nze liegt,
wo der articulirte Laut in das Wort übergeht, und die mit den einfachsten Mitteln zu
Stande kommt. Andererseits gehört aber doch auch dieser Vorgang schon den
erscheinungen der Wortbildung durch Zusammensetzung an, [...]" (Wundt 1900:
578-579).
This view is probably enhanced by the fact that reduplication exists rarely as a morphological
procedure in Indo-European languages in adult speech4, but is almost exclusively known as a
phonological phenomenon in child language. Therefore it was ascribed to “more primitive”
stages of languages. Gonda (1950) introduces his article on reduplication in Indonesian with
the following statement:
"In 'more advanced stages of civilization', among groups and classes which have,
generally speaking, lost contact with 'primitiveness', although it is always apt to
come to the surface, in circles where the so-called intellectual or modern mental
structure is dominating, reduplicating and iterative devices are a rather
unimportant part of language" (Gonda 1950: 170).
3 Located at the Institute of Linguistics, University of Graz, funded by the ÖNB (Österreichische
Nationalbank) and the FWF (Fonds für Wissenschaft und Forschung). This dissertation was partly
developed within the scope of the project.
4 Maybe this view has to be modified with more careful examination of non-standard varieties of Indo-
European languages. For example Harris and Halle (2005) "detected" a reduplicative plural inflection in
Spanish dialects.
2
INTRODUCTION
Such a view is long since antiquated, and the following description of the complex system of
reduplication types in Bikol exemplarily shows that reduplication can be (and in most
languages is) a full-fledged part of grammar, and is far from being simple or primitive.
This work is based on two fieldwork stays, ten weeks altogether, in the Bikol region in
Southern Luzon, The Philippines.5 Data were collected with various consultants of different
age and social background by making recordings of spontaneous speech and story telling, and
through elicitation tasks. The most important source of data on lexical reduplication was the
analysis of the reduplication types found in the Bikol-English dictionary by Mintz and Del
Rosario Britanico (1985).6
The dissertation is organized as follows: In Chapter II, a definition of reduplication is
provided and the phenomenon in general is described, from the formal and the functional
points of view, and with respect to its occurrence in the languages of the world. That is
followed by an overview of reduplication in linguistic research, pointing out the most
important problems and unresolved questions in the theoretical approaches to reduplication.
Chapter III is a grammar sketch on Bikol, which is not at all exhaustive, but focuses on the
aspects which are considered to be important to the understanding of the following
description of the reduplication system of Bikol in Chapter IV. Chapter IV is the “core
chapter” of this work, the analysis of the types of reduplication in Bikol. It is divided into two
main parts: The first part is dedicated to lexical reduplication, the second part to productive
reduplication. The systematic description is supplemented by several excursuses which go
into detail with respect to specific prob
