Reduplication
Another means for expressing inflection that we find in certain languages is reduplication. Like root-and-pattern, reduplication has already been discussed, but from a phonological perspective, in Morphology and Phonology. We present examples of the Indonesian plural here. It is formed via full reduplication (examples are from Sneddon 1996: 16).
Indonesian plural reduplication is not obligatory. Speakers of Indonesian have the option of using the unreduplicated form to refer to either singular or plural. So kuda not only means ‘horse’, but also ‘horses’; rumah can refer to one house or more than one; and so on. The reduplicated plural is most likely to be used when the number of the noun is not clear from the context, as in the examples below (Sneddon 1996: 17):1
Without reduplication of pohon, (18a) would be ambiguous between ‘His house is near that mango tree’ and ‘His house is near those mango trees’. Likewise, if bumbung were not reduplicated in (18b), the sentence could have the interpretation, ‘At his waist is tied an empty bamboo water container’, as well as the one given above.2 Such ambiguity is not characteristic of plural reduplication cross-linguistically.
It is also the case that reduplication in Indonesian has functions beside plural marking. As Sneddon (1996: 16) also notes, the meaning of a reduplicated form may be “different but nevertheless related to the meaning of the single base.” Among his examples are gula ‘sugar’ and gula-gula ‘sweets’, laki ‘husband’ and laki-laki ‘man’, mata ‘eye’ and mata-mata ‘spy’, and langit ‘sky’ and langit-langit ‘ceiling’.
Children acquiring languages without plural reduplication sometimes spontaneously use reduplication to express the plural. An English-speaking child may say shoe for one shoe, but shoe shoe for two.
Reduplication can be used to express inflectional categories besides number. In Affixation and stem alternations we saw a few examples where partial reduplication is involved in the formation of the Latin perfective stem from the present stem, for example, mordeō ‘I bite’, momordī ‘I bit’. Reduplication is also used in some languages as a derivational process. English has a derivational process of partial reduplication seen in wishy washy.
1 Word-for-word glosses for Sneddon’s examples were provided by Niken Adisasmito-Smith.
2 Sneddon (1996: 17) notes further, “It is sometimes stated that reduplication of nouns indicates variety rather than plurality (although plurality is implied by variety). Indonesian writers disagree on this question, but clearly reduplication can be used where variety is of no importance.” As evidence, he uses the examples that we have given in (18).
