Prosodically constrained non-local doubling

Abstract

In this article, we discuss non-local doubling in Greek and Turkish, a hitherto unanalysed aspect of these languages, and its implications for the interfaces. In non-local doubling, the reduplicated item is not located next to its base but at some other position in the clause depending on language-specific constraints. Interestingly, the attested type of doubling is not purely sensitive to syntactic nodes as in other languages (e.g. Dutch, Afrikaans), since we show that it targets a prosodic constituent. We argue that both Greek and Turkish employ an empty emphatic morpheme which has a two-legged exponence: One exponent is some phonological phrase in a clause and the other is its clone, placed farther than its source at the right periphery of the clause. We further discuss the variation between Greek and Turkish in terms of the prosodic structure of the two languages, showing that the differences lie in (i) the prosodic status of the copied element, (ii) the relative degree of free word order, and (iii) the properties of the right periphery (postverbal/postsentential). We thus propose that doubling is a general mechanism found across languages, and it is not only morphological or syntactic units, but also prosodic ones that can serve as input to this ubiquitous process.