This chapter provides an organized ranking and a discussion of expressives in Breton. Expressives are defined as expressions whose morphophonology is not entirely arbitrary, but partly iconic. I provide an inventory of them in Breton, a Celtic modern language spoken in Western France in a bilingual context with French. I discuss the productivity of the operations of expressive morphology, their exclusive use for expressive means, and their degree of iconicity. I show for each category in turn what operations or structures might be exclusive to expressive words.

The chapter focuses on two sets of items with hypocoristic function in Hungarian: 1. so-called embellished clippings, i.e. truncations that are subsequently furnished with one of the diminutive/endearment suffixes, such as Feri (Ferenc), Zoli/Zotya/Zotyi/Zolesz/Zolcso/Zoló (Zoltán), Kata/Kati/Kató (Katalin); 2. reduplications, typically consisting of two identical CV syllables. These can be based on first names, surnames, or some common nouns referring to people, denoting kinship relationships, profession, or property, e.g., Zozó (Zoltán), Zsozsó (Zsófia), Kokó (Kovács). Except for reduplications that are based on surnames, for all the others there is also at least one parallel hypocoristic form of the former type, i.e. an embellished clipping: Zoli/Zotya/Zotyi/Zolesz/Zolcso/Zoló – Zozó (Zoltán); Zsófi/Zsóca – Zsozsó (Zsófia). The goal of this chapter is to document the range of possibilities as well as to try to account for this peculiar distribution in the sense of which morphological processes interact with each other and in which order, but also in the sense of suggesting the factors that may have facilitated this state of affairs.

The chapter provides a general overview of lexical reduplication in Finno-Ugric languages. The research data are taken from observations of everyday life and from various written sources for major languages of this family: Finnic (Finnish, Estonian), Saamic, Mordvinic (Erzya, Moksha), Mari, Permic (Komi, Udmurt), Ugric (Hungarian, Mansi, Khanty). Finno-Ugric reduplication is rich, because, on one hand, agglutinative properties of these languages favor mergeability and repetition of various stems; on the other hand, many onomatopoeias and descriptive words (ideophones) can function as various parts of speech, mainly as adverbs and adjectives, which are often repeated. They also sometimes complete nouns or verbs. Repetitive constructions can express various semantic shades, mainly intensification, iterativity, distributivity, multiplicity, frequency, or indefiniteness. Finno-Ugric reduplication is total or partial (which is more frequent). Reduplicative tendencies are more visible and productive in Hungarian, Komi, Udmurt, and Mari, than in Saamic, in which they barely exist.

This chapter surveys various types of reduplicative word formation in German and discusses their morpho-phonological regularities as well as their use conditions and the iconically-expressive meanings attributed to them. It is argued that the repetitive, formally redundant forms pose strict conditions on their use, making reduplication prone to familiar and non-standard language use. At the same time, reduplications are phonologically conspicuous markers for expressive meaning dimensions. Reduplication in German especially evokes semantic flavours related to smallness, playfulness, lack of seriousness, and jocular depreciation. The survey suggests that, in spite of the foregrounding of the expressive and poetic function, the various types of reduplication are morphologically quite regular. Previous accounts on reduplication in German that deem these words to be “extra-grammatical” are therefore rejected.

Expressive and ideophonic constructions conveying ‘marked words that depict sensory imagery’ (Dingemanse 2012) are frequently found in the languages of all regions of the world, but their distribution, use and functioning across languages of the Caucasus has never been documented from a regional perspective. This chapter surveys the various kinds of expressive language present in the three autochthonous Caucasian families: Abkhaz-Adyghean, Kartvelian, and Nakh-Daghestanian. It also looks in depth at the specific morphological and syntactic peculiarities of expressives in Georgian, which exhibit exuberant consonant clusters, processes of reduplication uncharacteristic of the language as a whole, as well as specific morphosyntactic alignment splits between different classes of expressive. Expressives will be seen not to be one thing, but many.

The chapter surveys repetitions and reduplications in Italian, from the segmental to the discourse level. Italian has reduplicative structures in ideophones, onomatopoeic formations, child language, and baby talk; segment repetition is used as an expressive device in commercials and product names; reduplication is used as a lexeme formation device in Verb-Verb compounds such as fuggifuggi ‘stampede, lit. run away run away’, and as a means of intensification of adjectives and adverbs; some sequences of two nouns have lexicalized with adjectival or adverbial meaning; contrastive focus reduplication is also attested in Italian. Discourse markers are often reduplicated; several cases of repetition of imperatives in discourse have constructionalized, giving rise to converbs with concessive or hypothetical meanings or used as antecedents of consecutive clauses; noun reiteration in discourse can be used to indicate frequency of occurrence of entities and events. It is argued that no clear dividing line can be drawn between pragmatic or syntactic repetition and grammatical or morphological reduplication, since grammaticalization of discourse repetition in diachrony often occurs.

This chapter aims to build an understanding of the differences between words and characters in Chinese by introducing the ways that words and Chinese characters are formed. Particular attention is paid to learning and writing Chinese characters.

This chapter gives an overview of the grammatical features of Chinese adjectives and how to use them, specifically the way they can be used as the main predicate in a sentence. The forms and functions of the reduplication of adjectives are also discussed.

The use of transitive and intransitive verbs in Chinese grammar is introduced in this chapter. In particular, separable verbs (e.g., verb-object compounds), as a unique Chinese construction, are described in detail. In addition, special attention is paid to the expression of the temporal features of activities by suffixing the verbal aspects 了 le, 着 zhe, 过 guo, or the pre-verbal progressive marker 在 zài. Lastly, this chapter introduces the reduplication of verbs denoting tentativeness or the short duration of the action.

This chapter addresses the motivation for the emergence of classifiers. Before Middle Chinese, there was no such category as “classifier” in the grammar of the Chinese language, and this word “classifier” was historically innovated. Individual classifiers started to emerge as early as Late Old Chinese, and the number of classifiers steadily increased over time. However, the rigorous grammatical rule that required a proper classifier for every numeral phrase was firmly established around the fourteenth century AD. Importantly, there was a parallel development of nominal and verbal classifiers; that is, verbal classifiers came into existence not long after the emergence of nominal classifiers.

This chapter considers types of word formation that are not found in English and languages that might be more familiar to students. We look at infixation, circumfixation and parasynthesis, internal stem change (ablaut and consonant mutation), reduplication (full and partial), templatic (root and pattern) morphology, and subtractive processes. Students are introduced to techniques for analyzing morphological data in languages that may be unfamiliar to them.

Lam’s chapter analyses the phenomenon of reduplication, primarily in Cantonese, a language in which reduplication can occur in the nominal domain, usually on the classifier, to express plurality, in the verbal domain to express an iteration of eventualities or a prolongation of an eventuality, and in the adjectival domain to express property attenuation. Lam argues for a uniform treatment of reduplication in terms of summation and a sensitivity to whether the replicated elements are (strictly) quantized or cumulative. For example, entity-denoting nominal classifiers, and verbal predicates denoting quantized sets of eventualities (such as tiu3 ‘jump’) denote pluralities or iterations, respectively, based on the summing of entities/eventualities. For verbal expressions that denote cumulative predicates (such as fan3 ‘sleep’), summation adds up ‘portions’ of unbounded, overlapping eventualities forming one temporally extended eventuality. Lam proposes that Cantonese bare adjectives denote dimensions, e.g. tallness, but not degree or magnitude. This nullifies any semantic effect of summation, and the attenuation effect is derived via competition with other forms using hou2 (‘very’).

This chapter gives an introductory overview of the strategies for forming words in the languages of mainland Southeast Asia. The chapter begins with a discussion of the form class distinctions that are found, including the categories of noun, verb, adjective, adposition, and adverb. Of the various processes for forming words, the chapter focuses on compounding and reduplication, which are relied upon widely in languages of the area, and affixation, which is a speciality of Austroasiatic languages in particular. The chapter features a section on the uses of tone in word formation, a feature of Hmong-Mien languages. Psycho-collocations are discussed: an area-wide form of compounding involving the mention of body parts to denote emotional and psychological states.

Word formation in Germanic languages mainly takes place by means of compounding and affixation. Compounds are usually right-headed, and there is often a linking element in N+N-compounds that derives historically from a case ending. In addition to endocentric compounds there are also copulative compounds. Compounding also takes place with roots of Greek and Latin origin that do not occur as words by themselves. Some compound constituents have developed into affixoids. Affixation is used to derive words of major categories: nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Some of these affixes behave phonologically similar to compound constituents. Many nonnative affixes, identified on the basis of sets of borrowed nonnative complex words, are being used in word formation as well. Other mechanisms of word formation are affix substitution, conversion, reduplication, prosodic morphology, abbreviation, and blending. For the construction of numerals above 20, syntactic coordination may be used. The word formation patterns of Germanic languages have been strongly influenced by contact with Greek, Latin, and French. In addition, they have been influenced by contact with English. Individual languages have borrowed some of their morphology and complex words from another Germanic language, and Yiddish has been strongly influenced by various non-Germanic languages.

This chapter examines how both Pindar and Aeschylus invoke snakes as an example of how bodies, no less than voices, are rendered multiform through the reenactment of choral performance.