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4 - Expressivity in Scots: A study of echo words

from Germanic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 August 2023

By
Jeffrey P. Williams
Edited by
Jeffrey P. Williams
Jeffrey P. Williams
Affiliation:
Texas Tech University
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Summary

Scots, like too many other European languages, is viewed as possessing a dearth of expressivity in spite of evidence to the contrary. This chapter documents the fact that Scots possesses a wide range of forms of expressivity as part of its grammatical repertoire – including most notably echo word formations. Echo words are a type of apophonic reduplication where a root, stem, or other morphosyntactic constituent is partially reduplicated and there is a concomitant change in the echoant; the reduplicated, or copied, portion has no independent semantic value. The change in the copy portion can involve vowel ablaut, consonant alternation/substitution, or tone/register changes.

Keywords

expressivityecho wordsScots
Type
Chapter
Information
Expressivity in European Languages , pp. 91 - 102
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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