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.

The aim of this study is to investigate aspects of expressivity in Standard Modern Greek (hereafter SMG), specifically cases in which expressivity shares the characteristic [+negative] or pejorative, in the more technical sense adopted here. Our research is focused on the level of morphology, particularly on productive word formation, both through compounding (first compound constituents with pejorative meaning, as in vromokánalo ‘filthy TV channel’ and paʎoiós ‘old/damn virus’, among others) and derivation (derivational suffixes with pejorative functions, such as ipurʝéi ‘bad ministers’, ipalilákos ‘insignificant clerk’ and fititarjó ‘a student lot’, among others). It should be noted that although the particular SMG morphological phenomena/devices have been scatteringly studied in earlier Greek literature, negative expressive meaning, that is, pejoration, has not been systematically dealt with so far.

The chapter analyses a small corpus of twelve Catalan folk tales voice-dramatised and radio broadcast in Majorca in 1959. Most of the lexical material studied here is elicited from the same source and from Diccionari Català-Valencià-Balear, a master work of 20th-century romance lexicography. The expressive resources used in the recordings can be analysed as actual resources in the language for they are shared by both speakers and listeners and they successfully convey a part of the meaning. Along with voice-attached resources as pitch, intensity, or speech rate, other more conventional means such as those preserved in writing (morphological, lexical, syntactic) are also analysed. The findings by Dingemanse and Akita (2017) on the (inverse) relation between expressiveness and grammatical integration are used. The chapter demonstrates the degree to which expressives can be marked by means of phonetic cues in Catalan, initially setting the border between ideophones and unconventional spoken iconicity. By comparing oral and written versions of the same tales it is proposed that fixability by writing is a good test of grammatical integration, at least a necessary condition.

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.

One of the challenging features in the classification of of-binominals is distinguishing between the syntactically very similar forms. Therefore, Chapter 2 presents a variety of diagnostic tests in order to tease apart the constructions in the evaluative binominal noun phrase family. This chapter presents a comprehensive overview and discussion of the tests used in previous studies resulting in the following classification criteria: head status (Noun 1 or Noun 2), constituency tests, constraints on the selection of the two nouns, determiner selection restrictions, and the status of the preposition of. These tests are then used to classify all six of the of-binominals addressed in this study.

The classification criteria in Chapter 2 are now applied to the final three evaluative of-binominals. The evaluative binominal noun phrase (an egg of a head) is an of-binominal construction in which the first noun ascribes a property to the second. The second noun is head, and the construction exhibits a number of noncanonical syntactic features, e.g. the first determiner has scope over the whole construction, a restricted second determiner, and irregular premodification patterns. The evaluative modifier (a whale of a time) is a new of-binominal that I propose. In the evaluative modifier, the first noun has completely decategorizated and functions as a part of the [N1 of a] chunk that denotes speaker evaluation of the referent denoted by the second noun. Furthermore, I argue that this construction needs to be distinguished from the EBNP. Finally, in the binominal intensifier (a beast of a good read), [N1 of a] functions as an intensifier or booster, modifying the gradable adjectives that follow. This study demonstrates that this final construction is much more prolific than previous research has shown.

The three case studies presented in this chapter demonstrate that the six of-binominals introduced in Chapters 3 and 4 form a grammaticalization path, starting at the N+PP and ending, in most cases, at the BI (cake is the exception). The chapter begins with a discussion about the differences between grammaticalization and lexicalization, since both processes are plausible in this case. Then, looking at the first nouns beast, cake and hell (an animate, inanimate, and abstract first noun respectively) and using a range of historical corpora, this chapter presents a qualitative diachronic analysis that looks at first attestations of and discusses the use of these first nouns in the six of-binominal constructions presented in Chapters 3 and 4. Ultimately this chapter substantiates the claim that first nouns progress from the N+PP to the head-classifier, in some cases pseudo-partitive, then the EBNP, the EM, and the BI. Furthermore, it argues that the process demonstrated is indeed grammaticalization rather than lexicalization.

The chapter begins with an introduction to the FDG theory and language model. The discussion includes some of the issues in the classification of premodifiers and compares the distinctions made in FDG with the construction-based model. The second section presents an FDG model of each of-binominal, illustrating how the model captures the differences between these constructions. By doing so, current issues in recent FDG research are addressed, such as the role of CxG like constructions in FDG, interfaces and mismatches between levels, and the distinction between operators and modifiers. One important finding is that FDG predicts the changes of premodification patterns found in Chapter 7. The historical analysis in the FDG frameworks shows that we are looking at the reduction of the internal components of the N-of-N template to a simple NP template, with a reanalyzed chunk [N of (a)], functioning first as a modifier and then as a lexical operator. Therefore, although we are structurally looking at an of-binominal, this term is actually a misnomer