Contrastive focus reduplication, also called contrastive reduplication, identical constituent compounding, lexical cloning, or the double construction, is a type of syntactic reduplication found in some languages. Doubling a word or phrase – such as "do you like-like him?" – can indicate that the prototypical meaning of the repeated word or phrase is intended.
"As a rough approximation, we can say that the reduplicated modifier singles out a member or subset of the extension of the noun that represents a true, real, default, or prototype instance."
In English, the first part of the reduplicant bears contrastive intonational stress.
Contrastive focus reduplication in English can apply not only to words but also to multi-word phrases such as idioms, or to word stems without their inflectional morphemes.
I talked to him that week, but I didn't talk to him talk to him.
In fact I barely talked to him. Not talk talked.
Terminology
Contrastive focus reduplication has been called by various names in English. Early...
Nick Montfort
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