A comparative study of reduplication in Spanish- and Portuguese-based creoles

Ángela Bartens

(University of Helsinki)

This study aims at a comprehensive but at the same time concise account of the functions of reduplication across Portuguese- and Spanish-based creoles. Reduplication is understood as syntactic reduplication as defined by Wierzbicka (1986). While recognizing the origins of reduplication in discourse, clausal and intraclausal repetition, universally used pragmatic devices, are excluded from this study. Likewise, reduplication involving full copies will be at the center of the analysis while partially reduplicated forms are considered to be variants eroded from fully reduplicated ones.

Although reduplication can be argued to constitute the least marked morphological process (Couto 2000), the second and perhaps more important goal of this paper is to unearth the patterning of reduplication in the Spanish- and Portuguese-based creoles with the functions of reduplication in the corresponding substrate. It is argued that in spite of the universality of reduplication, substrate influence plays a crucial role in determining the exact functions of reduplication in a creole. This hypothesis is corroborated by my findings from the study of the partly overlapping area of ideophones (Bartens 2000) which will be discussed as a speacial category of reduplicated items in some of the creoles under survey.

Palabras clave: criollos de base portuguesa y española; estudios comparativos, morfología, reduplicación