Abstract

This thesis is an acoustic analysis, grammatical description, and typological comparison of morphological reduplication in Hiligaynon, an Austronesian language spoken in the Western Visayas region of the Philippines. This work has two main goals: first, to redescribe the formal and functional properties of full reduplication in Hiligaynon; and second, to offer a typological analysis as to how the system of reduplication in Hiligaynon compares to the known typological universals of human language, and within the genetically related languages of the Philippines. While reduplication in Hiligaynon has previously been described (Wolfenden 1971; Cameron 1985; Zack 1994; Spitz 2001; Santos 2012), the existing descriptions are contradictory regarding which features, if any, are used to formally distinguish the various functions of full reduplication. Specifically, the different sources vary in their descriptions of the prosodic patterns of full reduplication and in their analyses of whether prosody is a significant formal feature in distinguishing the various semantic functions of otherwise homophonous full reduplication morphemes. This work claims that there are three full reduplication morphemes in Hiligaynon--the augmentative degree, diminutive degree, and repetitive degree--that are formally distinguished by distinct morphemic patterns of prosody. After introducing Hiligaynon and its system of reduplication based on the current descriptions, I redescribe the formal and functional properties of full reduplication in Hiligaynon using original acoustic data collected through native speaker field recordings. Following the acoustic analysis and description, I use the novel Hiligaynon data combined with data from current descriptions to perform three typological comparisons based on the World Atlas of Language Structures Feature 27A, the Universals Archive, and an original survey of reduplication in 34 genetically related languages of the Philippines. These comparisons show the system of reduplication in Hiligaynon to be highly productive as well as typologically normal save for these unique morphemic patterns of prosody which are typologically unexpected. These forms suggest the need to revisit the putative language universal first observed by Moravcsik (1978: 315) which claims that "there is no reduplication pattern that would involve reference to phonological properties other than syllable number, consonantality-vowelhood, and absolute linear position".

Degree

College and Department

Humanities; Linguistics

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