
of Interest. Indeed, if we dene this principle as a violable constraint to which the
reduplicative template in English refers, /i/ and /a/ emerge as the optimal non-
rounded vowels to appear in the stressed syllable peaks.
(13) Interest: BR maintain maximal perceptual distance

One way in which perceptual distance can be dened is in terms of aperture which
correlates with their acoustic properties, namely rst formant frequencies. In order
to affect the outcome of the reduplicative process, Interest must be ranked lower
than the constraint on BR identity in terms of position size, but it outranks any
featural identity violations that might be incurred in the reduplication. In fact, the
appeal to Interest entails that the constraint Ident-BR (High) has to be violated,
i.e. the evaluation process must refer to its negative value: *Ident-BR (High). As a
rst step, we can dene the rst Interest-related lter as avoidance of height
identity:
(14) *Ident-BR (High): Correspondent segments have different values for the feature
[High].

A maximal height difference will satisfy Interest best. Full copying (boo-boo)
violates *Ident-BR (High). It is important that height identity should be violable
and gradient. Assuming a total of three discrete aperture levels, *Ident-BR (High)
can be satised only partially. An [I][{] reduplicative word will satisfy the
constraint fully, while [I][]/[E] will amount to a single violation (one degree of
height), and an [I][U] will be a double, and therefore in our case fatal, violation,
42 The evidence for the different quality of the vowel is presented in MacMahon (1998: 4567).
152 DONKA MINKOVA

since the two peak realizations are at the same height. These observations are
formalized in the tableau in (15):
(15) The role of Interest in BR Correspondence

/rf r{f/ Ident-BR *IdentBR

(m) (High)
+ rIf-r{f
rIf-rf *
rIf-rEf *
rIf-rUf *!
rIf-rIf *!

The representation in the tableau corresponds to the fact that [I][]/[E] reduplica-
tives, though rare, are nevertheless attested, which is not the case with [I][U] or
[i][u]. In the spirit of Flemming (1995) an alternative statement of the facts would
be to unpack the *Ident-BR (High) into separate constraints corresponding to the
height of the vowels. In that framework the double violation of the vowel height
difference in (15) will be a fatal, categorical violation of a prespecied minimal
distance constraint. The details of the analysis are immaterial; in either case the
outcome refers to the templatic parameter of Interest, avoiding full featural identity
while licensing the minority patterns.
The tableau in (15) shows why two maximally distinct vowels in terms of height
are preferred in the reduplicative formations, the rst task outlined at the beginning
of this section. I turn now to the second question: the linear ordering of the two
vowels: riff-raff and see-saw are well-formed, but not *raff-riff or *saw-see. What
are the probable linguistic causes for the xed order of the high vowel in the left half
and the low vowel in the right half of the structure?
The proposal I want to sketch out here rests on independent observations about
the sensitivity of domain-nal entities to phonetic lengthening. Everything else being
equal, i.e. Ident-BR (m) being respected, it is still the case that the low vowels will
gravitate towards the right half of the reduplicative structure. The independently
occurring well-formedness constraint which covers this distribution is given in (16):
(16) Final Length: phonetically longer segments are preferred in word- and phrase-
nal syllables43

Hayes (1995: 100) refers to Final lengthening as a phenomenon `widespread among

the world's languages . . . [that] may indeed be a phonetic universal'. The argument
I want to make is that Ablaut reduplication which is controlled by the markedness
constraints *Pl/Lab and *Ident-BR (High) treats the universal preference for
Final Length as an additional `enabler' in the selection and ordering of the vowels
in these structures. By polarizing the peak vowels on the criterion of length, Final
43 See Hayes (1995: 100) and references there.
 ABLAUT REDUPLICATION IN ENGLISH 153

Length is another way in which the process of reduplication respects Interest.

Although this constraint is not sufciently strong to create a categorical distinction
in length Ident-BR (m) is always higher than Final Length it restricts the
selection of peak vowels in the Base and the Reduplicant in a very specic way.

6 The phonetic correlates of Ablaut reduplication

This section will look into the functional rationale for the linear arrangement of the
vowels in Ablaut reduplication. The hypothesis is that the specic phonetic properties
of the high and the low vowels increase the probability of their placement in the right
foot of the structure. This section will explore the height-to-length correlation of
English vowels and the domain-end-to-length correlation of reduplicative utterances.
It is well known that the intrinsic duration of vowels differs signicantly depending
on their degree of raising. This phonetic difference, it will be argued, is utilized in the
creation of Ablaut reduplicative words. The essential empirical observation is that
the stressed vowel in the left foot of these words is the shortest vowel in the system.
Choosing the shortest possible vowel [I] for the left peak of monosyllabic trochees
would be the default case, though as noted in section 5.1 (fn. 33), [i] is another option
attested in 5 per cent of the cases. The stressed syllable of the right foot, on the other
hand, lls its peak with the phonetically longest vowel available in the system which
does not categorically violate the quantitative identity of the two parts. Some
relevant measurements of the durations in milliseconds of the two English vowels
most often involved in Ablaut reduplication are given in table 1.44

Table 1. Vowel duration for accented monosyllables (in milliseconds)

[I] [{] Percentage change45

V + /v, D, z, Z/ 186 252 35.5

V + /b, d, g/ 147 216 46.9
V + /m, n, / 110 196 78.1
V + /f, T, s, S/ 83 165 98.7
V + /p, t, k/ 73 93 27.4

The very signicant vowel duration differences shown in table 1 suggest a good
reason why, everything else being equal, the head of the trochee in the left half of
Ablaut reduplicatives will opt for [I] in the peak. The second foot lls its stressed
syllable peak with [{], the vowel which is phonetically best tted to a domain-nal

44 The numbers are adapted from Gimson (1973: 95). See also Lisker (1974) and the references there.
Lisker's chart of vowel duration in milliseconds vs. rst formant frequencies in English shows clearly
that [I] has the shortest vowel duration in the system, followed by [U], while [{] is the vowel of longest
duration, followed by [O/]) (1974: 227).
45 The mean percentage (half-way between the highest and the lowest in the set) is 63 per cent, the average
is 57.32 per cent.
154 DONKA MINKOVA

position. Filling the syllable peak with [{] maximizes both the sonority and the
duration of the right half, in conformity with Final Length.
An important premise to this approach is that phonological distribution can refer
to gradient phonetic properties.46 The claim is that the intrinsic phonetic length of the
[I-{] segments is responsible for the left-to-right order of these vowels. Reversing the
order, placing [I] to the right, or [{] to the left, would be an infringement of the
domain-nal length preference. The placement of [I] to the left and the low vowel to
the right is also related to sonority by way of the co-occurrence of sonority and longer
duration; in the universal hierarchy of vowel sonority, everything else being equal,
low vowels have greater sonority than high vowels (Ladefoged, 1982: 2212).47
This reference to specic phonetic measurements gives concrete linguistic sub-
stance to the widespread observation that `the short vowel comes rst', popularized
by Pinker. The appeal to a specic semantic and pragmatic categorization (me-here-
now) is unsupported, however. In English the independently preferred [I-{] alterna-
tion in the dipodic structure does trigger some recognizable associations, but the
semantic elds they cover are too widely disparate for a systematic account.48 If,
however, we take the whole dipod as an analog to poetic meter, the prosodic and
phonetic restrictions and the special stylistic status of these words become less
mysterious. Crucially, the proposal made here is independent of any semantic and
sound-symbolic associations that the deployment of vocalic properties might or
might not develop in a particular language.

6.1 Is [I] in the Base a case of xed segmentism?

Fixed segmentism is dened as `a phenomenon whereby a reduplicative morpheme
contains segments that are invariant rather than copied' (Alderete et al., 1999:327).
In our data [I] emerges as the default segment in the rst half of the structure. The
interesting question is how this result relates to the properties of `xed segmentism'
familiar from other studies of reduplication.
Developing a line of research identifying the relevance of markedness considera-
tions in reduplication (Steriade, 1988), Alderete et al. have argued that phonological
xed segmentism is a process which emerges as a consequence of various markedness
constraints in action. `[Fixed segmentism] falls under the Optimality Theory (OT)
rubric of emergence of the unmarked . . ., which provides a way to allow only
46 The literature on the phoneticsphonology interface is voluminous. One of the advantages of OT is
that it can bridge the gap between functionalist considerations and categorical formalisms. Within OT,
the incorporation of phonetic generalizations such as intrinsic vowel length into the phonological
constraint hierarchy has been argued for in Myers (1997), Hayes (1999).
47 For a feature-based version of the sonority scale in Modern English see Giegerich (1992: 152).
48 The iconicity idea is treated extensively in the literature: see Jespersen (1942 [1965]: 176), Malkiel
(1959), Thun (1963), Southern (2000) and the references there. It should also be noted that another
widespread perception, that `the clearer and brighter' vowel comes rst in Ablaut reduplication (Biese,
1939: 190), does not intersect the quantitative well-formedness account proposed here either. If `clear
and bright' is an impressionistic description of a high front vowel, then the statement is on the same
level as Pinker's.
 ABLAUT REDUPLICATION IN ENGLISH 155

unmarked structure in a domain like the reduplicant while permitting the corre-
sponding marked structure to occur elsewhere in the language' (1999: 328). A very
important component of the schema is that `emergence of the unmarked' implies
that the Base-Reduplicant faithfulness constraints are dominated by the markedness
constraints: Markedness >> Faithfulness (BR). In English Ablaut reduplication
Faithfulness (BR) is regularly violated by Ident-BR (High).
My tentative proposal in the context of English Ablaut reduplication is that the
appearance of [I] in the rst syllable peak is an instantiation of nearly perfect xed
segmentism. Empirically, at least, it is the `xed' segment in the left foot. It has been
argued that the markedness constraints involved in the vowel selection are indepen-
dently validated linguistic preferences. Their high ranking in the creation of
expressive words is, however, template-specic. In the initial stage of the develop-
ment of this idiosyncratic type of word formation, the selection and linear arrange-
ment of the vowels may have been accidental. Once a particular word, say a
borrowed riff-raff, became a familiar lexical item associated with a particular
creative template, it served as the model for a separate ranking for the faithfulness
and markedness constraints for this lexical subset. The rankings suggested here and
the corollary of Final lengthening, the positioning of [I] in the rst syllable peak, are
transparent and salient conditions on Ablaut reduplication. These rankings resulted
in outputs in which the left peak is overwhelmingly [I], while the segmental choices
for the second peak remained less rigid.49
One additional issue needs to be addressed in dening English Ablaut reduplication
as a case of xed segmentism and emergence of the unmarked, the issue of
directionality of copying. In the cases of `xed segmentism' cited in the literature, it is
the reduplicant that has the default segment, i.e. it is the reduplicant alone that
constitutes the `improvement' on the base. As argued in section 2, the two halves of
English reduplicatives are equally `primitive' partial copies of each other. The
iteration is independent of the lexical status of the components. It would be logical to
expect that in bi-directional structures like riff-raff, the emergence of the unmarked
and xed segmentism would involve selection of default vowels on both sides. Indeed,
as was argued in 5.2, the peak vowels of both feet of English Ablaut reduplicatives
show sensitivity to a markedness constraint whose effect is to promote nonlabial and
nonmid vowels. It is suggested, then, that xed segmentism and the emergence of the
unmarked are reduplicative phenomena which need not be conned to the traditional
notions of base and reduplicant afx. Both halves of a reduplicative structure can
contribute independently towards a minimally marked overall structure.
Invoking Final Length in the account of Ablaut reduplicatives is also in
conformity with the idea that reduplication results in less marked prosodic struc-
tures. The claim is that the right foot of riff-raff words recreates the universal
preference for `domain-nal length' where the domain is dipodic. The well-formed-
49 In the corpus based on Thun (1963) 93.5 per cent of the reduplicative words have [I] in the rst syllable,
97 per cent have [I] or [i] in the rst syllable. The only other vowels in the rst half of these structures
are an occasional [] or [E]: see table 3 below.
156 DONKA MINKOVA

ness of the reduplicant crucially draws on the phonetic length of the vowel in the
second syllable, whose effect is inseparable from prosodic prominence. The fol-
lowing section will address phonetic and phonological considerations that support
the inclusion of phonetic nal lengthening as one of the factors dening the
constituency of the second stressed syllable peak in Ablaut words.

6.2 The cause and effect of Final Length

This section returns to the constraint Final Length, dened in (16) as one of the
markedness constraints claimed to be active in evaluating the well-formedness of
Ablaut reduplicatives in English. The quantitative effect of domain-nal lengthening
which inuences the ordering of the vowels has been shown to exist in syllabic
trochee languages (Hayes, 1995: 99100), and in minimally disyllabic verse feet as
well as in higher-level structures (Hayes & MacEachern, 1998). In principle, Final
Length is a prosodic preference which can be satised by a combination of factors.
One such factor, the intrinsic duration of vowels, has already been introduced: see
table 1. In addition to height-related segment duration, the position of the vowel
within a phonological domain above the individual syllable is also of consequence.
Phonetic studies of the temporal differences associated with specic prosodic
positions in reduplicative structures show the ratio of nonnal-to-nal syllable
lengthening for English adults at 1:1.4 (Smith, 1978; Levitt and Wang, 1991: 237).50
Moreover, Smith (1978) reports that the lengthening ratio of 1:1.4 found in adults is
mastered by English-speaking children between two and three years of age. (The
comparable ratio for French is 1:1.6.) The fact that these differences arise during the
language acquisition period is signicant in that it supports the generality of the
linguistic principle of prosodic Final Length. Table 2, adapted from Levitt and
Wang (1991: 241), summarizes the data on nal-syllable lengthening in infants
ranging from 7.3 to 11.1 months of age.
Comparing the data in table 1 and table 2, one can see how the two factors the
intrinsic length of the input vowel and the universal tendency towards domain-nal
lengthening would be mutually reinforcing. This convergence of effects allows the

Table 2. Final syllable lengthening in English and French infants

Number of Penult mean syll. Final mean syll. Mean percentage
reduplicative babbles length in msec length in msec change

English 102 264.8 352.5 33.1

French 106 247.5 402.5 61.4

50 Levitt and Wang (1991: 244) studied utterances of 25 reduplicative syllables in infants. They
eliminated duration effects due to inherent differences in segmental lengths and to the differences in
tempo in the child's production. They measured duration `using a wave form editing and display
program'. The duration as measured included only the `visibly voiced portion of each syllable' (ibid.:
240). For an interesting discussion of lengthening associated with the right edges of prosodic domains
see Wightman et al. (1992).
 ABLAUT REDUPLICATION IN ENGLISH 157

stressed syllable of the second foot of Ablaut words more freedom in the selection of
an appropriate peak segment. As shown in (5), in addition to the basic [I-{] pattern,
a signicant number of [I-] reduplicative words come into the language at a fairly
early date. Two out of the three twentieth-century formations, ping-pong (1900) and
hip-hop (1985), show these vowels. The argument is that even if the intrinsic duration
of the second vowel were not as dramatically distinct from the duration of the left
peak, its position to the right of the entire structure would augment the perception
of length. With two factors involved, it comes as no surprise that the metrical target
of Interest is met in more than one way.51
The Ablaut reduplication types in English and their token counts based on Thun
(1963: 220) are presented in table 3.52

Table 3. Vowel distribution in Ablaut reduplication (quality)

Type Token Percentage of total
Thun Thun Hansen53

I-{ 278/435 63.9 63

I-O/54 101/435 23.2 22
I- 10/435 2.3
i-O:/55 12/435 2.7
i-{ 10/435 2.3
-{ 7/435 1.6
I-E 5/435 1.1
I-ay 3/435 0.6
I-{-ow 3/435 0.6
E-I 3/435 0.6
E-{ 3/435 0.6

51 This combination of factors might be involved in the occurrence of the very peripheral, but still
attested, [I-E] reduplications; see table 3. There are three such words in Muller (1909: 96): jitty-jetty,
kib-keb, stip-step. The DARE index (1993: 123) lists also dialectal fritter-fretter. I have not been able to
identify the remaining item counted by Thun.
52 I have left out hapax patterns. Thun records 39 combinations occurring only once; in 14 of them the
rst vowel is [I] or [i]. Not included are also 8 combinations attested twice each; in 3 of them the rst
vowel is also [I] or [i].
53 Hansen notes that the remaining `approximately' 15 per cent of his data are comprised of items which
have alternative, more canonical forms, which would belong in the other 85 per cent. The marginality
of the [-{] pattern (6 instances, 1.2 per cent in Thun's data) and the historical considerations
disfavoring this pattern have already been discussed.
54 This count includes 97 instances of [I]-[O/] and four instances of [I]-[O:].
Using [] and [O] interchangeably elsewhere in this article, when the reference is to current
pronunciation, is justied by the fact that for most American varieties there is no distinction between
the two sounds (the cot-caught pair). For Southern British English the difference is accompanied by a
length distinction, which would create other discrepancies in the reduplicative words. The three relevant
words in the entire data base are: glim-glaum (Scots, 1782, also glim-glam), sinter-saunter (Yorkshire,
1868, also sinter-santer), and yickie-yawkie (Scots, 1808), where the second reduplicative vowel is a
genuine Northern [O]. (Muller and Thun classify these words as (i:O), obviously unaware of the regional
character of the vowel in them.)
55 Includes 8 instances of [i]-[O:] and 4 instances of [i]-[O/].
158 DONKA MINKOVA

Table 4. Vowel distribution in Ablaut reduplication (quantity)

Peak type Count %

Pm- 413/435 94.9

Pmm- 22/435 5.0

Conspicuously absent, even in that very motley picture, are back vowels of any
length in the left half of the structure. In over 97 per cent of the corpus the vowel in
the base is [I] or [i]. Separately, I show the results sorted by the moraic content of the
left half of the word for all types in table 4.
Divergences from the monomoraic model are quite limited. It is important to
notice that all of the 22 bimoraic bases in the fourth and the fth row are paired
either with a bimoraic reduplicant or with [{] or [O/], never with any of the other
short vowels. I will return to the interpretation of this distribution below.
Compared to the faithfulness constraint Ident-BR (m), and the markedness
constraint *Pl/Lab, both of them categorical and phonologically controlled, Final
Length refers to phonetic length differences which do not necessarily go beyond a
certain threshold, and thus do not trigger a categorical reassessment. Of the two
potential contributors to Final Length intrinsic vowel length, and domain-nal
lengthening, which is not segment-specic the intrinsic quality of the vowel
appears to be the more important one. The fact that the peak of the stressed syllable
to the right can be variably lled characterizes Final Length as a constraint subject
to gradient satisfaction. The worst violation of Final Length would be incurred by
absolute identity of the vowels in the stressed syllables of the rst and the second
foot. The constraint is best satised by reduplicant vowels whose durational proper-
ties are maximally distinct from [I], namely [{] and [O/]. The latter two vowels push
the threshold of acceptability with respect to the faithfulness constraint Ident-BR
(m) to the limit. There are some relevant analytical and comparative points that
emerge in this connection. These points relate to the history and status of the
segments [{] and [O/] in English.
If, as argued here, the corollary of Final Length is the presence of the low vowels
[{] or [O/] in the second peak of Ablaut reduplicatives, it is relevant to see how the
properties of these vowels are utilized in other phonological processes. In this
connection it is not surprising to nd that both phonetic entities show considerable
ambiguity with respect to their categorization as short or long (or lax and tense).
Thus, although English [{] is traditionally classied as short, or lax, on the argument
of absence of lexical monosyllables ending in /{-/, the shortlong opposition can be
suspended. One such instance is the appearance of [{] as the default vowel in light
syllables with secondary stress in English.56 The `peripheral conguration' of light

56 This observation is found in Hammond (1999: 285). He comments that `For some reason [italics DM],
almost all the clear examples of stressed light syllables involve the vowel [{]. There are also, however, a
 ABLAUT REDUPLICATION IN ENGLISH 159

stressed syllable followed by a syllable with secondary stress also exhibits [{]
regularly:
(17) Default vowel [{]:
caffene asset
chalet atoll
plateau baton
raccoon jacquard
tattoo rabb
trapeze satyre57

Although *[-{ #] is an illegal rhyme in English lexical monosyllables, and should

therefore be an unstressable vowel unless followed by a tautosyllabic consonant, it
attracts stress in words of the type cited in (17). Discussing the weight requirements
for stress in English, Giegerich (1992: 185) states that `bisyllabic nouns can have
a _ _ or a _ _ stress pattern only if both syllables are heavy'. The statement is
germane because it links the special status of the technically monomoraic, but still
`heavy' [{] in English to the preference for that vowel in the left half of Ablaut
words where the unmarked monomoraic vowel should be maximally long in
phonetic terms. In both cases it is the intrinsic vowel duration of the [{] that is
responsible for its ambiguous phonological behavior. In the case of caffene, chalet,
etc. it allows the initial `light' syllable to carry stress in accord with the Germanic
stress pattern of English nouns in violation of its monomoraicity. In the case of
tc-tac or tc-tac it satises Final Length without violating the categorical identity
with the monomoraic vowel in the left foot.58
The [O/] vowel also stands out from the set of monomoraic vowels in English. As
noticed by previous researchers, e.g. Hansen (1964: 212), English and German
reduplication data differ with respect to the pairing of short (orthographic)
<i>-<o>. In English such words comprise over 20 per cent of the data, while
German has only four such words. Also, as evident from the short lists in (5), in
English there is some time-lag between the appearance and spread of [I-{] reduplica-
tion and the [I-] reduplication, where the second vowel presumably corresponds to
an earlier [O], a somewhat closer vowel. The most numerous instances of [I-] appear
after the beginning of the sixteenth century. This means that at the time when the
rst big wave of tip-top words came into the language, the vowel of the right peak
was lower than its modern counterpart. Wyld (1965: 71) describes this lowering as `a

very few examples involving other vowels, i.e. settee, suttee.' (The OED lists only settee, and gives
suttee as an alternative to suttee.)
Note that many of the items in Hammond's list of light stressed syllables in `pretonic' position, e.g.
caffeine, chalet, plateau, can have main stress either to the right or to the left. Hammond's (1999: 309)
list of `permitted peripheral congurations' is also made up exclusively of [{-] stressed syllables, though
he does not remark on the asset pattern.
57 For more examples (tarot, adult, etc.) see Fudge (1984: 21315).
58 Note the tendency of /{/ to develop into a phonetic diphthong: bat pronounced with [-E@-] or [-I@-] in
the so-called Northern Cities Shift in the US, tin can [-{:-] contrasting with I can [-{-] in New York.
160 DONKA MINKOVA

Westernism which penetrated in Standard and London English in the 16th c.'59 It is
likely that during the most active period of Ablaut reduplicative word formation the
openness of the low back rounded vowel might have encouraged the creation of [I-]
words on the model of [I-{] reduplication.60
The categorization of [O/] as lax or tense has also been an issue in phonological
studies of English. Prior to the merger of these entities in American English, the
input to the Ablaut reduplicatives was [O]. This vowel is classied either as lax, e.g.
Chomsky and Halle (1968: 176), or as tense (Giegerich, 1992: 1046; Hammond,
1999: 6). The conict between the two approaches arises from the inconsistent
phonological behavior of the vowel with respect to moraicity.61 Of signicance is
also the fact that two vowels previously associated with two separate categories of
length, [O] for cot and [O:] for caught (see e.g. Daniel Jones's English Pronouncing
Dictionary), underwent a widespread merger, the cot-caught merger. Typically,
vowel mergers do not cross categorical length boundaries. This is another indication
that the moraic status of the vowel in question is sufciently ambiguous to allow
both the interpretation of phonological monomoraicity and phonetic length required
by the template.

6.3 Ablaut reduplicatives as independent prosodic constituents (cola)

The structures produced by Ablaut reduplication are dipodic. I have suggested one
way of analysing them: as analogs of poetic meter where the categories involved can
be seen to have testable counterparts in the phonology of the language. Although
the account is appealing, especially in terms of the special cognitive status of Ablaut
words, I would like to consider briey another option which avoids the reference to
meter.62 Can these structures be described directly in terms of the prosodic
phonology of English?

59 On this point see Lass (1999: 87). Wyld (1965: 712) reports that the lower vowel was fairly widespread
among all classes, and in Vanbrugh's Relapse it is ridiculed as a fashionable affectation prevalent
among fops. Some rhymes indicating this development are:
that-plot (Spenser, Death of Sir Philip Sydney)
dally-folly (Shakespeare, Rape of Lucrece, 5546)
salamander-yonder (Swift, Description of a Salamander)
60 Many scholars assume raising of [a] to [{] in Early Modern English, e.g. Lass (1999: 85) who treats the
[{] quality described by contemporary orthoepists as an `innovation'. My account assumes an
uninterrupted [{] surviving from Old English. The continuity hypothesis is based on scribal and rhyme
evidence for a much higher [E]-type vowel, continuing through ME in the West Midlands and in the
South, especially in Kentish (Jordan, 1968: 548). The position one takes on this issue, or the fact that
in some varieties the vowel is still the low front unrounded [a], cannot affect the proposed account: [a]
and [{] are not contrastive phonemically.
61 The vowel patterns phonotactically with monomoraic vowels: it can occur before [-], as in song,
throng, a position from which tense vowels are excluded, similarly before /-mp, -sp, -sk/. A good survey
of the phonotactic reasons for classifying [O/] as lax, contra Hammond (1999), appears in Hall (2001:
239).
62 I have already mentioned one worry in this connection: in verse the strictness is associated with the
right edge, while in Ablaut words strictness is overwhelmingly conned to the left edge. Also, although
 ABLAUT REDUPLICATION IN ENGLISH 161

Hayes (1995: 119) lists seven mostly non-Indo-European languages for which a
separate prosodic layer of metrical representation, the colon, is invoked for the
account of word stress. If we ignore the `artistic' twist, it appears that the English
reduplicative data could provide support for the usefulness of the colon as an
independent domain. Analyzing Ablaut reduplicatives as evidence for an autono-
mous prosodic domain is prompted by the important role of Final Length in this
type of word formation. Another question within a `colon' framework is whether
iambic and trochaic effects can manifest themselves on structures higher than the
individual foot especially in the BR monosyllabic type, riff-raff.
The issue of whether reduplicative words as a whole are trochaic, iambic, or even
spondaic, has stymied their description for a long time. A reference to the prosodic
properties of the colon might be helpful. When both halves are monosyllables, the
colon is weakly trochaic, with prominence on the rst foot, /_ _/; the left strong
pattern is the most frequent one.63 On the other hand, Final Length is a very
highly ranked constraint in the colon domain, guaranteeing that the second foot is
phonetically longer. The lengthening effect in the right foot is nevertheless not
strong enough to alter completely the perception of trochaicness to iambicity. Hayes
(1995: 81) reports that `there is a threshold that must be exceeded for durational
contrast to have an iambic effect: the long elements must be 1.5 to 2 times as long as
the short ones for iambic rhythmic groupings to be perceived'. In our data, in the
most dramatic case when the nal consonant is a voiceless fricative (riff-raff ), and
the length difference approaches 100 per cent, the ratio of lengthening might be
sufcient to tip the scales in the iambic direction.64 Across the board, however, the
percentage of change is in the range of 5763 per cent, which does not produce a
distinctly phrasal iambic contour for the whole formation. Moreover, like the
weaker trochaic effect on the colon level, the iambic effect of Final Length is non-
categorical. In combination, the two factors may create a perception of `even' stress.
In other words, a reference to reduplication as occurring within a dipodic domain
may be helpful in addressing the issue of the instability of primary stress and the
phenomenon of `even' stress for these words.
One further comment on the overall prosodic contour of disyllabic feet joined by

`given the role of conscious formal artice, there can be no truly ``impossible meters'' in the sense in
which there are impossible grammars' (HK, 2934), the relevance of specic vowel alternations in
Ablaut would be unique in the realm of English verbal art.
63 See section 3 above and Dienhart (1999: 31), but note also his numerous caveats on the unavailability
of dictionary accent markings and the likelihood of individual speaker variation in stress placement.
64 According to Smith (1978: 44) phrase-nal and utterance-nal position induces 5060 per cent
increments of duration. Word-nal lengthening in non-phrase-nal position is on the order of 20
milliseconds in English not enough for a categorical reinterpretation of the prosodic headedness. The
extent of the perceptual function of non-phrase-nal lengthening and nal consonant lengthening in
English remains an issue if the analysis of the reduplicatives is conducted on a strictly prosodic level.
Thun (1962: 207) reports that there are 11 examples of weak-heavy stresses and 14 of middle-heavy
stresses in his collection of 207 words on which stress pronouncements have been made. He does not
identify the items that are reported as having these stress patterns.
162 DONKA MINKOVA

reduplication is that the trochaic effect on the level of the colon is weakened further
for nonmonosyllabic base and reduplicant feet. The hypothesis here would be that
the intervening syllables in diddle-daddle, shilly-shally produce two nonclashing
rhythmic structures where the strongweak contrast is obscured by the foot-internal
prosodic relations. Presumably, in larger structures the trochaic effect of the colon is
likely to disappear completely, and the two halves of the word will exhibit equal
stress.

6.4 Faithfulness vs. markedness in Ablaut reduplication

I have argued that the selection of the vowels lling the stressed syllable peaks of
Ablaut reduplicative words is a response to a mixture of faithfulness and well-
formedness pressures. The form of these words appeared to be sensitive to the
markedness hierarchy blocking labial vowels and a structure-specic parameter
called Interest, combining the linguistic lters of *Ident-BR (High) and Final
Length which augments the height distinction. The constraints regulating the
identity of the two halves of the constructions are not equally ranked with respect to
the markedness constraints. Nondeletion, Max-BR, nonepenthesis, Dep BR, and
moraic identity of the peaks, Ident-BR (m), are the top ranked faithfulness
constraints for the set of data analyzed here. The bidirectional copying is imperfect,
however, and the faithfulness constraint referring to featural identity, Ident-BR
(High), is dominated by the markedness and well-formedness constraints. The
general schema that combines the faithfulness constraints in (10) with the con-
straints in (12)(14) and (16) requires the two constraint families to be interleaved
as in (18):

(18) Max-BR, Dep-BR, Ident-BR (m) >> *Pl/Lab, Interest >> Ident-BR (High)

In this hierarchy Interest refers to the perceptual distance between the base and the
reduplicant in terms of phonetic length (Final Length) and aperture (*Ident-BR
(High)). Interest allows marginally riff-reff and riff-ruff, but not *raff-raff or *raff-
riff. *Pl/Lab for English appears to be the highest ranked markedness constraint.65
Setting aside the inviolable Max-BR, Dep-BR, which prevent epenthesis and
deletion, the tableau in (19) shows the ranking of the relevant faithfulness and
markedness constraints:

65 The arguments for the exclusion of [U] from the rst peak were developed in section 5.2. It is important
to note that this particular ranking of *Pl/Lab for Ablaut reduplication is not shared by other Indo-
European languages, like German, where [U-a] (buffbaff, Puspas) reduplicants comprise 12 per cent of
the data. Another problem with `universalizing' this constraint is that in some languages the low vowel
comes in the second peak: tak-tuk `knock-knock', hart-hurt `energetic bite(?)', pat-kut `with nosy
hammering' (Marchand, 1952: 624). Observing the discrepancy, Marchand comments (ibid. 65) that
`The Indo-Germanic Ablaut has rising tension, the Turkish falling.'
 ABLAUT REDUPLICATION IN ENGLISH 163

(19) Ranking of constraints for Ablaut reduplicative words

/rIf-r{f/ Ident-BR *Pl/Lab Interest Ident-BR

(m) Final Length *Ident-BR (High) (High)
+ rIf-r{f **
+ rIf-r{yf **
rIf-rEf * *
r{f-r{f *!
r{f-rIf *! **
rUf-r{f *! *
rIf-r{yf *! *

The outputs in the rst two rows in the tableau in (19) are both well formed. My
last suggestion in the present account will address the large statistical preponderance
of Pm- peaks vs. Pmm peaks. I believe that the 95 per cent choice of [I] has to do with
further enhancement of the perceptual distance between the base and the redupli-
cant. Within the OT model this could involve adding another independent lter
referring to the peak composition of the halves as *Pmm. This would seem totally
stipulative but for one fact.
Remember that the shaded bimoraic bases in table 3 paired with the same vowels,
[{] and [O/], which are also the most frequent realizations of reduplicants with [I] in
the base. For the purpose of reduplication with [I] in the base, [{] and [O/] behave
as monomoraic in spite of the strong phonetic tendency towards intrinsic length.
Their pairing with Pmm peaks might be licensed, rarely and uncomfortably, by the
moraic ambiguity exhibited by these vowels elsewhere in the system. The ambiguity
cannot be resolved in the direction of full bimoraicness for [{], [O/] because then the
structure will violate Ident-BR (m) massively for the riff-raff words. Everything else
being equal, then, a bimoraic peak in the left half will incur a violation of a lter
which refers, by extension, to the predominant, but not obligatory, monomoraic
status of [{], [O/].66
This alternative approach would put more emphasis on the qualitative composi-
tion of the rightward peak. One way of developing the approach would be to dene
the markedness constraints such that [{] or [O/] is anchored to the right, following
the markedness hierarchy in (12): *Pl/Lab >> *Pl/Cor >> *Pl/Phar. The next
steps in the analysis would be identical with the steps outlined already maximiza-
tion of perceptual distance through height and length differentiation. The problem
of the moraic identity of the peaks in [i]-[{] or [O/] reduplication remains, however.
Also, assuming a `xed' content for the right peak would be empirically at odds with
the occurrence of [I]-[ay] and [I]-[ow]. Ultimately, the preference for [I] but not [i] in
the rst foot remains a fact in need of an explanation.67

66 This is obviously not valid of the 8 instances of [i] -[O:] in the corpus.
67 Although I have conducted the analysis on the assumption that the linguistic material lling the
164 DONKA MINKOVA

The analysis of reduplicative words which involve disyllabic bases will be subject
to the same factors that constrain the reduplication of monosyllabic feet. Crucially,
the stressed syllable is always aligned with the left edge of the word, and that has
been used as the site of the constraint evaluation. Reduplication is blocked by an
unstressed syllable to the left of the stressed one: *remiss-remass, *Caligula-Calagula.
The only additional provision for an account of trisyllabic forms, diddery-doddery,
hickety-hackety, hippety-hoppety, rickety-rackety, slitherum-slatherum, is that any
material to the right of the second syllable remains unfooted and is invisible to the
constraints on reduplication. All the conditions shown to be active in the ordering
and the selection of nuclear vowels for mono- and disyllabic halves obtain here too.
The number of these forms is small,68 and they invariably conform to the predicted
patterns of [I-{] or [I-] in the peak of the stressed syllable. They are instances of full
copying of some inx, usually it(i). As noted in section 4.2, the prosodic structure of
these words is [s-s-<s>]S. The iteration of the weak syllable in the reduplicative
template is not problematic either since the weak branch of the structure can be
lled by zero to two syllables.

6.5 The bric-a-brac of inxing Ablaut reduplicatives

The analysis proposed in the preceding sections leaves a small residue of Ablaut
reduplicative words which represent variations on the basic model. These are words
in which unstressed (and meaningless) syllables are inserted between the left and the
right copying halves of the structures. Here belong words like pitapat (1515), bric-a-
brac (1830), clish-ma-clash (1839), clickety-clack (1877).69 Rhythmically, these forms
behave in the same way as any unlinked reduplicative word, i.e. they have the
structure [s-s-<s>]S [s-]S. The very few exceptions with disyllabic right half,
clitter-to-clatter, icket-a-acket, ipper-de-apper, titter-a-totter, all of which have
unlinked doublets, follow essentially the same model: [s-s-<s>]S [s-s]S. The
pitapat type of reduplicatives support the assumption that any Ablaut reduplicative
structure represents an autonomous domain whose subconstituents are well-dened
rhythmical copies of each other. The `inx' follows the left foot without affecting the
relevant string; it is either part of the normal foot, as in pitapat, or it constitutes
unfooted/extrametrical material. The model predicts that there should be no
instances of inxation with trisyllabic feet on both sides, i.e. *hippety-a-hoppety

template is syllabic trochees for the reasons given in section 3, I admit that an analysis of moraic
trochees fares well with respect to the selection of [I] over [i]. Trochees are preferentially noncontrastive
in duration. This is captured by the Iambic/Trochaic Law (Hayes, 1995: 7981). In the reduplicative
base the second mora is supplied either by a consonant, or by an unstressed vowel. In a disyllabic left-
prominent string the peak vowel will be preferentially monomoraic. This will work for disyllabic bases,
e.g. diddle-, shilly-, but it will not tell us why see- is so much rarer than tip-.
68 Hansen (1964: 25) counts a total of 28 such forms, which amount to 7.2 per cent of his data in which I
calculate 388 entries.
69 bric a brac is a borrowing from French (OED). The most exhaustive list of reduplicative formations
with link syllables is found in Thun (1963: 2224), where I count a total of 38 entries of this type.
 ABLAUT REDUPLICATION IN ENGLISH 165

where -a- would either create an impossible *[s-s-<s>-<s>]S string to the left, or an
impossible noninitially stressed reduplicant *[s-s-s-<s>] to the right.
Within verbal art, the closest analogue to the expanded reduplicatives is a half line
of folk verse, which is coterminous with the prosodic colon.70 The excess prosodic
material is limited to a single syllable. The additional phonetic length of the stressed
syllable to the right is in accord with the `long-last' principle, namely that in a
particular conjoined structure, the longer element comes last.71 In the context of
Ablaut reduplication the principle applies through the phonetic properties of the
stressed syllable rather than the actual number of syllables on either side as long as
the basic foot structure of the construction is preserved intact.

7 Summary of results
The question of why English Ablaut reduplication imposes specic restrictions on
the choice of vowels in the two halves of the structure has been addressed before, but
the answers have not covered the empirical facts in a satisfactory way. This study
proceeds from the assumption that English Ablaut reduplication follows a well-
dened dipodic template composed of syllabic trochees. The structure of the
template is justied on the basis of independently available prosodic and segmental
characteristics of the parts and the whole of the string. The two halves of the
structure are treated as morphological equals and their relationship is evaluated in
terms of output-to-output copying. A product of its time, the account uses
Optimality Theory, positing constraints on identity in reduplication and general
segmental and prosodic markedness and well-formedness constraints. The latter
jointly satisfy a principle valid for other verbal art patterns relying on the iteration
of linguistic sames, the principle of Interest. The Ablaut template enriches the
taxonomy of verbal art structures in English.
Ablaut reduplication is a creative process in which the new structures obey a suite
of constraints that are otherwise violated freely in the language. The appeal to
violable constraints in Ablaut reduplication allows us to accommodate variations of
the basic model: alternative quality of the stressed vowel, nonmonomoraic peaks,
and the occurrence of and limitations on inxation. Gradient satisfaction of
constraints addresses the question why some patterns of reduplication are exceed-

70 In drawing this analogy, I am relying on work by Hayes & MacEachern (1998). More specically, the
reference is to the argument that rhythmic constituents can achieve isochrony either by pause or by
lengthening of the line-nal syllable, more or less in free variation. In their analysis, nal lengthening is
a cue to `phrasehood'; in the analysis proposed here the constituency that the longer second element
delimits is an Ablaut reduplicative.
71 See Hayes & MacEachern (1998). This is a well-studied phenomenon referring to paired units such as
men and women; sons and daughters; tall, dark, and handsome. The classic reference is Malkiel (1959). A
cognitive parallel for the `long-last' principle in English syntax is provided by word-order patterns
which are sensitive to the `weight' of the constituent, e.g. simple vs. phrasal modiers: small matter vs.
a matter of great signicance.
166 DONKA MINKOVA

ingly rare. Multiple violations of the same constraint can be shown to produce
patterns which are completely unattested.
The analysis supports theoretical positions proposed in the recent literature: the
possibility of bidirectional Base-Reduplicant copying, xed segmentism and the
emergence of the unmarked, the usefulness of the colon as a prosodic domain, the
relevance of phonetic information for the phonological processing of language
material. The approach which allows phonology direct access to phonetic informa-
tion has important implications for the account of stress assignment in English
`light' syllables: in reduplication, as well as in stress-assignment, the quantity-
sensitivity effect is both categorical and noncategorical. The question of whether
reduplicative stress is quantity-sensitive or quantity-insensitive is moot.72
Sixty-ve per cent of the Ablaut reduplicatives in English were created during the
Renaissance. The lexicographical records show that the productivity of Ablaut
reduplicative words decreased dramatically after the end of the nineteenth century.
It is unclear to me what esthetic and social forces can be held accountable for these
facts other than vague references to the Renaissance spirit of artistic energy and
creativity. The rise and decline of English Ablaut reduplication is thus a stylistic and
sociolinguistic issue unrelated to the properties of the process. The waning interest in
this verbal art cannot be attributed to a change in the status of the phonetic or
phonological parameters dening Ablaut reduplication. Should the model become
fashionable again, newly minted words would presumably follow the same or similar
constraints.
By way of an envoy, a brief note on the relationship between Ablaut and Rhyme
and Copy reduplication. These three processes share powerful leftright identity
constraints, as well as identiable constraints on the vowels and the consonants that
participate in Ablaut and Rhyme. I have suggested that the main difference between
Copy reduplication and Ablaut reduplication is the creative goal dened as
Interest. By isolating the linguistic factors that dene the shape of Ablaut words,
the proposal prompts an interesting next step, a comparison of Ablaut and Rhyme
reduplication in English and an investigation of similar models elsewhere. These are
tasks for future research.

Author's address:
Department of English
UCLA
405 Hilgard Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90095
Minkova@Humnet.UCLA.edu

72 This is in line with the recent arguments in Kager (1999: 1745): `It is . . . predicted that constraint
rerankings produce various degrees of quantity-sensitivity. Typological studies of trochaic languages
with quantity contrasts conrm this scattered picture: there is a range from fully quantity-sensitive
systems, in which every heavy syllable is stressed, to systems which assign more importance to other
factors such as binary rhythm, at the expense of stress on heavy syllables.' For allowing phonetic
information into the phonology see Myers (1997).
 ABLAUT REDUPLICATION IN ENGLISH 167

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