Areal perspectives on total reduplication of verbs in Sinitic

The topic of reduplication in Sinitic languages has attracted much attention in the literature, but studies adopting a comparative and areal perspective are still lacking. This paper aims at identifying and analysing the correlations between form and function in reduplicating constructions in a sample of twenty Chinese dialects, representing eight branches of Sinitic, comparing them to a set of fourteen non-Sinitic languages of the East- and Southeast Asian area. We show that the various semantic nuances conveyed by reduplicated verbs could be argued to derive from the core (iconic) meaning of verbal reduplication as iteration of an event over an undefined time-span. On the structural level, a pervasive feature of reduplication lies in its compliance to strict requirements on the morphological makeup of the base. This holds especially in the case of reduplication of disyllabic and bimorphemic verbs with increasing semantics, a consistent pattern across the languages we considered.